Since some weeks already I have been using a completely new mail system. I had
been using Thunderbird and I had been accessing some accounts with IMAP, some
with POP3, some mails had been local, some remote before. And everything was in
large files I haven't really trusted. So I decided to set up something new.
Already last year I read about the
search for "the" mail client
of Michael Klier and therefore it was relatively
clear that mutt would be the client of choice. The
storage part wasn't that difficult, too. Some mails should be mirrored to a
remote IMAP server, but all mails should be in a local maildir.
The interesting question remained: Which software will send the mails with SMTP
and which one will fetch and sort them. Well, the first answer is
msmtp as it supports multiple SMTP accounts
and can be integrated into mutt quite easily. The other answer seemed to be a
combination of getmail and procmail - until I had discovered
fdm. It supports fetching mails and newposts
from various sources (includes IMAP and POP3, but also a local maildir) and
delivering mails to many destinations (includes maildir, mbox, IMAP and SMTP).
On the way you can filter the mails by a lot of criterias, you can select if the
mail shall remain on the server or not and of course you can send it through
other programs, too. Additionally it can maintain local lists of mails it
already knows so you can skip double mails. The advantage of fdm is that it can
e.g. filter old mails, too, it can maintain archives of old mails, …
After reading the documentation I started writing my own configuration file.
Although it seems quite complex it's relatively simple if you don't have that
many rules and all in all it's quite intuitive. Then the important moment
arrived: Fetching mails for the first time. It worked quite well, although it
has some flaws I will describe later.
The negative surprise was that authentication with NNTP wasn't supported. Well, I
decided to write a mail to the mailing list in order to see what the author
thinks about it - and guess, no, you won't guess it - not 24 hours later I had a
patch in my inbox that adds the feature I wanted. And it works. That was really
cool.
I encountered a couple of bugs with fdm but all obvious problems were solved by
the author some hours after reporting them (they were related to NNTP which
isn't that well supported…). Apart from some problem with terminating the
process I am currently trying to monitor with a more verbose log and the author
wants to have a look at fdm currently works, although IMAP with GMail seems to
not to work that good… At least if you want to leave all messages on the
server you have to mark them as read manually as otherwise fdm will continue
downloading them everytime (you can filter them with a seen cache, but it still
needs some time…). I've had problems with a large newsgroup and fdm, too. It
seemed everytime after looking into the maildir with mutt all messages were
downloaded so I ended up with having not only some thousands of messages but
almost 20 thousands of messages with every message at least four times or so.
That was when I removed that nntp account from my configuration as I haven't
read all those messages, anyway.
All in all fdm has really cool features, but seems to be quite unknown (?) and
not so good when you have to deal with random (news)servers.
I learned to love my new mail system. There is no longer a Thunderbird window
floating around, it's just another window in my screen session. I can now use my
favorite editor VIM for composing mails and it seems to me that I no longer
constantly look for new mails, too. The next thing is that mutt automatically
suggests moving mails out of the inbox into another mailbox specified in the
configuration, so I now started to have a clean inbox almost everytime I read
through it. Either I delete it (which I do more often now, it's just one single
keystroke) or I move it to another folder manually - or it gets into the
archive.