Recently in E-mail Category

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

OpenBSD 4.4 basically "saved" me and one of these marginal Toshiba laptops (both were destined for the garbage) last November when I could barely get an install CD of any type to boot. The install floppy in OpenBSD enabled me to quickly set up a system that worked quite well and did almost everything I needed it to do. And stability was almost a given. I rarely had a problem that wasn't inherent to OpenBSD itself (such as the difficulty of installing Java, nothing past Flash Player 7, the extra steps required to properly configure things such as CUPS).

Since the system ran so well — just like Ubuntu 8.04, video on this Intel-based system ran perfectly with no xorg.conf — I kept it going for the entire six months of the OpenBSD 4.4 release's life.

As those who use OpenBSD know, upgrading the operating system is not as easy as it is in your average Linux distribution. It pretty much comes with the territory that a -release upgrade requires preparation, following instructions, and a bit of manual command-line work. Many times I've heard — both in OpenBSD and in Linux for that matter — that it's easier and cleaner to do a full reinstall rather than an in-place upgrade.

I will still try a full reinstall of OpenBSD 4.5. And I'd like to try running -current — the OpenBSD development branch that can be regularly updated and which is famously stable despite the "development" tag.

But right here, right now, I can't spend weeks diagnosing my X issues (briefly, there's some funky junk hanging from the cursor, and "artifacts" linger on the screen, which isn't redrawn fast enough/often enough to make X usable). The same thing turned me away from Debian Lenny on this and my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in the months before the then-Testing distro went Stable. Because of my affection for Debian (still one of my very favorite operating systems), I spent weeks trying to diagnose the problem before realizing that dozens of other distros relieved me of the need to obsess (unsuccessfully) over it.

Right now the Gateway, used by our 5-year-old dual-boots Ubuntu 8.04 for her and CentOS 5.3 just because it runs so extremely well on that particular laptop.

And for months now I've had this other Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 as a backup. I have Java installed, which I do need. Flash, too. The Opera Web browser.

Today I added Inkscape, Thunderbird, gFTP and Gparted.

On the OpenBSD laptop, I had about 1 GB of e-mail in Thunderbird. It makes rsyncing the box such hell that I'm thinking of writing a script that EXCLUDES the Thunderbird files just so the rest of the backup doesn't take so damn long ... but I digress.

I figured out how to bring my Thunderbird settings and mail over to the Ubuntu machine. I did the same with my Firefox bookmarks.

-- Begin tutorial:

Moving bookmarks from one Firefox 3 installation to another:

• Since Firefox now uses the SQlite database to store/organize its bookmarks, simply moving the bookmarks.html file from one Firefox 3 installation to another will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You need to do it another way, which I describe right here. First, grab the bookmarks.html file from your old FF installation and put it somewhere in your /home directory where you can easily find it.

• In the Firefox 3.0 installation where you want to IMPORT the bookmarks, go to the Bookmarks tab and click on/choose Organize Bookmarks.

• Click on the Import and Backup drop-down menu and click Import HTML.

• Then navigate to the bookmarks.html file from your old FF 3 installation (you have moved it over already, haven't you?) and click it to bring it into your new installation.

• Note: In Ubuntu at least, this process WON'T allow you to see hidden files or directories, so before you begin, copy your old bookmarks.html file to a place in your home directory where you don't need to go into your old installation's .mozilla directory, for instance.

• FYI: In both of my Firefox 3 installations, the bookmarks.html file is located here:

  /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html

  In the above example, "username" is your actual username, and the eight x's are the unique alphanumeric prefix that Firefox gives to your "default" directory under /.mozilla/firefox/
  

-- End tutorial.

-- Resume rant.

OK, so I'm fully operational in Ubuntu at this point. My respect and admiration for the developers and users of OpenBSD remains, and I hope to get the other Toshiba fully operational under OpenBSD 4.5 as soon as possible.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was relieved to have, in Ubuntu, a machine and system that easily updates all of its software with a few clicks and provides me with what — at this point — is a trouble-free working environment.

Of course that could all change. I'll see over the next week how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS performs on this hardware, with my chosen applications and for the tasks I have.

I could start the distro-hopping merry-go-round and go back to Debian, try out Slackware, ZenWalk, etc., but right now if Linux in this form does what I need it to do (not crash, run acceptably fast, wash, rinse, repeat), I'll be sticking with Ubuntu as long as it fills the bill.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD.

