Email handling - please share what tools you use

Email handling - please share what tools you use

[Andrey Utkin]

Please share how you handle tons of email and how happy are you with
how you do it.
Which services and applications do you use.
What is good, what is bad, what is ugly.

And thanks a lot in advance for your time.
You are appreciated to share this "survey" to somebody interested, or
to repost on other maillists (CCing me please).
For off-list replies, feel free to reply directly to me or post
comments to this gist: [0]

==== BEGIN PERSONAL COMPLAINTS =====

I am a person who needs to be subscribed to many high-volume maillists
and who likes to catch up quickly with what is actually in the email I
receive.

Recently I got concerned by shortcomings of many accessible tools and
services and I am close desperation in a quest for comfortable
universal solution.


Service-related:

- Gmail pisses me off when I am trying to make submission via
git-send-email: [1]. Also there are issues with IMAP auth. So I am
also looking for a good mailbox hosting, too. Decent paid one is ok.
Sharing costs with somebody to run decent one is ok. Self-hosted is
silly, but ok. Please advise.

- Openmailbox.org mailbox stopped receiving mail from LKML a day after
I have subscribed. Maybe due to temporary unavailability. Subscribing
again fixed it, but days of email stream are missed.


Software-related:

- Thunderbird is by far most stable and feature-rich GUI MUA, but it
still seems buggy and poorly maintained: [2] makes it unsuitable for
offline work, and there are more despairing issues ([3], [4], [5] and
some more with Enigmail), also its future looks questionable now due
to abandonement by Mozilla.

- Mutt is no doubt is The Tool to avoid any screwup at composing, and
that it's rock solid, but it is not usable for quick reading (at last
without careful customization with a lot of trial). It is also not
multitasking - when you compose your mail, you cannot e.g. browse your
folders or see what new mail has arrived meanwhile (unless you start
another mutt). It is desperating that the user is forced to customize
it heavily, because there defaults are unusable, there's no "batteries
included" to streamline configuration and usage experience. The
positive point is that you can fetch your entire IMAP mailbox contents
with "offlineimap" to Maildir structure and browse it with mutt
totally offline, e.g. during flight. But browsing lots of mail with
mutt is still a pain, so I won't do that even though I can. I am ok to
try Mutt more if somebody proposes me good configs which make
folders/mail browsing pleasant.

- wanderlust (emacs-based). Installed, configured, couldn't find how
to see my email in it.

- Sylpheed - Claws-mail (its fork) is better.

- Claws-mail - fine regarding features, hangs for long time all the
way while doing something like sync-ing mailboxes. Crashes
occasionally.

- Evolution - crashes.

- KMail - so many dependencies, failed to get it installed on my two
different Gentoo installations due to some akamai-server compilation
issue.

- Trojita - something was wrong (even excluding lack of OpenPGP
support), don't remember what exactly.


I perfectly understand that "software is never done", and that it's
years of collective effort to bring to life a good mailing app,
especially open-source one. If that's inevitable, I'm fine to take
part in it. But if something exists today, being perfect for my
usecase, please let me know, I am happy to find my thing without
becoming an expert in all email-related things.


To recap what is important for me:
- Stability
- Offline work with full copy of mailbox
- OpenPGP support
- Sieve integration (spam marking, easy folders management for maillists)


==== END PERSONAL COMPLAINTS =====

[0] https://gist.github.com/andrey-utkin/df143baf1763330c0f45
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/1/3/148
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1244809
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1244814
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1182460
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1239604

Re: Email handling - please share what tools you use

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2016 at 01:53:34AM +0200, Andrey Utkin wrote:
> ==== BEGIN PERSONAL COMPLAINTS =====

<snip>

Stop complaining and bend one of the existing tools to your will.  I
recommend configuring mutt to do what you want and take a week or two to
learn how to use it well.  Many distros provide "sane" defaults for the
tool, and the configuration is very well documented.  You will not
regret it.  If you don't like mutt, for your oddly-specific reasons,
then use some other tool, it's not like we don't have a ton of different
ones out there for email as you have documented so well already.

good luck,

greg k-h

Re: Email handling - please share what tools you use

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Sun, 7 Feb 2016 01:53:34 +0200
Andrey Utkin <andrey.utkin@corp.bluecherry.net> wrote:

> I am a person who needs to be subscribed to many high-volume maillists
> and who likes to catch up quickly with what is actually in the email I
> receive.

Being such a person as well...  Claws is what I use for basic email.
Various things about it bug me but I manage to get things done.  For most
of the mail scanning, though, I use gmane and a newsreader.  It's pretty
hard to beat if you have to plow through a lot of stuff.

jon