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This is how I do email: - Use my domain providers 1GB mailbox. - IMAP on the phone, POP3 on the PC. - I'm currently not subscribed to any high-volume mailing

by gkya 10y ago

This is how I do email: - Use my domain providers 1GB mailbox. - IMAP on the phone, POP3 on the PC. - I'm currently not subscribed to any high-volume mailing lists, and won't unless I'm a very active contributor. The only lists I follow is the announce lists from GNU, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. You don't need to subscribe in order to post to many email lists. - Pop my mail into my computer, use procmail to check for spam & virus (spamassassin, clamav), sort likely spam into spam mailbox, non-spam into inbox, rest to /dev/null (spamassassin score>5 and/or clamav virus check positive). If I'm on any moderate-or-high-volume lists, sort them into different mailboxes (most the content there is not sent to me, so no need to have them in front of me every time I look at my inbox). - My inbox receives many updates from services and newsletters I'm subscribed to. I delete most mail from those if I won't have to return to them (e.g. a message about an event next week, I add the event to my agenda if I'm participating, and delete the mail; copy the relevant text to my agenda if necessary). - Report to spamassassin and delete any message that escaped it and made it to my inbox. - Check spam every-so-often, report ham and move to inbox, delete the rest. - Use a combination of mpop, msmtp, procmail, spamassassin, clamav, Rmail, Org-Mode and mairix to get all this going (K9 mail on Android for IMAP there). Sounds complex, but isn't, nowadays I've tuned my setup to be pleasing. The only thing I'd like to do in future is to do POP, SMTP, sorting and search in Emacs instead of through all those programs. One shortcoming of my setup is that once I pop my mail, I can't view it on mobile anymore. That's something I can fix (maybe there's an app for Android that can read local mail in the SD card), but I haven't had a problem up until now. And no, I'm not a unix-vintage-guy or whatnot, this setup is practical and pleasing to use (at least in my case), and I own all my mail the moment I pop it from my server, and nobody has a copy of it. If it's not on your disks, you don't own it.

maccard 10y ago
This is why I don't host my own email. I pay a provider that I trust to do all of this for me.
- gkya 10y ago
  Neither do I host my mail, I just fetch it from the server. Even if you have your mail kept up there somewhere, you still have to do all this (grouping, spam reporting, ham-checking [i.e. mail you want to read that went into spam folder], getting rid of unwanted mail, managing subscriptions, etc.), but the differences are (a) you don't get to decide which software does all that, (b) you have to use a half-arsed interface to configure groups, filters, etc., and (c) an attacker with your login can get at all your past messages whereas in my setup all he gets is what I didn't fetch yet. All I did was configure the software once (a couple days on-and-off hacking), and I saved myself from those disadvantages and spared ~$30 per year (used to use FastMail).
p4bl0 10y ago
> The only thing I'd like to do in future is to do POP, SMTP, sorting and search in Emacs instead of through all those programs. Have you given a try to mu4e? I've been using that for more than 5 years now and it is really great :). https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html
- gkya 10y ago
  I've tried Notmuch after considering it and mu4e (they looked very similar, don't recall anymore why picked one over the other), but it's not my cup of tea. Also none of these eliminate mpop, msmtp or procmail, I want to use Elisp tools instead of these (the actual one that has no equivalent in Elisp is procmail). I currently use mairix, which is similar to notmuch and mu in that it provides fast search across my mailboxes (which are my inbox, and quasi-periodical archive files [archive000, archive001, ...]), but it supports mbox format which I like for various reasons (doesn't eat up inodes, easier to check integrity [just hash the single file], no file-name portability issues [which I often had with Maildir], simplicity, out-of-the-box support on any Unix-like systems, etc.). With it I can treat multiple mboxes like a single one, and I've written an org-mode link type for mairix so that I can easily link from my org files to an email (via message-id) or a mairix search w/o thinking about which archive file the mail was in. Edit: I also don't really use tags etc. to classify my mail, and don't have a plethora of email as I delete most of it after reading, so a list of all I have is the best interface for me, which Rmail provides.
lastbestmatt 10y ago
I like this setup. I've done something similar with POP3 on both PC and mobile: PC downloads and archives mail, but is configured not to delete it from the server for a month. Phone never deletes from the server, and at least has access to the most recent month of email, which is usually enough while mobile. I'm intrigued by the idea of IMAP on the phone though. Are you able to sync sent mail this way? If you send mail from mobile, will the PC client get a copy of it?
- gkya 10y ago
  > I'm intrigued by the idea of IMAP on the phone though. Are you able to sync sent mail this way? If you send mail from mobile, will the PC client get a copy of it? Nope, I use phone mostly to browse mail, and send from there if and only if inevitable. And if the sent mail is too important to keep, I BCC myself and sort it out on the PC later. If your mail provider saves sent mail, I guess you could just fetch that; mine doesn't. Also I guess depending on your phone MUA, maybe you could fetch it from its storage. WRT IMAP, I just use it like POP3 w/ keep on, used it b/c was easier to set up. Phones are incredibly inconvenient for typing anything that's not a whatsapp blurb, so I mostly use it that way. It seems smart to keep the mail on the server for a while, I'd be glad to know how you do that.
  - lastbestmatt 10y ago
    I see. I use the bcc trick as well - it's not ideal but it works. As for keeping on the server, it's a setting in the client. In K9, for example, Settings > Account Settings > Fetching Mail > When I delete a message. K9 only provides "delete" or "don't delete" options. Outlook has "delete after X days", but I assume others must as well.

