mailDir capable email clients

[Peter Chant]

I'm migrating from kmail. Thunderbird does not support mailDir and I think
it is unwise to move my mail archives to the mBox format. Any suggestions
for a mailDir capable mail client? Mutt, Evolution and Balsa seem to be the
mail ones that come up. Mutt is text and I don't want to go there. Balsa
has been superceeded by Evolution. Is it worth the effort installing
Evolution?

The other option that comes up in searches is to install Dovecot and then
use any email client that supports imap. Is this a good solution? It seems
to be adding an additional layer of complexity.

I also want a decent calendar application so I'd be running Sunbird or
Thunderbird with the Lightning plug-in in any case unless there are good
alternatives.

Thoughts?

Pete

[Keith Keller]

On 2012-11-30, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm migrating from kmail. Thunderbird does not support mailDir and I think
> it is unwise to move my mail archives to the mBox format. Any suggestions
> for a mailDir capable mail client? Mutt, Evolution and Balsa seem to be the
> mail ones that come up. Mutt is text and I don't want to go there.

mutt is awesome! Plus you can ssh in to your box from anywhere to read
your mail. I find this a lot more flexible than needing a GUI mail
client on every box.

BTW, it's Maildir, not mailDir (and mbox, IIRC, not mBox).

> The other option that comes up in searches is to install Dovecot and then
> use any email client that supports imap. Is this a good solution? It seems
> to be adding an additional layer of complexity.

It's not unreasonable--I also have a dovecot server running, and it
works fine. If you have a static IP you can also hit your IMAP mail
from any client (including clients on smartphones).

--keith

--
kkeller...@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
AOLSFAQ=http://www.therockgarden.ca/aolsfaq.txt
see X- headers for PGP signature information

[Jim Diamond]

On 2012-11-30 at 15:24 AST, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:

> I also want a decent calendar application so I'd be running Sunbird or
> Thunderbird with the Lightning plug-in in any case unless there are good
> alternatives.
>
> Thoughts?

I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
happy with anything I found. I looked at
- orage (too minimal for my needs)
- remind (powerful but text-based only, and this is one place I prefer
a GUI tool)
- Reminderfox (too minimal, for people with few events in their days)
- gcalcli, pygmynote, calcurse: all too minimal in capabilities and/or
interface
- Thunderbird with Lightning (crashes my window manager repeatedly)
- and missing some configuration items which I really like to use
- Sunbird - best of the lot, I think, except it is dead-end


Since I consider S14.0's KDE 4 to be a complete, total and utter loss
(some time I might tell you how I really feel :-) I installed Trinity
on one computer (for testing) and its version of korganizer seems to
work fine. Not exactly the same as the korganizer version from
S13.37, but still OK.

On my primary computer, I have the kde from 13.37 installed on a
S64-14.0 system, and that korganizer works as well. So you might
consider that option. However, the 13.37 version of some programs
(such as k3b, which needs HAL to find /dev/cdrom) don't work properly
in 14.0 (for me, anyway).

If you find anything I haven't mentioned above which you think is
interesting, please share the info.

Cheers.
Jim

[John McCue]

Jim Diamond <Jim.D...@deletethis.acadiau.ca> wrote:
> On 2012-11-30 at 15:24 AST, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> I also want a decent calendar application so I'd be running Sunbird or

<snip>

>> Thoughts?
>
> I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
> happy with anything I found. I looked at

<snip>

Maybe give plan a try, needs lesstiff or motif.

http://www.bitrot.de/plan.html

Regards
John

[dillinger]

Thunderbird has experimental support for maildir since v.12.
There is no GUI for it so you have to change the pref manually.
Change
mail.serverDefaultStoreContractID
from
@mozilla.org/msgstore/berkeleystore;1
to
@mozilla.org/msgstore/maildirstore;1
in about:config (or prefs.js) before you create an account.

It's still experimental so it may not be "wiser" than moving to mbox.