It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc:

During initialization, fvwm will search for a configuration file which describes key and button bindings, and a few other things. The format of these files will be described later. First, fvwm will search for a file named .fvwmrc in the user's home directory, then in ${sysconfdir} (typically /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm). Failing that, it will look for system.fvwmrc in ${sysconfdir} for system-wide defaults. If that file is not found, fvwm will be basically useless.

There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

Since fvwm looks for the .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, I decided to create one with the help of the system.fvwm2rc file mentioned in the man page.

I used the Geany editor, but substitute any text editor you wish (I'm just more comfortable in a GUI editor when it comes to things like copying and pasting. I don't use vi enough to be all that proficient).

Here's how to do it:

Log on with your user account, open an xterm window and do the following (again, substitute your favorite editor for geany, or install the geany package on your OpenBSD system with $ sudo pkg_add -i geany):

$ geany /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/system.fvwm2rc

Under the File menu in Geany, choose Save As, then navigate to your home directory and save the file as .fvwmrc (in other words, create /home/~/.fvwmrc, substituting the name of your user's home file for ~)

Now you should have a .fvwmrc file in your home directory that is editable by the user account. Modifying the menus is pretty easy. I've already added a category for applications and added all the apps I've installed thus far to it.

I'd still love to find out where the systemwide fvwm configuration file really lives. I don't have enough Unix or OpenBSD knowledge to do so at this point.

I've stuck with fvwm because it's the default window manager in OpenBSD, and it's pretty nice once you learn about it. I've got a long way to go, that's for sure.

Fvwm note: Changes in your .fvwmrc aren't implemented until you quit X and restart it.

Applications I've added to my OpenBSD box thus far:

Geany (text editor)
Dillo (lightweight GUI browser)
Firefox (heavyweight GUI browser)
Nano (console text editor; I just "get it" more than vi)
MC (console file manager)
Rox (the ROX-filer GUI file manager)
Abiword (relatively lightweight word processor)
Ted (even lighter RTF-format word processor)

I haven't added a mail client, and I might add Sylpheed or Thunderbird. I might also add mutt, fetchmail and msmtp and try POP mail from the command line for one account. Generally, though, the whole console e-mail thing baffles me -- and yes, I have done it before. I generally find a GUI mail client or Web mail interface so much easier that I don't need to spend days and days fiddling with mutt.

Essential OpenBSD reading: The OpenBSD Journal. I just found out about this, although I'm sure I've been here before.

Also: OpenBSD 101.

Ted on OpenBSD: I installed the Ted word processor -- an exceedingly light application that reads and produces files in rich text format -- which can be read and edited by most word-processing applications, including Microsoft Word.

Ted on OpenBSD ... how to actually run it:

This doesn't work:

$ ted

But this does:

$ Ted

Remember, Unix-like OSes are case sensitive, and in the case of Ted, it's really capital T, small e, small d.

I've been grumbling about Ted not working in Debian for an age, but Ted works fine in OpenBSD. I'll probably use Geany for most of my work, though. I got used to Geany by using it in Puppy Linux, and while I'm not crazy about its Windows implementation, in Linux/Unix, I still really like it.

There's the way to stick it to Yahoo.

Google surprised me by slowly rolling out the IMAP e-mail protocol for users of its Gmail service. Since Web-based e-mail clients are basically front-ends for IMAP-style e-mail access, it only makes sense to allow users of your Web e-mail portal to check their mail from ... any mail client they wish without resorting to the use of the POP protocol, which downloads all the mail to the hard drive of the computer on which you are using the stand-alone mail client.

Back in the days of dialup and small amounts of disk space, POP made sense -- you didn't want your phone line tied up, and you were always hitting your storage limit, so POP-ing your mail down to your own PC made sense.

But now, with always-on broadband, free mailboxes offering 2 GB and more of space, and with just about everybody needing to read their mail on multiple PCs (I use between three and six in any given week), the iPhone, Palm handhelds (including Treos) and more, IMAP -- in which mail stays on the server and can be accessed by multiple apps on multiple devices at multiple times -- is the only way to go.

Since Yahoo Mail charges for POP service and doesn't even offer IMAP, Google's move to IMAP (they already have free POP access) cements them as the go-to free mail provider.

So if you already use Outlook (or Thunderbird, Evolution, Sylpheed or what have you), once you go IMAP, you never go back.

Update: My Gmail account does not currently have IMAP capability.

