I’m a person who isn’t satisfied with a lot of things. This both affects me and helps me on several circumstances in life, such it is.
The latter also affects my way to deal with mail, mail serving and MUAs. For years, I was a strong Novell Evolution user, mainly because it was quite easy to use, it was pretty and it used to understand the needs that people like me, involved in a lot of things (some of the worthwhile, some of them shitty), required. But in the last couple of years, it began to bloat, to handle connections Bayesian filters and SpamAssassin in a way that was utterly broken and decomposed.
I took a break years ago, and tried Mutt, as many free software folks and Debian developers use them on a daily basis to deal with even more incoming mail. I actually liked it, but I was just unable to deal with spam too. My local config was probably broken, fixing it was an obscure fart of Benedict XVI and hidden folders for mailing lists were just a way to forget that I actually was subscribed to mailing lists and focused only on the incoming mail on the inbox.
I then tried KMail, since I started usign KDE. It was good enough for it was sometimes slow when trying to load or search on about 100’000 mails and it just didn’t fulfill me. I also tried Thunderbird which only made me hate its very closed format to display its ugly UI. Besides, a lot of things on it were getting my angry, like the message filters, etc.
So I just didn’t give a damn and moved my whole personal mail accounts to Google Apps, giving an opportunity to a totally different approach on mail handling. So I started using the Web interface of GMail. At first I was shocked watching me dealing with a Webmail but after a while I started getting used to it and liking it. Its way to put all conversations threaded on a central inbox was sweet (i was able to filter, tag and take out of inbox too). So I liked it. Some things have never liked me whatsoever: It will always use your default mail address to reply to all messages, even if they are delivered to another recipient, which I consider retarded; its way to let users to top-post, etc, (you should also see how debian-private is seen on GMail and how the google sponsored links propose products based on all its threads xD). The good thing here also was that while not being a total purist, I loved that most spam has automatically handled for me, oh thank Lord I’m a lazy bastard.
Then I found Sup, which I think is like GMail but on mutt. It is written in Ruby and distributed as a gem (I’d prefer it to be in C/C++, but I’ll always give the benefit of doubt). Its main feature? A console mail client featuring GMail’s features, such as, one inbox, one big archive and labels all over the place, which is exactly what I was (probably) looking for. As the time of writing,Sup can only connect to IMAPs remote servers or read a number of local file formats. So, I undusted fetchmail and set it up. Since all my mail accounts now are forwarded to the main GMail account, I only need to handle one fetchmail config to get messages with POP (and some procmail recipes salting touch).
Here comes the sweetest thing from all this setup, by enabling GMail’s POP support, you can also specify if you want it to delete the GMail copy or store it. Since I’ve used 2% of all my storage, the best thing to do right now is to store and archive, which means that while i download all my email everyday and several times a day, all downloaded copies are also being stored on GMail, so in case I don’t have access to my machine, I can still find messages on the web interface. GMail also works nicely when you are sending an email from your remote mail client and using GMail’s SMTP, then also the mail you are sending gets stored on your GMail web interface, which is totally cool.
So I think I’m mildly content now with what I have. This also leads me to another awesome feature for me: Spam gets processed by GMail before I fetch it, so most of my downloaded POP mail is ham. In case I want to see some spam, the web interface will have it as usual for 30 days before being deleted.
I like to improve my time for productivity, to get more things done in less time, I do like learning about it, and the proof of concept for GMail handling being used by Sup and the free facilities that Google offers to dudes like me is just a great of avoiding procrastination. It’s a hell nice bag of features for me, and probably for you, why not try it?
