[LUGSB] Re: Email management

[Ilya Sukhanov (dotCOMmie)]

Everyone has their own solution to the email headache. My solution is to run my 
own mail server so I can do what ever I want with it. Its a lot of work up front 
and if you do not have a general purpose server handy its expensive as you have 
to rent a box from coloc or something of the sort. After you put initial 
setup-work, the server is pretty maintenance free (assuming you choose good 
software). I probably don't spend more than 3 hours a year maintaining my mail 
server software.


Jon Brandvein wrote:
> When I last used imap in kmail, it was a bit klungy and slow. I 
> reenabled it again and found that that's still the case (I'm on kmail 
> 1.9.9, KDE 3.5.9). I tried out thunderbird and found it to be noticeably 
> faster, if lacking the KDE charm. I think I'll try to stick to using 
> this for a little while and see how bearable it is.

You can configure your imap client to cache email and in that case it'll 
download all the email and not just the headers from your server. Any folder 
which is selected for offline use will not be slow. And any online folder will 
still be faster than webmail.

Kmail is crap, I've tried it a couple of times and its just painful to use. In 
fact at one point it deleted a bunch of my mail spontaneously.

Thunderbird/Icedove works - its not great but usable. I haven't seen any client 
yet which I've liked, so I just keep using Thunderbird/icedove, if nothing else 
its stable and predictable.

> That doesn't address the problem of sparky, however. I haven't been able 
> to connect to it through imap yet - it's rejecting some combination of 
> my username, password, and authentication method. If anyone happens to 
> know those parameters please let me know.

protocol: imaps (ssl imap)
imap server: webmail.ic.sunysb.edu
ports: default
username: netid (probably: jbrandvei)
password: ******

As far as I remember the ssl cert was funky so you have to manually accept it. 
I've never tried the non-ssl imap.

> [...] 
> I assume that I should be able to locally save my messages from 
> thunderbird to a format that will remain relatively stable in the 
> future, should I need to browse through them again.

Thunderbird uses a mbox-like (mboxrd) format to store email [1] I'm not sure how 
much software exists to parse it but if in a pinch you can cook up an awk script 
to parse out the email. There are some plugins to Thunderbird/Icedove which will 
export your mail. I've used one of them it was either filtersimportexport or 
SmartSave .. don't quite remember which.

> I can accept not 
> having access to this archive while away from my machine, but would it 
> be safe to sync this archive between the two machines using something 
> like rsync?

You'd hope so. And its probably possible but from my experience its not that 
trivial. About 2 months ago when I opened kmail by accident it chewed up several 
hundred of my emails. Fortunately I back up my email-client-machine daily using 
an rsync script. I copied over the following files over from my backup to 
working installation:

~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/$BLAH.slt/ImapMail/$BLAH/INBOX
~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/$BLAH.slt/ImapMail/$BLAH/INBOX.msf
~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/$BLAH.slt/ImapMail/$BLAH/INBOX.sbp

And none of my lost email appeared (YAY mozilla! </sarcasm>). Sure I could 
extract the emails out of its botched format but it would be a pain in the ass 
to properly populate them into my folder layout. Long story short I was able to 
recover the mail from my server backups.

One thing should be mentioned. Icedove/Thunderbird do have a message import 
feature, it supports all of one format -- and not its own.. go figure.

> [...]

best of luck.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox#Modified_mbox