How to deal with mailing lists?

mjollnir said:
Thx for the hint, never heard of them before... so I can't comment. If there had been any bad news about them, very likely I would have heard/read about. I guess you should send GitHub an unencrypted mail?
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No. Github just doesn't like any emails with the keemail.me domain and refused to send me the confirmation email. I asked you because tutanota is a Germany company so I think they should be famous on the country? I have only hear about two security oriented email services, one is tutanota, one is protonmail. Protonmail only offers 512MB of storage for the free account, too few, so I go for tutanota.
 
Dear sysctl,
Basically news/slrn is not about mailing lists but usenet groups. Many mailing lists are mirrored into such groups by news.gmane.io or others. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane. There are many advantages to subscribe to the mailing lists mirrored to the usenet, especially if you just like to read.
  • You do not need to download mails or postings you do not want to read.
  • Tools as news/slrn have excellent filter capabilities to adjust what you like to see, what to highlight and what to ignore.
  • News can expire. After some time they are not shown anymore and do not pile up in any mailbox. This keeps the reader clean.
It is really worth to try that. There are also some native FreeBSD usenet groups in the comp.unix.bsd.* category. But on the NNTP server I use I see only little traffic.
 
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Maybe GitHub blackmails the domain keemail.me because there might have been spam coming from there. You could write them an e-mail (info@github.org or something like that) asking kindly to exclude your address from their blackmail list. My research for secure e-mail lead to the two services I named in the thread mentioned above. I will edit that thead and add the two you named. Interestingly, the german wikipedia article about ProtonMail reports about a Google-affair, i.e. Google suppressed links to ProtonMail in their search results in 2015/16. Hmm.
 
sysctl said:
No. Github just doesn't like any emails with the keemail.me domain and refused to send me the confirmation email. I asked you because tutanota is a Germany company so I think they should be famous on the country? I have only hear about two security oriented email services, one is tutanota, one is protonmail. Protonmail only offers 512MB of storage for the free account, too few, so I go for tutanota.
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Neither ProtonMail nor Tutanota offers native IMAP or POP3; end-to-end encryption makes it impossible to do so.

You would want at least one of IMAP or POP3 to be supported by your mail provider, else you can't use software like Thunderbird, Mutt, etc. That means your choices are:
  • an email service that prevents you from using helpful third-party software in exchange for protecting your privacy
  • a regular, less secure, plaintext email service (email is inherently insecure anyway)
ProtonMail has one advantage in that it offers ProtonMail Bridge that is effectively a decryption service for you to interact with third-party mail clients. How well it works is something I don't know, and I'm not sure if it will work on FreeBSD. If it won't work with FreeBSD, I'm unfortunately not qualified to give advice about any workarounds (some sort of mail server running in a Bhyve VM that acts as a proxy between the bridge software installed in the VM and Thunderbird/KMail/whatever on FreeBSD? I don't know if such a thing would be possible!)
 
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I started to feel severe limitations of the tutanota free account and considering switching back to Hotmail, or Zoho Mail.
 
I can highly reommend mail/sylpheed. In my opionion it's an incredible piece of software. I have filters set up to the point where more than half of the incoming mails get instantly deleted because it's unimportant garbage and the remaining part gets sorted so i can always dig them up with again with more than half of it automatically marked as read since while i need to archive them for reference actually reading the content would be a waste of time. Should work just about perfect for mailing lists.
 
sysctl said:
I started to feel severe limitations of the tutanota free account and considering switching back to Hotmail, or Zoho Mail.
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Remember that for the usual, mainstream, so-called free services you pay with your (meta) data instead of money, while presumably the TutaNova free service is a way to eventually get paying customers, which is reasonable & not reprehensible. You get what you pay for, right? I for my part am happy to pay 1€/month for an ad-free, privacy enhanced, optionally fully anonymous e-mail+ service. Using services produces costs. Maybe you do not feel the limitations arising from grabing your metadata?
 
If you use gmail, you can make filters that classify the mail and put it in different
folders.

I have a gmail account only for lists, but I do not do that. I send with the filter
every mail of lists to the trash folder, so that I do not need to delete them.

