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Re: Mail Reader (updated)



Hi,
I use a combination of three things; I don't think it's the setup you want, but some of them can be replaced with others.
1. offlineimap to fetch the emails from the mail server and store them in Maildir format. As the name suggests, the server only needs to support IMAP.
It is available as offilneimap3 in the main debian testing repository, it might also be in stable. It is also possible that stable has only offlineimap (no '3'), written in python 2, I didn't check.
2. mu, which provides mail indexing and searching. It's also available in the debian main repository as maildir-utils.
3. mu4e, which is an emacs package that provides the actual email client.

On Do, 08 Jul 2021, Polyna-Maude Racicot-Summerside wrote:
> I'd like the following :
> 1. It can be TUI or GUI but if it's TUI then I'll need both.
The "feel" of mu4e is that of a TUI, but if using a GUI version of emacs (like emacs-gtk for debian) it is able to display images and html messages.

> 2. It need to support PGP.
I think that some configuration is needed in mu4e, but it is quite straightforward.

> 3. It would be nice to have some scripting possibility or exhaustive
> sorting.
For offlineimap, there is an ini-like configuration file, and some items can (but don't have to) be customized using external python code.
For mu4e, you have the full power of emacs lisp at your disposal, although that might be more complicated than you would like.

> 4. Would be nice to have a good control over my SPAM rules, that I'd
> control it's interaction with SpamAssassin or the other tools available.
I never tried, but it should be possible.

> 5. Would need to have it speedy.
About that, it's the best I found so far. The only inconvenient is that offlineimap is run by cron, so if a website says "copy the code you just received via email" at 11:00:01  you need to wait one minute or run it manually.

> 6. Need to be possible to easily backup and restore my email without
> syncing with the server. That is, I could make a backup and restore with
> rsync or something similar.
I'm not sure I understand that, but your emails will sit on your computer, so a full disk backup (or just copying the directory) should work.

> 7. If there's no calendar option (as a good software only does one
> thing) then I'd like some suggestion regarding what type of calendar
> software has a Google Calendar connector.
I know that emacs can do that, but it's fairly complicated and I gave up; but I actually didn't try it recently (that is, since I installed a free calendar app on my phone).

> 10. My email account on my IMAP server are not related to the local user
> account on the computer I use in any way. So a software used for sending
> mail as "unix mail" is not the case
mu4e should be able to directly send emails via SMTP through a remote mailserver.

About the dependencies:
- mu4e depends on mu plus some knowledge of emacs.
- mu only depends on a Maildir folder (so offlineimap can probably be substituted with dovecot or other similar utils);
it seems to also offer a gui (mug), which I never tried, so I don't know if it has some email client functionality.
It can probably be useful with other email clients (mutt is cited on the official page).
- offlineimap will only work if you can set it up as a cron job (there some daemon like functionality, but it seems to be the cause of most reported bugs, so I didn't activate it).
That said, it will copy your emails in a Maildir folder, and most email clients should understand it.

Best
-- 
Francesco Florian

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