[Loki Harfagr]

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:43:51 -0400, Jim Diamond did cat :

> On 2012-11-30 at 15:24 AST, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> I also want a decent calendar application so I'd be running Sunbird or
>> Thunderbird with the Lightning plug-in in any case unless there are good
>> alternatives.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
> happy with anything I found. I looked at
> - orage (too minimal for my needs)
> - remind (powerful but text-based only, and this is one place I prefer
> a GUI tool)

did you also check wxRemind?
http://freecode.com/projects/wxrem
if you'd like remind andwere simply stopped by the lack of GUI
you may now have the best ;-)

[Peter Chant]

Jim Diamond wrote:


> I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
> happy with anything I found. I looked at
> - orage (too minimal for my needs)

! It took me googling and a further poke around to find out that it
actually supports iCalendar. Not sure whether it can import these from a
server - as the dialog looked like it was wanting files on my disk only.

> - remind (powerful but text-based only, and this is one place I prefer
> a GUI tool)

Same here.

> - Reminderfox (too minimal, for people with few events in their days)
> - gcalcli, pygmynote, calcurse: all too minimal in capabilities and/or
> interface

Not seen these.

> - Thunderbird with Lightning (crashes my window manager repeatedly)
> - and missing some configuration items which I really like to use
> - Sunbird - best of the lot, I think, except it is dead-end
>

IIRC, unless they have diverged, Sunbird is the standalone version of
lightning. Used Sunbird years back before using korganizer as part of the
KDE PIM. Just installed lightning on Sunbird - the google calendar plugin
is good, it means it works _properly_ as far as I can tell from limited
testing, with Google.

>
> Since I consider S14.0's KDE 4 to be a complete, total and utter loss
> (some time I might tell you how I really feel :-) I installed Trinity
> on one computer (for testing) and its version of korganizer seems to
> work fine. Not exactly the same as the korganizer version from
> S13.37, but still OK.

Well, I can stick with the KDE4 korganizer if I disable the semantic stuff
on KDE4 (and kmail2!).

Personally I find KDE4 a pleasent environment with some nice things, such as
built in terminals in Dolphin and kate. However, for reasons given
elsewhere I have issues with some of it.

>
> On my primary computer, I have the kde from 13.37 installed on a
> S64-14.0 system, and that korganizer works as well. So you might
> consider that option. However, the 13.37 version of some programs
> (such as k3b, which needs HAL to find /dev/cdrom) don't work properly
> in 14.0 (for me, anyway).
>
> If you find anything I haven't mentioned above which you think is
> interesting, please share the info.
>

Will do. Nothing springs to mind. I'd got rather used to having the
calender and email client as one app. Not that I've used it for meeting
request emails at home, so only the convenience of not having to dig around
for another window is an advantage. However, do use the combined calendar /
email functionality in Outlook at work frequently.

> Cheers.
> Jim

[Peter Chant]

Keith Keller wrote:

> On 2012-11-30, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
>> I'm migrating from kmail. Thunderbird does not support mailDir and I
>> think
>> it is unwise to move my mail archives to the mBox format. Any
>> suggestions
>> for a mailDir capable mail client? Mutt, Evolution and Balsa seem to be
>> the
>> mail ones that come up. Mutt is text and I don't want to go there.
>
> mutt is awesome! Plus you can ssh in to your box from anywhere to read
> your mail. I find this a lot more flexible than needing a GUI mail
> client on every box.
>

Jugding by the number of items that come up when I press '?' its only a
Ctrl-Meta away from being the emacs of mail clients... :-) The archived
mail stays on my main PC, the only place it is accessible. My phone and
netbook can access my main account and gmail from whereever they are.

I am almost never in the position to ssh into my PC. I did set up ssh from
the outside once, that was quite a few years back and was the exception.

> BTW, it's Maildir, not mailDir (and mbox, IIRC, not mBox).
>

I knew you'd know what I mean!

