What mail client do you use?

cactus · 2005-06-04 19:14:21

neri wrote:

Oh and once I make maildrop available seperately I prolly use esmtp as forwarder. I really like it.

http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/#id2255842
heh..I like software authors with a sense of humor. The screenshot is hilarious.

Too bad it doesnt support ssl though. I will probably have to use a different relay mta for my setup.

ozar · 2005-06-04 19:20:10

Well, crap... I reported that I'm using Thunderbird earlier in this thread but I've just changed to Mozilla Suite. :x

Firefox and Thunderbird are causing a few problems while Mozilla Navigator/Mail seem to work and run much faster on this box, so MozillaMail it is...

phrakture · 2005-06-06 15:29:06

ok, I'll post this in this thread because there's not a better palce for this:
I've been looking around at mail systems for a tad, and it's complicated. It seems you need about 37 daemons running, plus 9 other binaries, give or take 5.

Heh, in all seriousness - it's confusing... setting up sendmail and procmail and all this screwy crap.

Isn't there one program out there which does everything? Yeah, I know it's anti-unix philosophy, but this isn't that complicated...

Right now, looking at the simplest setup I can think of, it'd be fetchmail for incoming mail, using procmail as the delivery system (no, I don't want to run an smtp daemon) and perhaps esmtp for outbound email.

Does this make sense? is it workable? is there anything simpler?

edit: nbsmtp looks a tad more promising than esmtp, but I'm not sure... also getmail (python) might be easier than fetchmail, though fetchmail is pretty simple to setup

kensai · 2005-06-06 15:52:51

evolution for some strange reason I never get tunderbird to work with my gmail account.

neri · 2005-06-06 16:19:36

phrakture wrote:

I've been looking around at mail systems for a tad, and it's complicated. It seems you need about 37 daemons running, plus 9 other binaries, give or take 5.
Right now, looking at the simplest setup I can think of, it'd be fetchmail for incoming mail, using procmail as the delivery system (no, I don't want to run an smtp daemon) and perhaps esmtp for outbound email.
Does this make sense? is it workable? is there anything simpler?
edit: nbsmtp looks a tad more promising than esmtp, but I'm not sure... also getmail (python) might be easier than fetchmail, though fetchmail is pretty simple to setup

basically that's what you need:
fetchmail is good, especially when you combine it with an mda (procmail/maildrop doesn't matter), but maildrop really makes it easier only on maildir - it does not work with mh and not good with mbox together. But it has a way easier syntax. mda easily can filter your stuff in mailboxes and for spam or viruses or whatever...

I like esmtp, but as cactus said - no love for ssl. So you better try nsmtp or msmtp. I havent tried so far what's better for me.

Gullible Jones · 2005-06-06 16:20:18

None at all. Evolution needs gtkhtml (redundant), Thunderbird includes another copy of Gecko (redundant), and I use GMail (redundant).

phrakture · 2005-06-06 16:43:54

neri wrote:

fetchmail is good, especially when you combine it with an mda (procmail/maildrop doesn't matter), but maildrop really makes it easier only on maildir - it does not work with mh and not good with mbox together. But it has a way easier syntax. mda easily can filter your stuff in mailboxes and for spam or viruses or whatever...

What are the benefits of maildrop over procmail? and for that matter, maildir over mbox.... all I can tell from google is that maildir is newer and made by qmail, whereas mbox is a bit more standardized... but not really sure.

neri · 2005-06-06 17:30:49

phrakture wrote:

neri wrote:
fetchmail is good, especially when you combine it with an mda (procmail/maildrop doesn't matter), but maildrop really makes it easier only on maildir - it does not work with mh and not good with mbox together. But it has a way easier syntax. mda easily can filter your stuff in mailboxes and for spam or viruses or whatever...
What are the benefits of maildrop over procmail? and for that matter, maildir over mbox.... all I can tell from google is that maildir is newer and made by qmail, whereas mbox is a bit more standardized... but not really sure.

procmail vs. maildrop - lets compare two simple config files:
.mailfilter(maildrop)

DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
LOGFILE=$HOME/logs/maildrop.log

xfilter "bogofilter -u -e -p"
if (/^X-Bogosity: Spam, tests=bogofilter/)
{
  to "$DEFAULT/Spam"
}

if (/^X-Spam-Status: Yes/)
 to $DEFAULT/.Spam/ 
 
if (/^Subject: Cron/)
 to $DEFAULT/.System/ 
 
if (/^From wiki@/)
 to $DEFAULT/.Wiki/ 
 
if (/^Subject:.*[hylafax-users]/)
 to $DEFAULT/.Hylafax/ 
 
if (/^Return-Path:.*syslinux/)
 to $DEFAULT/.Syslinux/

A roughly equivalent .procmailrc

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/

LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/procmail.log
LOGABSTRACT="all"
VERBOSE="on"

