E-mail maintenance, Part 1

Now that I've learned that my company e-mail server offers the IMAP protocol (even though part the the server's domain name is the word "pop"), my interest in e-mail clients has returned.

I returned to Mutt, the command-line mail program that allows you to handle large amounts of mail and dispense with them quickly. I've got a bunch of Mutt links, which I will present in a future post, but in reconfiguring my .muttrc file, I found that things weren't working all that perfectly (I used the IMAP configuration for freelinuxemail.com and fastmail.fm as the base for my new IMAP configuration).

I did find some good IMAP-focused Mutt resources to help me, but I decided to try a few GUI mail clients in the meantime.

Under Debian, I configured Evolution, but for some reason I could see the headers of my e-mails but couldn't open them -- the app said the messages were "unavailable."

So I fired up Sylpheed, fast becoming my favorite GUI e-mail client. I got the configuration done in a couple of minutes, and all I had to do after that was a little tweaking (making sure my sent messages go into the sent folder, modifying the way the date is displayed so it's MM/DD/YY, etc.) Sylpheed indeed works well. And so far I prefer Thunderbird to Evolution.

But, believe it or not, on my Windows box I'm using plain ol' Outlook. Why? It's already installed and is working pretty well thus far. As yet I don't have any other mail clients installed on this box, and I'd like to try Thunderbird at least, but currently I'm more focused on getting mail working well on my Linux boxes. All of the GUI mail clients allow for multiple accounts to be managed in a single app, and I know that Mutt can do this too, although it requires a lot of work on the .muttrc configuration file (and a little on the .msmtprc config file for MSMTP, my outgoing-mail app).

Looking at all the helpful Web pages out there on Mutt, I know why many people prefer POP over IMAP. When you POP the mail and bring it all down to your PC, you can use Procmail (or even Mutt itself) to sort your mail into directories, making it that much more manageable. And dealing with mail on your own hard drive will always be quicker than reading it on a server, even with the ultra-quick Mutt as your MUA (mail user agent in geek speak).

Upcoming in Part 2: Cleaning up after yourself