>> The other option that comes up in searches is to install Dovecot and then
>> use any email client that supports imap. Is this a good solution? It
>> seems to be adding an additional layer of complexity.
>
> It's not unreasonable--I also have a dovecot server running, and it
> works fine. If you have a static IP you can also hit your IMAP mail
> from any client (including clients on smartphones).

Had a quick go. Made some progress but didn't get too far. However, found
a good article on dovecot on slack last night which I've yet to act on.

[Peter Chant]

Keith Keller wrote:

>> The other option that comes up in searches is to install Dovecot and then
>> use any email client that supports imap. Is this a good solution? It
>> seems to be adding an additional layer of complexity.
>
> It's not unreasonable--I also have a dovecot server running, and it
> works fine. If you have a static IP you can also hit your IMAP mail
> from any client (including clients on smartphones).

Bit more complexity than I would have liked, but Dovecot does look like the
solution. It looks like the maildir used by kmail is not exactly maildir.
However, if running dovecot I find that I can see the same folders in
sylpheed and thunderbird. I can also copy across from kmail2 but a bit of
manual moving is requried as kmail does not seem to create the subfolders as
subfolders seen from the other clients.

Dovecot config was not obvious and was not helped as it appeared that the
format has been chaning rapidly. However, good mitigation as it strongly
hints that you can automatically create an updated config file. So its a
more complex solution than indended, and not in core slackware, but as you
say, it is a reasonable solution.

Pete

[Loki Harfagr]

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 14:46:42 +0000, Peter Chant did cat :

I'm not opposed to your installation of Dovecot if you like it and
have the need of of it but still you should remember that in case all
you wanted was an imap server you already have one in Slackware which
only needs a small action from your side that'd be to let it uncommented
in /etc/inetd.conf.

I might agree that UW imap may not be what a big server with loads and
crowds would prefer, but for a local LAN to a small WAN server (say
between 1.0 to 6K users) it just rocks, works and do it all without feathers ;-)

[Jim Diamond]

On 2012-12-01 at 09:15 AST, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
> Jim Diamond wrote:
>
>
>> I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
>> happy with anything I found. I looked at
>> - orage (too minimal for my needs)
>
> ! It took me googling and a further poke around to find out that it
> actually supports iCalendar. Not sure whether it can import these from a
> server - as the dialog looked like it was wanting files on my disk only.

Probably so. It looks like it will be a nice program when it grows up
a bit more, but not yet (IMHO).

>> - Reminderfox (too minimal, for people with few events in their days)
>> - gcalcli, pygmynote, calcurse: all too minimal in capabilities and/or
>> interface
> Not seen these.

Probably not worth your time looking at them.

>> - Thunderbird with Lightning (crashes my window manager repeatedly)
>> - and missing some configuration items which I really like to use
>> - Sunbird - best of the lot, I think, except it is dead-end
> IIRC, unless they have diverged, Sunbird is the standalone version of
> lightning.

If you look at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
you should see
This is the last public Sunbird release by the Calendar
Project. We recommend upgrading to Thunderbird and
Lightning.
The files in the most recent download are dated Jan 11, 2010. It's
apparently dead and not coming back to life (which is too bad).

> Used Sunbird years back before using korganizer as part of the KDE
> PIM. Just installed lightning on Sunbird -

You mean "lightning on Thunderbird" ?

> the google calendar plugin is good, it means it works _properly_ as
> far as I can tell from limited testing, with Google.

I might have picked that as the way to go had it not crashed my window
manager repeatedly. I don't have the time to track that one down
right now.

>> Since I consider S14.0's KDE 4 to be a complete, total and utter loss
>> (some time I might tell you how I really feel :-) I installed Trinity
>> on one computer (for testing) and its version of korganizer seems to
>> work fine. Not exactly the same as the korganizer version from
>> S13.37, but still OK.
> Well, I can stick with the KDE4 korganizer if I disable the semantic stuff
> on KDE4 (and kmail2!).

