TUI Challenge: Day 2
Don Harper
Hey, look! Another day, another post. Today’s challenge is Email Management. Since I already live in neomutt, I should probably describe my setup.
Receiving Email and filtering
Much to my shame, I am still receiving my email with Gmail. But, it is on my list to migrate somewhere else this year. I think I have narrowed it down to two providers, but that is not what I am doing today.
I do have IMAP enabled on my account so I can read my email without going to gmail.com. For filtering, I use a tool called gmailctl which allows me to control gmail’s filters from my computer. It works by connecting to gmail and pulling down the filter definition file, and then firing up my default editor. Once I am happy with the changes, it will upload it back to gmail.
To actually retrieve my emails, I use mbsync which is part of the isync suite. You follow the directions, and it will sync your email down. This tool will work with any IMAP server, so when I finally leave gmail, it will still work. One of the nice things is that since it is written in python, you can re-map folder (labels in gmail-speak) to something different locally. For example, I map All Mail on google’s side to All-Mail on my side.
I use a systemd timer to schedule the sync runs.
I also run notmuch to index my mail so I can search it in my MUA (Mail User Agent) of choice.
Reading Email
I have been using mainly a TUI to read my email since I started on the internet. Back in the beginning, it was because there where no GUI email applications, and it was before the WWW (yes, I am that old). Over the years, I have used elm (fun fact, for a while, I was the Debian package maintainer for elm!), pine, and an Emacs email client (do not remember the name anymore). But the client I have been using since I started using back when it was new is mutt, although I have switched to neomutt a while back. Neomutt is mutt with a bunch of patches included, but it is a great MUA on its own.
One of the killer features (for me, anyway) is that I can configure neomutt to use notmuch and it makes searching for a specific email a breeze.
For my address book, I use a program called khard which I sync with my google address book using vdirsyncer which I will talk more about on Day 6.
Sending Email
I used to use gmail’s SMTP service, but sometime this year, the have changed their sending limits to an aggressively low number which would cause me to not to be able to send an email for hours, sometimes days. I typically do not send a lot of emails (mainly less than 10 automated reports to myself a day), so this was annoying. I switched to using the free tier at smtp2go and I have had zero issues sending email since then. My needs to not really require any of their paid plans, but I am thinking about getting the smallest paid plan to help support the service.
Daily totals
I come into today with 20 points. How did I do today? Well, the basic for setting up an email tui is 20 points, 5 points for filtering, and 10 points for using a TUI address book for a daily total of 35, bring my total to 55 points!