Hating my mail

[elfs]

I have never found a mailer program I like. Never. The text-based ones have poor spam detection, and the UI-based ones like Evolution or Thunderbird are just slow. Evolution was such a resource hog I just can't put it onto my laptop, and Thunderbird, while not being quite the resource monster or having quite so many bugs, is so agonizingly slow that using it is always an act of last resort.

It's especially bad if I'm running the transaction over a remote X connection. The draw routines, especially when typing a title, show up pixel-by-fraking-pixel! It's like thinking with molasses in your cranium.

*Sigh* I'd love a text-based program that just gave me my mail, and a filter as effective as thunderbird's. I can't live without the spam handler, but I can't do email effectively with the state of the art.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I use mutt with a front-end spam filter run by procmail. spamprobe work pretty well, though it's not perfect - I really need to add a 2-word tokenizer instead of using its default single word tokens. I've also heard some people who swear by spamassassin, which can also do Bayesian filtering. I found that the Bayesian filtering couldn't do an initial run on my mail on my mailserver, though, in the 256MB RAM on that box, so it's dspam for me.

Suffice to say that the tech that's in Thunderbird's filter can be pretty easily run on with a text-mode client, too. It's just not as integrated. s =spam is not significantly harder than whatever Thunderbird uses, and while it's moderately harder to set up (a couple procmail rules, a couple cron jobs to check the folder for new spam that wasn't initially caught to learn it), it's easily manageable by anyone who'd want to use a text-mode client anyways.

Ah...

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Run spamassassin? Then any mail program capable of sorting mail into folders based on arbitrary headers can handle your spam.

Myself, I use Gnus and Spamassasin.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Add one vote for Mutt and one for Spamassasin.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

One big problem is the amount of legitimate email which is using convoluted HTML, or even encoding the ASCII text as Base64 for some reason.

[kengr]

ASCII as base-64 you can lay at the foot of MS.

If I ever get motivated to learn the required tools, I'm tempted to set up a filter at my domain's inbound mail server that'll bounce any base-64 encoded text with a warning about the sennder's mail program being misconfigured in a way that "may conflist with the ADA" and "renders the message unreadable on many computers".

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Last instance that hit me purported to be a survey from some third party on behalf of eBay

The response from the spoof-reporting address was that it was "more than likely" from eBay.

I have a special extra-long pole in my toolkit, especially for not touching such emails.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Gnus/emacs and Spamassasin. Spamassin is _wonderful_, and it learns as you use it.

v

[kengr]

Not sure what OS you are running, but you could check out Pegasus Mail if it'll run on your hardware.

It does eat resources at start and the first time there's a bunch of graphics in a message in preview mode. But only for a few seconds.

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

Sylpheed?

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

Like everyone else - mutt + spamassassin + procmail

My domain lives on sidehack.gweep.net, and my friends who run that server setup spamassassin globablly, so I haven't messed with it much. I use procmail to handle mail based on SA's scores, as well as a few other rules of my own.

And, of course, I use the trick of giving every site I deal with a unique address, which helps me track who is being naughty and keeps more spam out of my main inbox.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's the trick. I'm on a laptop that's constantly changing networks, and frequently is attached to none. I have four or more different POP accounts that I might want to reference: my gmail, my speakeasy, and my drizzle accounts. I want fetchmail to grab from all of them-- when I'm connected to a network-- and to not even try when I'm not. I want the mail sucessfully forwarded to procmail to be spamchecked and then sorted according to the mailing lists I'm on.

I'm sure there's a way to do this.

[lazarus834.livejournal.com]

I use KMail - it handles many different accounts and identites and networks, lets you move them up or down on the list, and you can attach certain identities to certain folders, certain servers to identities, etc etc.

But the problem is, it only works in KDE, and it uses maildir format, which apparently is not 100% compatible with the maildir that mutt uses :-(

So apparently if you use kmail you're also supposed to run courier IMAP server so you can access your maildirs remotely. But I haven't gotten around to setting that up yet...

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I have no problms whatsoever with the drawing times of GUI mail software, and use Thunderbird all the time, when I'm not using the even mor bloated Outlook for work.

For those worried about html mail and other rich formats, I always configure my email software to only ever display in plaintext anyway, and I don't allow my mail client to connect to anything other than the mail ports on my mail server, so I never get slowed down by emails trying to load remote graphics (for instance). Doing that also means mail "bugs" won't work.

You need to be running a personal firewall that allows you to configure ports allowed and IP adresses allowed on a per executable basis however. On XP (which I have to use at work) I use the Kerio personal firewall for this purpose. It's remarkable how many programs try to access internet site when they are run with a LAN connected. Microsoft's own programs are the worse.

And if your network connection is slow, and your TCP/IP timeout is default, it slows down all your operations considerably, so denying them access usually speeds your system up.

Though I'm tempted to suggest that perhaps more power is the answer, you're not still trying to use a Pentium II or earlier are you?
^__^

[elfs.livejournal.com]

P2-266 w/164MB ram, yeah. It's all I can afford. It doesn't take much to write stories on Emacs, and believe it or not it plays movies just fine. It just can't handle email. How wacked is that?

[mundens.livejournal.com]

True, that's all you need to edit text on!

Have to say I continued using a DOS-based emall and news reader (snews) for many years after Windows became common because it was far more powerful than the limited GUI clients of the time

Emacs is cool too, got to write a mode for it once during my CS degree, and at the time I really enjoyed the way they used arrays of function pointers to allow the addition of new features to the UI.
(Sorry, bored geek reminiscing)

Shame you're on the other side of the Pacific or I'd give you one of the PIII's I got lying around at home (all having been retired for 1.2Ghz laptops or better). As it is, the postage cost would be prohibitive!