I don't think you can. I believe if you disable the semantic stuff
korganizer refuses to start. Please correct me if I am wrong.

>> If you find anything I haven't mentioned above which you think is
>> interesting, please share the info.
> Will do. Nothing springs to mind.

Thanks.
Jim

[Peter Chant]

Loki Harfagr wrote:

> I'm not opposed to your installation of Dovecot if you like it and
> have the need of of it but still you should remember that in case all
> you wanted was an imap server you already have one in Slackware which
> only needs a small action from your side that'd be to let it uncommented
> in /etc/inetd.conf.

I'd feel rather silly if I'd not noticed an existing imap server when I went
out my way to install another one and learn its config...

>
> I might agree that UW imap may not be what a big server with loads and
> crowds would prefer, but for a local LAN to a small WAN server (say
> between 1.0 to 6K users) it just rocks, works and do it all without
> feathers ;-)

Perhaps I should have enabled it and not worried about it. However, it
seems that UW imap developers are not overly enamoured with maildir yet to
me saving your mail in large files would seem to me to be less robust.

I've noticed an odd thing with kmail2 when copying my messages over to
dovecot, rather than use a '.' as a separator for subfolders and 'i' is
used. 'I' is also stripped from (sub)folder names. Other clients, sylpheed
and thunderbird, do not do this.

I though email was a fairly mature and stable area. However, it appears
that if you would like to chop and change between clients things get a
little more complex.

Pete

[Peter Chant]

On 01/12/12 04:28, dillinger wrote:

> Thunderbird has experimental support for maildir since v.12.
> There is no GUI for it so you have to change the pref manually.
> Change
> mail.serverDefaultStoreContractID
> from
> @mozilla.org/msgstore/berkeleystore;1
> to
> @mozilla.org/msgstore/maildirstore;1
> in about:config (or prefs.js) before you create an account.
>
> It's still experimental so it may not be "wiser" than moving to mbox.
>

Agree on the 'wise' front. I've installed dovecot so I seem to have a
working cross-client solution, even if it is more complex than I
originally envisaged.

[Peter Chant]

Jim Diamond wrote:



>>> - Thunderbird with Lightning (crashes my window manager repeatedly)
>>> - and missing some configuration items which I really like to use
>>> - Sunbird - best of the lot, I think, except it is dead-end
>> IIRC, unless they have diverged, Sunbird is the standalone version of
>> lightning.
> If you look at
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
> you should see
> This is the last public Sunbird release by the Calendar
> Project. We recommend upgrading to Thunderbird and
> Lightning.
> The files in the most recent download are dated Jan 11, 2010. It's
> apparently dead and not coming back to life (which is too bad).
>

That is a shame as Sunbird by itself was a nice app.

>> Used Sunbird years back before using korganizer as part of the KDE
>> PIM. Just installed lightning on Sunbird -
> You mean "lightning on Thunderbird" ?
>> the google calendar plugin is good, it means it works _properly_ as
>> far as I can tell from limited testing, with Google.
>
> I might have picked that as the way to go had it not crashed my window
> manager repeatedly. I don't have the time to track that one down
> right now.
>

I'm not doing too badly with Thunderbird. However, it does seem to complain
on newsgroups, it can't save something in drafts, then locks me out. Which
is why this is posted from knode.

[Keith Keller]

On 2012-12-01, Loki Harfagr <l0...@thedarkdesign.free.fr.INVALID> wrote:
>
> I might agree that UW imap may not be what a big server with loads and
> crowds would prefer, but for a local LAN to a small WAN server (say
> between 1.0 to 6K users) it just rocks, works and do it all without feathers ;-)

Last I looked UW imapd did not support Maildir mailboxes. That was the
biggest reason I switched to Dovecot.

