On 9/12/16 4:54 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 11:29:09PM -0000, Liam E. wrote:

...

What is the most minimal setup for command-line mail on a system like Debian? "MUA and POP retriever."

For ultra lightweight, use bsd-mailx

For features, use alpine or mutt

For retriever, getmail or mpop. Fetchmail is way too slow.

I always use imap, for many reasons, including using multiple client machines simultaneously while keeping the authoritative version on the server. Use an imap backup to mbox files, which does efficient delta updates, then a local client on those. sdw

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 11:38:24PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 7:29 PM, Liam E. wrote:

...

What is the most minimal setup for command-line mail on a system like Debian?

On any BSD or Linux, neomutt with mbox [1] serves simple use[r]s. You can go more minimal for lols but there's not much point to it.

But if you want to move to more volume, a programmable backend, and extra crypto, which you eventually will and should just do from day one, you need fetchmail,

Please! As I said, use getmail or mpop! Fetchmail is barely maintained these days, besides being an order of magnitude slow (per email downloading, without any pipelining, unlike both getmail -and- mpop).

msmtpa,

I'm almost certain mutt has smtp built in, and mutt can be used from the command line to construct and send emails without having to run interactively either. Why add a separate program into the mix unnecessarily? (Note, now I see below you mention cert pinning.)

maildrop,

This is a modernish and more importantly maintained procmail replacement. Recommended if you want its features, but technically optional.

and gpg

gpg of course

with maildir.

I still find mbox "folders" substantially quicker, even with an SSD. I expect notmuch-mutt will remove that particular block to using Maildir, and loop mounted Maildir hierarchy in a single (zip compressed) file would handle my objection to the storage bloat - that or ZFS of course.

Beware most every other imap/pop and smtp client cannot do cert pinning (and optional checking) at all, let alone right or flexibly.

Mutt ?

(You might be able to get it added in neomutt if you ask them and help now.) And most of them suck badly at flexibly handling many accounts, unless you code around it. (Fetchmail / msmtp would be willing.)

Ditch fetchmail already.

[1] For technical reasons I do not recommend mbox, unfortunately most users see it, incorrectly, as simple, so there it is listed.

For users who want to have to know the minimum, handle the least problems, Maildir is most likely a better, more trouble free "seamless" option, I agree.

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 01:59:04PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 11:38:24PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:

...

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 7:29 PM, Liam E. wrote:

...

What is the most minimal setup for command-line mail on a system like Debian?

On any BSD or Linux, neomutt with mbox [1] serves simple use[r]s. You can go more minimal for lols but there's not much point to it.

But if you want to move to more volume, a programmable backend, and extra crypto, which you eventually will and should just do from day one, you need fetchmail,

Please! As I said, use getmail or mpop! Fetchmail is barely maintained these days, besides being an order of magnitude slow (per email downloading, without any pipelining, unlike both getmail -and- mpop).

mutt (and neomutt presumably) supports imap natively pretty well, at least on my freebsd box (mutt 1.6.0). It used to be fairly buggy but it worked well the last time I used it for a couple weeks. But then you are limiting yourself to filtering on the server side with something like imapfilter, a program actually I like, but maildrop is nice too... So many good options! :P John