[Dovecot] [GoLugTech] thunderbird

[Steve Litt]

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 at 192.168.1.88

While on the road I run this travelling.sh:

sudo ssh -NTL 993:127.0.0.1:993 slitt at 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/
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