Reading Emails

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mu4e with Emacs

It's great because:

process a big bulk of emails quickly
renders emails in a consistent format, lowering mental overhead
can link to individual emails in my notes
many mail providers through the same interface
custom views crossing many (or some) mailboxes and providers
emails available offline
tracking pixels and the likes don't work
can search/filter through many mails quickly

It's bad because:

requires Emacs, high learning curve
first setup was cumbersome for Gmail
rendering emails as text loses some information (rarely a problem, can view the email as html)
no backlink from email thread to my notes yet (should be ok to write)
I use another interface on mobile
I send emails as plain text which is weirdly rendered in some clients (mostly fine, emitting html possible)

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It does support markdown???? I always thought it didn't.

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Outlook with a 365 account.
Like about the application: The close button actually closes the application not minimising it to a tray icon.
Dislike about the application: Vaguely gestures at it
Dislike about the provider: it's run by M$
Like about the provider: I don't have to deal with Exchange anymore.

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The protocol supports anything. You can send an email in PDF format. And I don’t mean with a PDF attachment, I mean the email itself is formatted as a PDF.

The default that’s required to be supported by every client is text/plain, and the standard on top of that is text/html, but you can provide text/markdown instead if you want. If the client doesn’t support displaying markdown, it will probably let the user save it like it was an attachment. But, since you don’t really know what client the other user is using, the only really safe thing to send is text/plain.

You can also provide both markdown and plain text (and even just use the same text, since markdown is perfectly readable) inside a multipart/alternative. Then every client should be able to display it.

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I use Thunderbird on both desktop (Linux) and mobile (Android). I currently have five accounts in a unified inbox:

Gmail (2 accounts): 'professional' one I give to people and the other one for generic account signups - currently migrating away from both of these.
Mailbox.org: the replacement for both my gmail accounts as mailbox.org allows aliases. They are completely EU based and don't sell your data. Costs a small fee of €15 a year.
Zoho: for my own domain which is public and attached to my various projects as a developer contact address
Microsoft 365 : Had to add this one literally today because I'm going back to uni in September. Hate that they use microsoft, but thankfully the uni enabled IMAP/SMTP instead of only allowing Microsoft's proprietary OWA protocol.

As for general usage, I treat my inbox like a to-do list. Once I've completed all tasks relating to an email, it gets deleted if it's not important or archived (usually if it's anything to do with money like a receipt or invoice). I usually only have at most 3-4 emails in my inbox at once.

The only thing that annoys me about Thunderbird is that occasionally if I delete a message, it will leave a blank 'ghost' message where the old one used to be that has a date of 01/01/1970 which only goes away when the program is restarted.

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I feel you, I also had to use either gmail or outlook in university. At the moment I'm trying to clean the mess of all the accounts I have signed up for.

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Thank you for sharing this knowledge.

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Thunderbird on desktop Linux, no mail on mobile.

I love the UI. Looks nice, feels nice and mostly functional.

About the mostly:

Search is terrible. Mail is listed in one way in "regular" display mode. As you search, the regular display gets filtered. Cool. But, as soon as you hit enter and commit to the search, for some godforsaken reason Thunderbird opens a new tab with your query. In some ugly (probably legacy) display. Oh, and sugar on top: the results are different than before hitting enter. Probably different by being completely empty. Apparently Thunderbird can't search.
The address book and calendar are very lacking. They do look nice like the rest of the app, but the actual features availiable are so few and far between it's comical. I gave up on using that quickly.
The tabs. I love them as a concept, but I don't get why having one tab would make the tab bar disappear, having two splits the bar into two giant tabs, and having a lot splits it into tiny, ewualky unmanageable tabs. Probably the remnants of a time long by, which i'll touch upon shortly.
The new message window. Making it a modal (like on pretty much all web clients), with the additional option of popping it out (for example like Firefox handles videos, but with an icon in the taskbar) would be nice. Since i used Gmail web for 10+ years, I tend to forget about the half-written message somewhere beneath the other windows. Not a dealbreaker, but a bit annoying. Again, probably a remnant of simpler times.
The folders. They're a bit hit or miss. Better than any web client I've used, but still with its own quirks. For example, making a new folder is easy. Moving or deleting one is next to impossible.
The calendar notificantions. I don't want to use my mail client as a perpetually open calendar. Ideally, it'd have my appointments so I can jot new ones agreed in the e-mails I get and suggest new ones according to the schedule in the calendar. I do not need to be reminded of my appointments. Especially not when I check my mail a few times per day and reck up a few calendar entries in between mail checks. Getting bombarded by a (small) shower of notifications (on by default and boring as hell to remove from each entry manually) gets annoyig fast.