by gkya 10y ago

maccard 10y ago

This is why I don't host my own email. I pay a provider that I trust to do all of this for me.

gkya 10y ago
Neither do I host my mail, I just fetch it from the server. Even if you have your mail kept up there somewhere, you still have to do all this (grouping, spam reporting, ham-checking [i.e. mail you want to read that went into spam folder], getting rid of unwanted mail, managing subscriptions, etc.), but the differences are (a) you don't get to decide which software does all that, (b) you have to use a half-arsed interface to configure groups, filters, etc., and (c) an attacker with your login can get at all your past messages whereas in my setup all he gets is what I didn't fetch yet. All I did was configure the software once (a couple days on-and-off hacking), and I saved myself from those disadvantages and spared ~$30 per year (used to use FastMail).

p4bl0 10y ago

> The only thing I'd like to do in future is to do POP, SMTP, sorting and search in Emacs instead of through all those programs. Have you given a try to mu4e? I've been using that for more than 5 years now and it is really great :). https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

gkya 10y ago
I've tried Notmuch after considering it and mu4e (they looked very similar, don't recall anymore why picked one over the other), but it's not my cup of tea. Also none of these eliminate mpop, msmtp or procmail, I want to use Elisp tools instead of these (the actual one that has no equivalent in Elisp is procmail). I currently use mairix, which is similar to notmuch and mu in that it provides fast search across my mailboxes (which are my inbox, and quasi-periodical archive files [archive000, archive001, ...]), but it supports mbox format which I like for various reasons (doesn't eat up inodes, easier to check integrity [just hash the single file], no file-name portability issues [which I often had with Maildir], simplicity, out-of-the-box support on any Unix-like systems, etc.). With it I can treat multiple mboxes like a single one, and I've written an org-mode link type for mairix so that I can easily link from my org files to an email (via message-id) or a mairix search w/o thinking about which archive file the mail was in. Edit: I also don't really use tags etc. to classify my mail, and don't have a plethora of email as I delete most of it after reading, so a list of all I have is the best interface for me, which Rmail provides.

lastbestmatt 10y ago

I like this setup. I've done something similar with POP3 on both PC and mobile: PC downloads and archives mail, but is configured not to delete it from the server for a month. Phone never deletes from the server, and at least has access to the most recent month of email, which is usually enough while mobile. I'm intrigued by the idea of IMAP on the phone though. Are you able to sync sent mail this way? If you send mail from mobile, will the PC client get a copy of it?

gkya 10y ago
> I'm intrigued by the idea of IMAP on the phone though. Are you able to sync sent mail this way? If you send mail from mobile, will the PC client get a copy of it? Nope, I use phone mostly to browse mail, and send from there if and only if inevitable. And if the sent mail is too important to keep, I BCC myself and sort it out on the PC later. If your mail provider saves sent mail, I guess you could just fetch that; mine doesn't. Also I guess depending on your phone MUA, maybe you could fetch it from its storage. WRT IMAP, I just use it like POP3 w/ keep on, used it b/c was easier to set up. Phones are incredibly inconvenient for typing anything that's not a whatsapp blurb, so I mostly use it that way. It seems smart to keep the mail on the server for a while, I'd be glad to know how you do that.
- lastbestmatt 10y ago
  I see. I use the bcc trick as well - it's not ideal but it works. As for keeping on the server, it's a setting in the client. In K9, for example, Settings > Account Settings > Fetching Mail > When I delete a message. K9 only provides "delete" or "don't delete" options. Outlook has "delete after X days", but I assume others must as well.