And I read gmail with mail/alpine.
 
chrbr said:
There are many advantages to subscribe to the mailing lists mirrored to the usenet, especially if you just like to read.
  • You do not need to download mails or postings you do not want to read.
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That should also be an advantage of imap, but modern, graphical mail reader programs
download everything.
 
hruodr said:
but modern, graphical mail reader programs download everything.
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Not necessarily, mail/thunderbird for example can fetch the headers only over pop3 ( not IMAP ).

fetch-headers-only.jpg
 
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Claws Mail & Evolution are among the very few Gtk-based applications that I can recommend in all (good) conscience (I'm strongly biased towards Qt/KDE).
 
mjollnir said:
Claws Mail & Evolution are among the very few Gtk-based applications that I can recommend
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I can't comment on Evolution, but on Claws Mail: It was fine when I used it with a few email accounts. When I started to add more email accounts, lets say more than 10, I've observe serious performance issues, including lagging and unresponsiveness. I'm not sure it was a bug or some design problem, maybe it got fixed. Thunderbird has less problem with large number of email accounts, but not problem-free.
 
If it helps, I tend to use the -F option to mutt to run it with different accounts (basically different muttrc files). I.e

Code: 
$ mutt -F .mutt/outlook
$ mutt -F .mutt/gmx
$ mutt -F .mutt/work
$ mutt -F .mutt/gmail
$ mutt -F .mutt/disroot
$ mutt -F .mutt/freebsd

And better still to write a quick script (i.e called do_mail.sh) that simply runs them all sequentially and lets me process them all. I have never found a faster solution to mail than this.
 
With alpine: alpine -p configuration-file.
I have the impression that alpine has better support of imap than mutt.
It does not download attachments without requesting it.
 
I had a play with alpine. It was pretty good, I found the config file a little more difficult to understand (I think it focused on people creating configs via Alpine itself?). That said, Mutt configs are also a little bit complex, but certainly a lot easier than Outlook, Evolution or even claws!

Yes, I did notice that attachments download when you open the message text. If they were large (i.e over 2 megs), that would be fairly annoying. I have been lucky so far.

The biggest issue for me is I couldn't get Alpine to work with davmail (exchange -> imap bridge). It should have worked (it is just standard imap after all!) but mutt happened to work first so I just stuck with that. I might give Alpine another shot if Mutt fails me.
 
Yes, as we read in Wikipedia: "Alpine is meant to be suitable for both inexperienced email users and the most demanding of power users". Hence, it should be "easily" configurable using alpine
itself. I would prefer it be only for "power users" of unix and be meager. In spite of it, I do not
know a better alternative.

I want to use imap, and that means to download as much as one needs, not all mails,
not whole mails, not every attachment, only headers or recent mails. Unfortunately
this original use of imap is being forgotten. BTW, (al)pine was developed originally
by the people that invented imap, you find UW imap in the source of alpine till now, but
unfortunately it is not anymore maintained. It was a very good imap server for fewer clients,
it run out of the box.
 
A suite like Thunderbird is good. You get irc, nntp, smtp/imap/pop3,etc for irc chat, newsgroup/usenet, email and a bit more. Claws-mail have some if these plugins too. I switched to claws-mail recently when Thunderbird was bloated up like firefox. But it still rocks.
 
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vigole said:
On Windows (corporate laptop, unfortunately no way around that): Thunderbird for all above functionalities.
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mail/alpine runs also in Windows. I saw it once, it looks very nice.
It can also read news (nntp).

It can thread messages, but never tested it (I prefer to read messages
chronologically). For reading mail you may select with ncurses a configured
account, for writing it has something called roles that I never tested
(I prefer to just use other configuration file).
 
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vigole said:
On Windows (corporate laptop, unfortunately no way around that)
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If it is policy to not provide admin access to the machine, remember that Cygwin's setup.exe has the --no-admin flag. Just because a few at your work are incompetent and unable to make good tech decisions, shouldn't mean you need to suffer!

And then Cygwin has alpine, mutt, etc.. all in the repos.
 
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