[lug] email client for linux

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:34:19 -0600
Davide Del Vento wrote:

> >> if you have any suggestion about email client on linux, that'd be
> >> good too
> >
> > This is the best GUI e-mail client. Ever.
> > http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
> 
> Thanks for the suggestions. I have two questions:
> 
> 1) how the conversation view is handled with respect to
> folder/directories? One thing that greatly bothers me with
> Thunderbird, is that if I have a conversation and then archive it or
> move it to a folder, when someone later reply to that conversation, I
> got the new message in inbox, but I do not get the rest of the
> conversation, nor any information about where I stored it. Paired with
> the terrible search capabilities of Thunderbird (I often prefer to
> manually recursively grep in its files!) that makes a huge PITA.
> Does sylpheed mimic Thunderbird, or does it mimic gmail (which places
> the whole conversation back in your inbox for you to examine, and
> still does preserve the information of the folder/label where I
> previously stored it)?

This would be a somewhat not-Sylpheedish way of doing things. The
question has never come up for me, because I use Sylpheed's filtering
capabilities to sort incoming mail into specific folders upon receipt.
e.g. I have filter that moves BLUG messages into the blug folder. Thus,
most of my e-mail ends up going someplace other than the inbox, and I
rarely have an orphan message. I don't have an "archive" folder. That I
know of, there isn't an "archive" function either, out of the box, though
you could set something like that up. Sylpheed is extensible, after a
fasion.

http://melvin.hadasht.free.fr/sylpheed/actions/index.html

I haven't delved deeply into that. Once I found a nice incantation for
decrypting PGP messages, I stopped. I think a filter rule would be what
you'd want for archiving messages. Whether it'd be possible to
auto-retrieve a thread from an "archive" folder upon receipt of a new
message, I don't know. Since you can invoke external programs, it's
likely possible, but you'd have to roll your procedure.

I'm not aware that Sylpheed has any db of metadata about specific
messages.

> 2) it looks like sylpheed stores each email as an individual message.
> While this seems a good way to solve the corruption issues that
> plagued early versions of Thunderbird, it looks like an even better
> way to tax the filesystem, both in terms of seeks and in terms of
> inodes. Just to get an idea on how this scales (and not to nose): how
> many emails do you receive per day, and how many do you keep? How
> often do you search them and with what responsiveness? I couldn't find
> info about an index, which would be essential for searching (recursive
> grepping) in thousands and thousand of files! I need something that
> would scale gracefully in terms of hundreds of emails per day received
> and about half saved - kept "forever" (what? am I gonna die? Ok, let's
> say for 10 years - hope to live much longer than that, but I'm ok with
> just 10 years of email storage)

I really can't speak to this much, as I don't save much e-mail for
extended periods. I have some going back to 2003, but by and large I
delete most correspondence after a few months. I currently have ~3770
messages stored, among 16 folders, and I don't notice any performance
problems. If I can't think of which folder some thing might be in, I do a
recursive grep from the command line to find it. Otherwise, the search
function in Sylpheed is adequate.

I much prefer MH format to mailbox. One thing I do is use a cron job to
clean out my trash folder. It's a simple matter of deleting files
containing some search criteria, found using grep. Things such as notices
from the library, my logwatch output, and mailing list stuff, are trivial
to delete on a file basis. Sure, there are tools, such as formail, which
let you operate on a mailbox. But it sure seems easier to me to work on
individual files. I used to do that more often, and I don't recall
specifics about a couple things I was trying to do years ago which were
downright awful with a mailbox file, and easy with MH files.

I don't have any good metrics on volume. I certainly don't get hundreds
daily. Some days, I get nothing but the nightly logwatch.

Also, be aware that I'm not at the latest version, nor have I searched
exhaustively for plugins and whatnot to make Sylpheed to thing X or Y. It
suits my needs quite well as is. Maybe there's an index/search plugin or
extension. Looking at the Sylpheed-Claws fork might turn up a bunch of
cool stuff.

I would also say that there's little harm in installing it, and importing
your huge mailbox file, and then playing with it.

jed