Mail, please.

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 11:38:24PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 7:29 PM, Liam E. <liame at mail2tor.com> 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.