On Sun, 21 Mar 2021 at 11:57, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500
| I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, | mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though.
I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful.
So: what do you use? Why?
Here's my answer. It is not a recommendationo.
Most of us in this household use Alpine. Thats a venerable text-based-GUI mail user agent. I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)). As you can tell, I'm quite conservative. I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, but I'm behind now.
Why do I like and stay with Pine? - inertia - modest subset of EMACS keystrokes - stable but well-maintained - works well through SSH - I'm very comfortable with it - has most features that I know that I want. - Alpine does not hold my mail hostage: ordinary UNIX text tools can get at it. (Alpine supports various formats but I use mbox.)
Molly (my wife) uses Thunderbird. - she's used to WIMP GUIs - she does not use any advanced features - dislikes and avoids updates
Thunderbird:
- seems attractive
- was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of. I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault. Nothing said by Ubuntu folks convinces me that it is safe to unpin (archived mail is very important).
- I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't put my mind to the problem)
- future looks precarious. Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird project loose
GMail:
- seems to be taking over the world
- I'm sometimes forced to use it.
- runs well on smart phones
- someone else does the maintenance
- But: I want control over my mail. I don't want it in the cloud. I don't want it to go through Google's hands (we run our own mailserver).
- I want painless offline access to mail archives--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
I have two primary email accounts, one at Gmail and one at Protonmail (Protonmail has free accounts: I like them enough that I'm paying for their account, although on usability Gmail is definitely better ...). I was intending to move entirely to Protonmail, I seem to have stalled on that. I have Thunderbird set up at home, primarily as a way to back up Gmail and Protonmail to my hard drive: it's rare that I use Thunderbird as a client, but it's always worked fine when I do. Protonmail, because of its encryption, requires a special "bridge" software to allow local clients to access their mail server. It's a lousy arrangement, but does seem to work - and I bought into their service in part because of that encryption. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com