terryc said on Sat, 25 Nov 2023 01:21:49 +1100



>I don't use fetchmail or anything else. Claws-mail can use POP and
>IMAP to access the provided mail boxs.

Vendor lock in alert!

By having almost all your email assembly line run by Claws, if Claws
ever goes bad, you're royally screwed. And I think we all can name a
half a dozen great softwares that later went bad.

The way I have mine set up, whenever Claws screws up I switch to
Evolution, and vice versa. Some day I'll add Mutt to that list. Choice
is good.

>So you could set and mail boxes on Proton, Tutanota and any of the
>others, although gmail is problematic. Caveat, I don't have any of
>these.

How do you back those up? And what if one or more starts getting like
gmail? Remember, once upon a time gmail was pretty good.

>Claws-mail just downlads on demand and places them into specific
>directories.

True.

>I just dump everything into Inbox and then run filters to
>sort (copy and/or deposit) into various mail folders.

Very doable. But this solution puts all your eggs in the Claws basket.
The Unix way is "do one thing and do it right." Check out the following
flow:

* Fetchmail pulls email from all your remote accounts and sends them to
Procmail.

* Procmail files all emails in the desired Dovecot Maildir directories
and also /dev/null.

* Dovecot acts as your local IMAP server but without all the bullshit
that private entity remote IMAP/POP servers throw in your face.

* Claws, Evolution, Mutt or Thunderbird (if you don't have many emails)
act as a simple window into your local Dovecot IMAP server, and some
of them can also act as a "file browser" for your IMAP server.

There are free software replacements for all of the preceding
softwares. No vendor lock in possible, no dead ends, no painting
yourself into a corner. Also, you're not relying on a specific email
client to store your emails, so switching clients for troubleshooting
or because your current client went bad is trivial.

By the way, Claws-mail is currently my favorite email client. However,
it's just part of my email flow, not the whole thing.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21