[Loki Harfagr]

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:45:47 +0000, Peter Chant did cat :

> Loki Harfagr wrote:
>
>> I'm not opposed to your installation of Dovecot if you like it and
>> have the need of of it but still you should remember that in case all
>> you wanted was an imap server you already have one in Slackware which
>> only needs a small action from your side that'd be to let it uncommented
>> in /etc/inetd.conf.
>
> I'd feel rather silly if I'd not noticed an existing imap server when I went
> out my way to install another one and learn its config...
>
>>
>> I might agree that UW imap may not be what a big server with loads and
>> crowds would prefer, but for a local LAN to a small WAN server (say
>> between 1.0 to 6K users) it just rocks, works and do it all without
>> feathers ;-)
>
> Perhaps I should have enabled it and not worried about it. However, it
> seems that UW imap developers are not overly enamoured with maildir

That's right and my answer was not totally exact since it only addressed the
"migrating from KMail" part, fact was a few years ago when Kde started to
go down the path of being a bit greedy in resources and a bit dizzy on
stability I migrated to Claws-Mail but didn't want to lose my ~2G of
local KDE mailboxes so I fired up UW and put the Kmail rootbox in INBOX/
and mailed happily ever after. But that's right I probably previoulsy
made a maildir to MH move within Kmail :-)

Then, I reckon that was for the previous Kmail version and I cant't tell if
if may wotk for Kmail2 (and am not going to reinstall and reimport just
to test it, sorry ;D)
And yes:

> yet to
> me saving your mail in large files would seem to me to be less robust.

That could be a concern id you have really huge files, but I'd say that
for one, the size for 'huge' is quite different nowadays as pretty depending
on RAM, CPU, filesystem and I/Os (these also depending on users uses).
Besides I also have had situations where the one file per box was a winner
against the zillion small files, even on huge servers and many users.
And I'd certainly prefer UW for personal use
(hence users are few and with hex hygiena ;-)

So, the final choice between UW, courier, cyrus or dovecot still keeps open
not only by their respective implementations on IMAP but also by their
various flavors of boxes indexed or not and mixed or not ;-)
Now, I reckon that since you favor maildir UW is not in the range and
I made the mistake when answering to reply to a question I pre-interpreted.

> I've noticed an odd thing with kmail2 when copying my messages over to
> dovecot, rather than use a '.' as a separator for subfolders and 'i' is
> used. 'I' is also stripped from (sub)folder names. Other clients, sylpheed
> and thunderbird, do not do this.
>
> I though email was a fairly mature and stable area. However, it appears
> that if you would like to chop and change between clients things get a
> little more complex.

That's quite the same on the servers side, each dev team had their beliefs in the
ultimate format, and worse had a strong belief that they needed to discard the
concurrent box format, which then makes a bit more difficult to switch when
you started on a way and realize you might better test another. That was bad
attitude but it's not so seldom in IT and that's the reason why it is good for
us, users and admins to show the makers that we still can make the moving out ;-)

[Peter Chant]

On 03/12/12 08:29, Loki Harfagr wrote:
>

>> Perhaps I should have enabled it and not worried about it. However, it
>> seems that UW imap developers are not overly enamoured with maildir
>
> That's right and my answer was not totally exact since it only addressed the
> "migrating from KMail" part, fact was a few years ago when Kde started to
> go down the path of being a bit greedy in resources and a bit dizzy on
> stability I migrated to Claws-Mail but didn't want to lose my ~2G of
> local KDE mailboxes so I fired up UW and put the Kmail rootbox in INBOX/
> and mailed happily ever after. But that's right I probably previoulsy
> made a maildir to MH move within Kmail :-)
>

Well, since my old mail was in kmail folders and kmail supports IMAP I
thought it would be a simple copy across. But then things started to
get a little strange... kmail's view of dovecot's maildir does not look
like what is actually in the maildir. Similar seems to be true of
kmail's own internal folders. Perhaps something fishy is going on with
caches. Some stuff does not appear to be anywhere but still is
accessible within kmail. May have to reach for that DVD backup. Had I
known this was the way it was going to have gone I'd have got my hands
dirty and copied it across on the command line - the folder structure is
fairly simple. I think that kmail does not _quite_ use maildir. It
seems to use a directory full or maildirs directly. But then I
understand that maildir does not support sub-folders, but rather
maildir+ (or something else does) so perhaps the standard is not quite
as fixed as one would hope.

