On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:43:49 -0400, Chris Clifton said:

Hi all,

Do I read it correctly that thunderbird funding is being cut back by mozilla?

I'm not on a linux mail client yet, wondering what others are using in ubuntu for mail client, I need multiple pop3 profiles, good html support, fast indexing and searching, solid gpg support and all the usual bells and whistles. Evolution seems to be in pretty widespread use. Wondering what others like and use heavily.

Hi Chris,

I tried Evolution once about 10 years ago, and it was too complex and comprehensive for me to understand.

The centerpiece of my emailing activity is a Dovecot IMAP server on my daily driver desktop computer. The way it works is that fetchmail grabs all my email from my various POP accounts, pushes them through procmail, whose filters distribute the emails into the proper Dovecot IMAP directories (and also /dev/null stuff from PITA people). As far as I know, my Dovecot has never malfunctioned.

Currently, I access my local IMAP with Claws-Mail. Claws is capable, robust, and does what I need without being an ecological disaster like Kmail or intermittently pig slow like Thunderbird. Claws' configuration is difficult to wrap your head around, and very much in need of better documentation, but so far, thanks to a knowledgeable and helpful user community on the mailing list, I've been able to make almost every config change to speed my interaction with Claws.

My one complaint about Claws that can't be cured by documentation is its propensity to do everything with one process and one thread, so while you're sending an email or scanning your IMAP, you cannot look at other emails. I also wanted their powerful search to be able to recurse folders, and when nobody volunteered to do it, I tried to do it myself. Making something recursive sounds like simply a matter of writing a simple loop around the existing functionality, but what I found out is, at least this part of Claws was written in a manner resembling MVC, with process and UI completely commingled. For that reason I was unable to make it recursive.

I have Claws on my daily driver and all my laptops. Thanks to Kevin Korb's instructions, on the laptops I was able to tell Claws its IMAP server was at 127.0.0.1. I pinholed my OpenBSD/pf firewall appliance to port forward incoming ssh to my daily driver. Then, on my laptop, if I'm at home and on the LAN, I run the following inhouse.sh

sudo ssh -NTL 993:127.0.0.1:993 slitt@192.168.1.88

While on the road I run this travelling.sh:

sudo ssh -NTL 993:127.0.0.1:993 slitt@99.99.99.99

In the preceding, 99.99.99.99 is the IP address my ISP gave me, while 192.168.1.88 is the LAN IP address of my daily driver. This makes 127.0.0.1:993 get pushed through ssh to the ISP supplied internet address or the LAN address.

So I can use Claws to interact with my daily driver desktop anywhere I go.

I'm extremely pleased with this setup. My IMAP tree is trivial to back up, and gives me the assurance that if Claws-Mail ever commits suicide the way Kmail did when they went to Kmail2, I can simply plug in a different IMAP enabled email client. Meanwhile, Claws gives me an extremely productive and easy to use user interface. With my client/server setup, I no longer need to copy all my email too and from the laptop when travelling.

I'm going to present on my remote use of my daily driver desktop Dovecot, using Claws and ssh, at tomorrow night's GoLUG meeting.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ * http://twitter.com/stevelitt Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance