[Cialug] Email

[Todd Walton]

Email frustrates me.  Supporting email frustrates me.  Supporting my
own email frustrates me because I can't make head nor tails of what's
going on with mail on the filesystem.  My favorite setup ever was
fetchmail downloading POP mail to /var/spool/mail and then my email
program getting it from there... No wait.  My *favorite* was using
Eudora on Windows.  Eudora was perfect in almost every way.

But all of that aside, I wish I wish I wish email was stored in a very
basic very standard way that was highly portable.  I know that mbox
and maildir are supposed to be standard, and maildir is all the rage
these days among that crowd.  But even with those, my mail program
keeps adding little bits of extra crap to those files.  Eudora
supposedly used mbox, but added crap.  Evolution adds crap.
Thunderbird, my current email program, adds crap.  And just trying to
find the mail with Thunderbird???

~/.thunderbird/somekindofretardedrandom.default/Mail

And then you have to deal with "Local Folders" versus a folder with
the server name.  Why oh why can't I have a standard folder (~/.mail
or the like) and a standard format (straight maildir)?  I've tried
merging all that mail I saved from my Eudora days six and seven years
ago into mail-program-of-the-moment.  It never seems to work.
Everybody says it can be done, and there are even programs that do
converting (emailchemy is one I remember).

But it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as I'd hope.  I'm always
worried that the extra crap in there is going to confuse some future
program and it's going to mangle my precious emails after I've deleted
the old stuff.  And then I worry that the longer I wait, the more
chance there is of an old format falling by the wayside and being no
longer supported.  There's always vi, and in the end that's all that
will really be necessary.  But these aren't just text files, and I
want them to be treated like email.  And then everytime I send an
email using my webhoster's webmail program I don't know what to do
with them afterwards.  How do I get those emails off of the hosting
space and into my regular email program?  I considered using IMAP
instead of POP, but I don't like the idea of all my email being in
someone else's hands.  Maybe if I had the funds for a colocated server
or a beyond consumer-grade Internet connection here at home...

I feel safer storing my textual output in a word processor's file
format than in email, and email is supposed to be a well-defined
standard by now.  I'm probably being unreasonable.

-todd