> Then, I reckon that was for the previous Kmail version and I cant't tell if
> if may wotk for Kmail2 (and am not going to reinstall and reimport just
> to test it, sorry ;D)
> And yes:

Can sympathise there. Moving mail clients has been much more
complicated than expected. When I fire up kmail and perform a large
copy nepomuk and akonadi kick in. I suspect there is disk thrashing as
a mail is copied across and then the database on the supporting mysql
instance is updated.

>> yet to
>> me saving your mail in large files would seem to me to be less robust.
>
> That could be a concern id you have really huge files, but I'd say that
> for one, the size for 'huge' is quite different nowadays as pretty depending
> on RAM, CPU, filesystem and I/Os (these also depending on users uses).
> Besides I also have had situations where the one file per box was a winner
> against the zillion small files, even on huge servers and many users.
> And I'd certainly prefer UW for personal use
> (hence users are few and with hex hygiena ;-)
>
> So, the final choice between UW, courier, cyrus or dovecot still keeps open
> not only by their respective implementations on IMAP but also by their
> various flavors of boxes indexed or not and mixed or not ;-)
> Now, I reckon that since you favor maildir UW is not in the range and
> I made the mistake when answering to reply to a question I pre-interpreted.
>

Not really a mistake. It is a perfectly logical and perhaps better
solution and likely simpler solution for me. However, providing I don't
regret having to reinstall dovecot each time I update slack, I've now
made my choice.

[Peter Chant]

>> Agree on the 'wise' front. I've installed dovecot so I seem to have a
>> working cross-client solution, even if it is more complex than I
>> originally envisaged.
>

> 1.x was easy and simple, Timo went crazy and changed it all in 2.x almost
> need a fighter jet pilots licence to master it.. well ,not really, but
> yeah some of the changes are not for the best IMHO but he claims it makes
> it cleaner (fucks me how)
>
> just look at the quota mess. 2 lines, in 1.x to do same in 2.x u need
> about 12 lines *shakes head*

Really can comment on that. Slightly bemused that I have now got a
config that probably would happily run a small company to handle my
personal email...

Never seen anything like an application telling me to do something like
doveconf -n to fix my configuration before. I suppose if you are going
to radically change your config it is the way.


>
> Oh and as for UW* .. Dovecot leaves it and Courier for dead for
> performance and resource uses.
>

1G mbox files by and chance?

[Jim Diamond]

John,

that one escaped my earlier search. Thanks for the pointer.

Jim

[Jim Diamond]

On 2012-12-01 at 05:29 AST, Loki Harfagr <l0...@thedarkdesign.free.fr.INVALID> wrote:
> Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:43:51 -0400, Jim Diamond did cat :
>
>> On 2012-11-30 at 15:24 AST, Peter Chant <pe...@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> I also want a decent calendar application so I'd be running Sunbird or
>>> Thunderbird with the Lightning plug-in in any case unless there are good
>>> alternatives.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I looked at a number of calendar programs a few months ago and was not
>> happy with anything I found. I looked at
>> - orage (too minimal for my needs)
>> - remind (powerful but text-based only, and this is one place I prefer
>> a GUI tool)
>
> did you also check wxRemind?
> http://freecode.com/projects/wxrem

Another one that I didn't find.

> if you'd like remind andwere simply stopped by the lack of GUI
> you may now have the best ;-)

Hmmm... maybe.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll take a look at it.


Cheers
Jim