Another contender: AOL -- remember them? -- offers both POP and IMAP access to its free mail service. And if you have an AIM account, you're already signed up. Along with the best-in-class Xdrive online storage service, it makes AOL more of a contender than you might realize.

I don't use my DSL Extreme e-mail all that often. Even though the mail service is part of my ISP service -- and I've been with DSL Extreme since before I even had DSL (they still offer dialup) -- I've hesitated using it because I want to have an e-mail address that I can keep forever.

But what is "forever" in the online world? And does it matter?

And now that I discovered that DSL Extreme's e-mail Web portal uses a secure connection all the time -- not just during login -- I'm thinking about using it more.

Couple that with the fact that DSL Extreme offers, in addition to Web-based access, both IMAP and POP service, and it gets even better.

But for me, the main selling point is the secure connection.

My company's e-mail is not secure. Neither the login nor the mail itself is on a secure server. Now we're not dealing with national security here, but why not use a secure server if its available.

I just feel better about it.

Even though Yahoo Mail is my "main" account, I haven't been checking it all that often. I've been using my Daily News e-mail for business correspondence, but the lack of security -- and the fact that I don't want to use it for personal e-mail -- is a drawback.

I've always had good luck with DSL Extreme e-mail when it comes to configuring mail clients (including Mutt and MSMTP on the Linux console), so it just might be time to start using it more.

At least I'm thinking about it.

After years of reading about Outlook, the good and the bad, I've finally started using it for IMAP e-mail with a single account.

I added a second IMAP account for my DSL Extreme e-mail with a different outgoing SMTP server. First of all, I couldn't get it working (to be fair, I didn't look at the exact setup instructions for DSL Extreme, but I have successfully set it up in many other clients). First of all, I couldn't seem to get the SMTP server properly set up, and secondly, I had trouble sending out e-mail with my first mail account -- it kept going out (or trying to do so) with the new, non-working SMTP server.

So I just deleted DSL Extreme from Outlook for the moment. So far, Thunderbird and Sylpheed have been easier to set up for multiple accounts. I'll have to look into making Outlook behave.

I love seeing the body of the mail in the window below the message list. It's just like a stand-alone e-mail client, and Gmail doesn't have it. Most of the time, I don't even need to "open" an e-mail. I can see all I need to see in the window. It really speeds up my handling of mail.

Another thing -- with this new software, Yahoo Mail just looks better than Gmail. Expect Google to play major catch-up on this.

I've never used RSS feeds, but since the Yahoo Mail client includes RSS functionality, I tried it. It's a great addition to the mail client, especially because you don't have to leave the mail-reading environment to use it.

Yahoo Mail "pushes" new messages to the Web-based client. You never have to "refresh" your browser. New e-mail just appears.

Chat is integrated in the client. I'm not as excited about it because it's not as good in some ways as the stand-alone Yahoo Messenger. The notifications from Yahoo Mail about chat requests and new mail aren't as visable as they are in Messenger. But you can still use the separate Yahoo Messenger app if you wish. At least Yahoo gives you the choice, and for that I applaud them.

Unlimited storage: I hope I don't need it, but I'm glad it's there.

I've just begun using the new Yahoo Mail beta, which is supposed to mimic -- through a Web browser -- the way a stand-alone e-mail client works, with the ability to drag and drop mail into folders, see messages in a preview below, easily delete them, etc. All that is working great (but Ilene misses the "check all" feature of the old Yahoo Mail and therefore won't switch. I've been reluctant but figured I'd give it a try).

Another good thing -- new mail is "pushed" into the browser and appears without you having to hit a button to check mail and reload the page. Another good thing: EVERY message in EVERY folder is accessible in the same window. No more "next 100" messages, should you have that many in any one folder (and I do) That alone is enough to keep me in Yahoo country.

One of the big new features the Yahoo Mail beta is the integration of instant messaging into the client itself. It works OK, but not great. I even miss the e-mail alert function of Yahoo Messenger. With chat enabled in the Yahoo Mail beta, I don't get the same kind of little pop-up in the lower right portion of the screen when I get new mail. And when somebody wants to chat, the minimized program in the bar at the bottom of the screen doesn't change color as obviously to tell me that somebody wants to chat. And even if my speaker was loud enough to hear the new beeping function (presuming I'm not away from my desk at that moment, which I at least sometimes am), I need it to be obvious when someone is IMing me AND when I get new mail. (You can still use Yahoo Messenger, but when you're logged on there, you can't use the IM feature in the Yahoo Mail client.) And once my Internet Explorer windows start stacking up, I can't see the status of Yahoo Mail without clicking on it, and I prefer to see the window itself in a wholly different color.