:0fw
| spamassassin -P

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.Spam/

:0:
* ^Subject: Cron
.System/

:0:
* ^From: wiki@
.Wiki/

:0:
* ^Subject:.*[hylafax-users]
.Hylafax/

:0:
* ^Return-Path:.*syslinux
.Syslinux/

:0:
*
$HOME/Maildir/

Thes files are shamelessly stolen/changed from a German wikipage. I just
changed my spamfilter to bogofilter since it is comparably efficient but way
faster and lighter for desktop usage.
so I know what's easier:) From a more technical point of view:
procmail reads in messages to memory also if you get 20MB monstermails.
maildrop saves thos files to cache/temp folders if you want. Which I think
is way more performent since it takes less ram, even if the disc is involved.

mbox vs.maildir
initially developed to curve around mbox' and mh's incompability to deal
with concurring acesses maildir became pretty much standr for newer
servers. Main difference is that mbox holds every mailbox in one file,
which just becomes huge and hence is easier to be corrupted. Maildir holds
every mail in one file, every box in one directory. It might not be a big
issue for desktop users but I plain hate 40 or 60MB mbox files when you
work with idiots sending al graphical work as attachement. maildir is faster
on that kind of stuff.

-neri

phrakture · 2005-06-06 17:59:12

hmmm maildrop looks interesting... however, it's going to involve the whole courier-mta package + setup, which I'd prefer not to do... I'll try out procmail+spamassassin and see where that gets me (maildir)

thanks for the tips neri, if ya got anything else, let me know, as you seem to know your *nix mailing pretty well

neri · 2005-06-06 18:10:04

phrakture wrote:

thanks for the tips neri, if ya got anything else, let me know, as you seem to know your *nix mailing pretty well

*cough* and *psssst* ....
do a "pacman -Ss maildrop msmtp" tomorrow ...
msmtp rocks btw

-neri

phrakture · 2005-06-06 18:18:12

hmmm maildrop is it's own package? according to the courier-mta site it was all part of the same thing... rock on

and I think I want to try out nbsmtp even though they stole the esmtp screenshot joke... but most of these smtp forwarders should be the same... it doesn't seem too complex beyond implementing the protocols...

cactus · 2005-06-06 18:33:49

maildir basically makes a file for every email. mbox puts all the emails into a single file, and puts some type of dilineator to differentiate the emails.
mbox takes a while to find an email (or parse them all for startup listings) when the file is large. Also, if there is a write issue (system crash while file is being written), then you could hose a bunch of your emails.
maildir less prone to loss (you might lose one file/email, but likely not all of them), more performant, and likely less cpu intensive (maybe a tad bit more disk usage though, but that it debatable).

neri · 2005-06-06 18:35:17

phrakture wrote:

hmmm maildrop is it's own package? according to the courier-mta site it was all part of the same thing... rock on
and I think I want to try out nbsmtp even though they stole the esmtp screenshot joke... but most of these smtp forwarders should be the same... it doesn't seem too complex beyond implementing the protocols...

it was not much magic I applied the sources are available seperately and I made the package conflict with courier-mta.
One day maybe when we can build multible packages from one source I will make this build in one rush and we can have an cumulative layout then.

I just saw msmtp on community/AUR and thought we should have at least one ssl/TLS/sasl capable relay in the official repos. I didn't really compare
it with nbsmtp. The main argument might have been that it was one letter less to type for me

-neri

phrakture · 2005-06-06 18:41:03

hmmm... I'm a fan of simplicity and "i don't want 30 apps to accomplish one logical step" - I just spent some time looking at getmail, which is a fetchmail replacement written in python (!!) - the thing that struck me though was that it *can* do the whole procmail/maildrop step itself.... it has support for filters and maildir/mbox delivery

that means I'm going to go with getmail... I've stripped my setup down to 2 binaries, which I like alot... one for inbound, one for outbound... makes sense to me.

Legout · 2005-06-07 08:48:35

I´m using thunderbird at the moment. But i´m looking to fetch and send mails the way phrakture wanna do it, with getmail and nbsmtp.

So fetching and sending mails is clear. But, phrature and neri, which mal-client do you use for reading?

cactus · 2005-06-07 09:02:22

mutt

Legout · 2005-06-07 09:07:42

i´ve excpected this answer

Is there any other mailclient which i can configure to show my mails i´ve downloaded with getmail/fetchmail?

