[UFO Chicago] playing around with IMP

[Peter A. Peterson II]

Quoting Brian T. Grant:
> I run both IMP and SquirrelMail on my mail server. No doubt about it: 
> SquirrelMail is a lot easier to get installed and working. There is a deb
> package for it, and it just worked when I installed it, whereas I found IMP's
> installation was a bit more complicated. 

Alright, I actually just installed SM, and I must say it was
incredibly easy to install. It doesn't seem as full featured or as
slick as Horde/IMP, but SM has the advantage of not using any
JavaScript (which I would have counted a much bigger advantage prior
to Mozilla featuring a useful implementation). SM also does have a big
plugin system where you can sort of featurize it the way you want,
which is cool. But, if IMP does those things out of the box (and you're
not concerned about it's size or cpu cycles) it may not be worth it to
deal with all the plugins, etc of SM. I still haven't tested SM with
lynx or links.

>From just first playing around with it, SM looked like early Yahoo!
mail, wheras IMP looks a lot more like an actual mailapp, or like the
newer, J.*Script using webmailers.

Brian, you said you have both SM and IMP installed -- what do you use
them for? Or rather, what do you use each for?

> If you use MBOX format for new mail, you should have no problem swapping between
> mail clients. All you need to do is touch a file called "mbox" in your home
> directory and, when a mail client makes a connection through IMAP, it moves all
> of the mail from /var/mail/user to the mbox file.

I actually just have it get it's mail from the spool, and flynn's
email is set up with a symlink back to the spool for the inbox. (So
new mail sits in the spool until it is acted upon.) I guess I dont'
know why I do it like that. So I don't have an ~/mbox file. But it
works great. I also told IMP to use ~/mail for my folders, and so it
can see my ~/mail/inboxes folder which is where list mail is filtered.

> I've been running this way for months now, and I alternate between
> IMP, pine (I just don't understand what you see in mutt) and
> Mail.app on OS X. The only hassle is having to maintain multiple
> address books. 

I don't understand what you see in pine! Seriously though, what I like
about mutt is:

o 100% free software from the ground up
o threading!
o no security announcements referring to it!

> I have yet to set up spam filtering. Postfix has built-in filtering that is
> fairly easy to set up, from what I understand. We use postfix at work on our
> mail gateway and it works like a charm. 

Try Spamassassin -- it's in Debian and works great. Then add these
lines to your ~/.procmailrc (thanks to kickaha):

:0fw
| spamassassin -P


:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
inboxes/spamalamadingdong (or wherever you want it to go)

... and then periodically check that box for false positives, email
from hotmail users, etc.

While we're at it, let's have an out-and-out pine versus mutt
discussion. I'm actually curious what people on the list think. And we
could do the community a service as I'm sure that noone has ever
thought to have that discussion before.

pedro

-- 
Peter A. Peterson II, technician and musician.
---=[ http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/ ]=---