My solution is probably going to be running IMs and getting e-mail notices through Yahoo Messenger and not using that feature in the Yahoo Mail beta

but the ability to preview an e-mail in the window below the list (just like a traditional mail client) just might be enough to keep me the new Yahoo Mail.

It really is like a traditional mail client, except that the whole thing runs in a browser window. All I can say is that the competition between Yahoo and Google is leading to quite a bit of innovation on the part of both providers, but as I've written previously, it would take quite a bit to get me using Gmail instead of Yahoo Mail -- and that's why both mega-companies keep upping the stakes (I'm not counting Microsoft's Hotmail or AOL Mail in this competition, but maybe I should).

Another recent innovation from Yahoo: unlimited e-mail storage. And while I don't have 10,000 e-mails stored on the Yahoo servers, I'm amazed that I have that option. And I still don't know how any of these companies does it. And for free, too.

Get a grip on your e-mail. Whether you keep it on the server (using IMAP or a Web client) or have it all on your local drive (in which case you really, really, really need to be making frequent, multiple backups), it pays to keep it clean.

My mail gets out of control pretty quickly -- and pretty often. I have a work account, a main "personal" account (Yahoo Mail) and a few others that I barely use (Fastmail.fm, Gmail, AOL Mail, DSL Extreme) but which could be pressed into service at any time.

You know how it is with e-mail -- you stick with the account at which everybody sends you mail. I don't want to tell everybody that I'm changing addresses unless I'm really ready. And when it comes to the big providers of free e-mail (Yahoo, Google, even AOL), they just keep making their services better and better. Have you tried the new Yahoo Mail beta? It's made to function like a traditional stand-alone mail client, with the ability to drag and drop messages into various folders. I'm not personally using it, mostly because I don't change things unless there's a really, really good reason, and secondly because I value speed above everything -- that's why the Web mail interface at Fastmail.fm (which is also the back-end of Freelinuxemail.com) is so excellent -- it works well on computers and connections of poor quality as well as offering free IMAP access (though not an outgoing server, except on the Linspire-sponsored Freelinuxemail.com, but most people with an ISP have access to one anyway).

Anyway ... it took awhile, but I went through my Yahoo mail and moved the stuff I wanted to save into folders and deleted the rest. Most of it I didn't even look at (it's "directed spam" from places I know) -- I know I'll get more, so now I can handle it better). I also deleted a bunch of folders I no longer use. The whole thing is much cleaner now, and I feel better about using Yahoo Mail as my main account.

With so much clutter, I'd missed more that a few e-mails I woud've liked to respond to in a more timely way (i.e. at all).

Take 15 minutes here and there to clean out your mailboxes -- and if you can back up your e-mail to CD and a backup hard drive, do it.

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

Gmail users pretty much know that if you don't want to use the Web interface for Google's free e-mail service, you're limited to POP access, with which all of your mail is downloaded to the client computer and deleted from the server (or, at your option, left there for you to delete later).

But while Googling for infomation on Gmail and IMAP -- the protocol that allows all of your mail to remain on the server -- I found this petition, signed by 10,000 geeky types, calling for Google to offer IMAP with Gmail.

The page, well worth a read, describes what POP and IMAP are and why Gmail and Yahoo Mail should offer it. Also, the author spends much time describing the functionality of one of my favorite mail providers, fastmail.fm, which offers IMAP service. Fastmail.fm's free accounts are Web-based and IMAP only, and the company isn't shy about telling you why IMAP is better than POP.

From this page: A 2004 (but still relevant) Washington Post story on why IMAP beats POP.

And a commenter here recently informed me that AOL Mail offers IMAP connectivity. In fact, it looks like AOL offers both IMAP and POP.

A reason for AOL to exist (besides AIM)? I'm thinking so.

The word is that it takes more servers -- and more money -- to offer IMAP, but I wonder if not needing to download all the spam that clogs e-mail accounts these days via POP makes up for the larger number of connections to the server by those using IMAP. And since Web-mail users are basically connecting via IMAP anyway, what's the harm in actually offering it as a choice.

I know what the answer is, at least for Yahoo Mail: They can't show you ads when you're not using their Web portal.