Maybe i should use hypermail/browser

neri · 2005-06-07 10:23:32

Legout wrote:

i´ve excpected this answer
Is there any other mailclient which i can configure to show my mails i´ve downloaded with getmail/fetchmail?
Maybe i should use hypermail/browser

Sylpheed can be configured to fetch mails via external tools though it doesn't make too much sense since it's filtering capabilities are quite comparable with standalone mda.

Sending via external used to be included, iirc, but I can't find it in the current version :shock:

-neri

phrakture · 2005-06-07 14:14:34

Legout wrote:

i´ve excpected this answer
Is there any other mailclient which i can configure to show my mails i´ve downloaded with getmail/fetchmail?
Maybe i should use hypermail/browser

squirrelmail does this too, I think - at least it can read maildir/mbox stuff

dtw · 2005-06-16 10:33:21

i use imap for all my mail

i been using thunderbird all along. i started trying with sylpheed claws a way back but it was still too buggy.

problem is, in the last few days, I have had a bitch of a problem with getting tbird to mark my mail read - doesn't seem to matter what i do tbird just can't remember which mail has been read and which hasn't between sessions. it's driving me mad!

i just installed sylpheed, then sylpheed-claws, reported a bug where they conflict. I actually think sylpheed looked better than -claws

anyway, i think i am going to try mutt! i've always considered email a graphical process but seeing as most of my email in linux now revolves around the mailing lists tbird is over kill. I can do all my other stuff in outlook 2003

phrakture · 2005-06-16 15:11:26

yeah - I still have to set mine up - I got some bitching from the getmail people when I sent them a class to allow simple sorting for ML threads... (getmail runs regex's over the headers for different things anyway - no real extra work)
anyway they bitched at me saying "this can be done in procmail/maildrop - your 10 lines of python is stupid"
sigh... I'd much rather add 10 lines of code to something like simple sorting...
so I'm going to setup fetchmail when I get a chance.

pixel · 2006-04-16 22:59:35

pine

smoon · 2006-04-16 23:37:38

Hmm... Even though this thread seems to be rather old, here's my opinion: Mutt(-ng) is by far the best mailclient I've ever used (and I guess I tried them all, at least the ones for *nix). Another really interesting client is GNUMail, I suggest everyone who's still not found his/her perfect mailclient should give this one a try. And if you don't like GNUstep's default look, you can even make it perty if you theme GNUstep: http://nooms.de/up/screenshots/GNUMail.jpg

magnum_opus · 2006-04-17 04:57:23

i have sort of a love hate thing with Sylpheed-claws.
on one hand it for some reason loads not just my mail from my campus account but also all the files in my campus user account, which is something nothing else has done.
on the other hand it makes for a really busy display in the account /folder side bar and i don't seem to be able to get rid of them
on the gripping hand it actually sends mail which for some reason thunderbird refuses to do.

codemac · 2006-04-17 06:58:45

fetchmail > procmail > muttng > nbsmtp

Works for me.

Arch Linux

#26 2005-06-04 19:14:21

Re: What mail client do you use?

#27 2005-06-04 19:20:10

Re: What mail client do you use?

#28 2005-06-06 15:29:06

Re: What mail client do you use?

#29 2005-06-06 15:52:51

Re: What mail client do you use?

#30 2005-06-06 16:19:36

Re: What mail client do you use?

#31 2005-06-06 16:20:18

Re: What mail client do you use?

#32 2005-06-06 16:43:54

Re: What mail client do you use?

#33 2005-06-06 17:30:49

Re: What mail client do you use?

#34 2005-06-06 17:59:12

Re: What mail client do you use?

#35 2005-06-06 18:10:04

Re: What mail client do you use?

#36 2005-06-06 18:18:12

Re: What mail client do you use?

#37 2005-06-06 18:33:49

Re: What mail client do you use?

#38 2005-06-06 18:35:17

Re: What mail client do you use?

#39 2005-06-06 18:41:03

Re: What mail client do you use?

#40 2005-06-07 08:48:35

Re: What mail client do you use?

#41 2005-06-07 09:02:22

Re: What mail client do you use?

#42 2005-06-07 09:07:42

Re: What mail client do you use?

#43 2005-06-07 10:23:32

Re: What mail client do you use?

#44 2005-06-07 14:14:34

Re: What mail client do you use?

#45 2005-06-16 10:33:21

Re: What mail client do you use?

#46 2005-06-16 15:11:26

Re: What mail client do you use?

#47 2006-04-16 22:59:35

Re: What mail client do you use?

#48 2006-04-16 23:37:38

Re: What mail client do you use?

#49 2006-04-17 04:57:23

Re: What mail client do you use?

#50 2006-04-17 06:58:45

Re: What mail client do you use?

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