Minimal skills

[Polytropon]

On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:54:15 -0700, Donald Wilde wrote:
> On 6/4/20, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:08:01 -0700, Donald Wilde wrote:
> >> If it's an Android phone, whatever MUA you have on it should also have
> >> such setting switches.
> >
> > Emailing on a smartphone is a terrible experience. Real people
> > use a real computer for real stuff. :-)
> 
> I'm busily re-designing smartphones in my 'spare' cycles because they
> barely fit my needs for a _phone_!

Smartphones are not _designed_ to be used for phone calls. :-)



> >> What I'd suggest that you do is to go to gmail.com and create
> >> brandon.helsey at gmail.com and subscribe that address to your
> >> open-source mailing list collection. The GMail client can be accessed
> >> from any (lynx, anyone? Haven't tested THAT one :) ) web browser, so
> >> you can use this on your FreeBSD machine or even a public library
> >> computer.
> >
> > Which, from a security point of view, is one of the worst things
> 
> Point taken.As you can see, 'easy' has overtaken 'secure' for me for
> some time. As yet, my GMail hasn't been hacked and it does a pretty
> good job of stomping spam, especially from actual live politicians.
> ;-)

Yes, the functions built into Gmail are actually useful, even
if used at a "secondary stage", i. e., with a non-Google mail
account. The downside is that you share lots of things with BB
that you might not be comfortable with. Luckily, you can do all
those things locally on a FreeBSD machine (spam filtering and
blacklisting, for example).



> >> The downside to GMail is that it is more difficult to categorize
> >> e-mails, but IIRC it can be done.
> >
> > In my opinion, it's just added complexity to something as simple
> > as email. Adding Google's Gmail to the mix does not lead to any
> > benefits, I'd say. Probably "hotmail.com" already offers some
> > web mailer that could be used. But as there is IMAP confirmed,
> > why not use that with a normal mailing program on a real computer?
> > Anything is better than trying to do this on a smartphone, without
> > real success... :-)
> >
> 
> Actually, I do like to have folders of e-mails that I stash, but
> that's a personal preference.

Hey, I do the same with Sylpheed - the "sidebar" on the left
contains a sorting hierarchy. Such hierarchies can be maintained
automatically by filters acting to keywords, or manually by
mouse drag & drop. Thunderbird also has this feature, making
it easy to manage IMAP accounts using your local interface and
not having to worry about Internet connection - actions will be
taken at synchronization time that you can decide on yourself
("offline mode").



> It sounds like the MBox format can do
> that, so I'll make a transition myself in some near future.

Both mbox and MailDir can be used for hierarchical storage.
The main difference is that in mbox, you have _one_ file per
mailbox, which can lead to big files; in MailDir, you have
one file per message, which can lead to many files. Depending
on filesystem parameters, one or the other can slow down
message retrieval when you have millions of messages.

As I mentioned, the storage mechamism doesn't actually matter
as in the end, it all looks the same to the user:

+-----------------------------------------------------+
| [] []   [] [] [] []   [] [] [] [] [] []             |
+----------+------------------------------------------+
|####      | #   #########       ######     #### #### |
| #####    |     #####           ####       #### #### |
| #####    | #   #########       #######    #### #### |
| #####    |     ###########     ##         #### #### |
|####      |     #########       #####      #### #### |
| #####    +------------------------------------------+
|   #####  |###  ##############                       |
|   #####  |###  #######                              |
|   #####  |###  ######################               |
|   #####  |                                          |
| #####    |### ########                              |
|   #####  |                                          |
|   #####  |##### ####### ### ### ###### ## ###### ## |
|####      |### ### ##### ### ####### #### ###### ##  |
| #####    |###### ######### ####### ##### ##### #### |
| #####    |##########                                |
+----------+------------------------------------------+

Yes, I drew this by hand and local editor copypasta. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...