Now for the likes:

The filters. Simole yet quite powerful. While not as good as I'd hope (ideally doing first-pass triage for me), they're still something mail clients don't have. Great for filtering stuff into large categories and discarding old mail, with how old is too old being heavily category-dependant. Usually I don't use the "run automatically every" option. I feel it's overkill, and I like having a look before filtering, running filters when I feel is necessary. I also love to look at the filters run and the numbers on folders move. Very calming, unlike the calendar notifications.
The privacy. Specifically, the option to disable fetching remote content (mostly images abd fonts). They're unnecessary, use up bandwidth and slow down loading, sure. But why I like it is that it removes the visual clutter of images, as well as rendering the text in a more "textbook" format, as opposed to a flyer. Useful for quickly glancing at the text and getting its meaning out fast, instead of having to decipher highly stylized bullshit.
The "old-fashioned" way of dealig with (some) stuff. Tabs, calendar, search and address book get a fail in this regard. They shoukd be uodated and improved.

3.1 I love the way Thunderbird asks you to compress your mailbox. In today's world of Electron apps not caring about anything, let alone storage space, Thunderbird (although being huge itself) still asks to compress your 40 MB mailbox, and tells you to how much it compressed it to. Is the telling you neccesary? No. But it is a nice touch.

3.2 I love the way Thunderbird puts PGP signatures front and center. I also love the fact it tells you generating a pair if keys will last "a few minutes", when it's in fact seconds. While PGP has mostly been driven out by more modern stuff, I like its simplicity. Generate a new pair of keys whenever you want and sign with any amount of keys. But it's also powerful. The signature stays on-device by default. That's actually useful fir me to differentiate mail sent once in a blue moon from my phone or a public computer (no signature) or from Thunderbird. The ability to aslo encrypt with PGP is also nice. While I've never used it, it does seem like a good extra layer of privacy. For example, sending a private email from a monitored work account, or keeping stuff private from the mail provider (since the signature is client/device based).

I use gmail. I'd absolutely love to jump ship, but it's just too ingrained in my life. I tried switching from it about three years ago, but didn't manage. I've already been using it for too long. While not longer than Thunderbird, i did use it consistently unkike Thunderbird (I've used Thunderbird in the early 2010s, but dropped it when I started using gmail), and for some reason I still don't use the new (or did I ever use the old Thubderbird) so much I'd consider myself intimately acquainted with it. Unlike gmail.

Gmail is fine. It works. It has its quirks, to which I'm perfectly used to already. What I hate the most is opening the web client on a public PC every blue moon and having to go through new privacy popups and saying "No, thanks" wherevar it lets me. The Gemini stuff is also annoying. I want to write an e-mail, not have it do it for me with potebtially disasteous consequences. The privacy stuff is also a huge issue I'd like to tackle, but couldn't.

But, if you asked me "I'm building my own web service with its client (web or ohberwise). What should I shamelessly rip off from the one you use?", my answer would be "The general look and feel (UX) of Gmail. However, not the new one. Maybe a 2016 or 2018 snapshot. Perhaps one or two older ones as well. Gmail is pretty much the mail sevice a lot of people use. The tech-unsavvy ones will adjust easier, and the tech-savvy ones woukd feel at home.

As for my workflow: I check my email 2 to 5 times a day (while not on vacation), including weeknds. I have a bunch of filters set up. As I already said, I use Thunderbird desktop and run the filters manually. The first group of filters seperates stuff into categories. Stuff like "Bills", "Insurance", "Work" (further divided into "Meetings", various current projects, "HR stuff", "Payroll" etc). You get the idea. Bills also get their own subfolders. Each vendor/utility gets its own subfolder in Bills. Insurance is seperate from bills because it's a special can of worms that apparently needs special treatment. Oh, and there are a bunch of other main folders. Listing them all would take too much time and space.

Inside of the main folder (e.g. Bills), each subfolder has its "new", "general", "paid", "unpaid", "old" abd "retained" subfolders. A bunch of filters look into the inbox and sort the appropriate new mail into the apropriate "new" folder. Mail in the "new" folder older than two weeks ia moved into the "general" folder, since if it's not paid, unpaid or old, it's clearly not important. Stuff from paid and general gets moved into old after a year. I do all deleting manually, since the volume of mail I get never required me to have filters for clearing mail altogether, just for sorting. When deleting, I usually open up the relevant old folder, have a quick glance at the mail subjects, select everything and delete. Every now and then I do get the odd mail I feel might be important. That gets moved manually into the retained folder by hand before purging. Rinse and repeat a similar process for the other main categories of mail.

That's aboit it for my little disertation on my use of Thunderbird. As this ebtire thing was somehow typed up on my phone, pkease excuse all the misclicks and typos up there. I just can't be bothered to read all of that again. Sorry.

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One thing that's fishy about Proton is, the way how they're turning away from the Fediverse when it comes to social media presence. It's one thing when a company hasn't discovered Mastodon yet. But Proton did have a Mastodon account, and they decided to abandon it. Not standing with the most prominent human-friendly (and in my opinion, most decent of all) platform and siding with the traditional, proven to be exploitative corporate platforms is something I cannot stomach.

The other thing is, I'm looking at my possibilities to replace Android with /e/OS in my degoogling efforts. And Tuta does publish their apps on F-Droid, which is a major advantage.

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Thank you for sharing!

agnos.is Forums

Reading Emails