Not too long ago I came across a great solution for email. My requirements for email are:
- Have copies of email existing somewhere other than server
- Be able to check mail anywhere with webmail
- Fairly effortless
That way if the mail server crashes you still have all your junk, and if you’re not at your computer it’s easy to check your email. Let me introduce the Claws Mail client on Linux (there’s some kind of Windows port too) with Gmail.
First it creates an MH style mail folder in your home directory. Each message is automatically downloaded there in a separate file for each message and can be read with any text editor if necessary. This is the backup solution. You can backup this folder very easily (by hand if you don’t do it too often, or with rsync if you’re crazy about that sort of thing). Also it’s easy to encrypt your email using EncFS, so no one can access your email on your hard disk even if they have physical access to your computer.
You can still have your email in the Gmail Archives if you want. I usually delete many of my emails offline so I only have the ones I want, but everything stays in Gmail. Then you can check and read your messages with Gmail when you’re away from your computer, and they will still be downloaded once you connect with your client again, even though they’re read from within Gmail, so it doesn’t mess with the local copy scheme. Further you can delete all your mail from the server and still have the local copy, in case for some reason your Gmail account overflows.
Additionally the Claws email client is an excellent program and has an external editor so you can use Gvim to edit your email, and it has mail filtering with regular expression support.
Hi, if I may ask a question about your scheme: do you use pop3 or imap access to gmail? Thanks.
(I’m sort of struggling with the whole email thing. Gmail tagging and archiving just don’t map to local MUA layouts too well. I’m considering sup now (see http://sup.rubyforge.org/ ), but maybe I’ll check out Claws too!)
I use pop, but unfortunately the way I have my email set up won’t reflect Archiving and tagging offline; so while you can still do that stuff in the gmail interface, in the client the email will be regular old email with folders. It’s good for backing up if you like folders….
The sup client looks interesting and actually I’ve been looking for a text based client as well. So far I’ve not found one that can be setup as easily as a GUI one like Thunderbird or Claws. I’d also like one that was self-contained and didn’t require complex configurations of programs like sendmail, fetchmail, etc. Seriously, I love the command line but all CLI email progs have been way too complicated.
I checked out the page and it has tags but is it compatible with gmail tags I wonder? Tell me if you get it to work.
btw If you do try out Claws, use the latest version from the website and not the ones from the Ubuntu repos if you happen to use Ubuntu, or any other distro that has old 2.x version … not very stable those are, at least on my machine.
Hi, thanks for your answers!
No I haven’t set up the sup client yet, but from the documentation I gathered the tags are not synced with the gmail tags. I think I’ll set it up sometime soon - the nice thing is that it treats your mail archive as read-only; so it’s kind of safe to play around with (it marks deleted files as deleted in its own database, but everything always stays in the mailbox).
Anyway, I’ll probably post about it on my “learninginlinux” blog once I’ve played around with it for a longer time. Will let you know.