I've been doing a bit of cleanup with my email, and I also setup some tools to help in the future! But I also relived the past... such a deep summary am I right?
Some people here know that I’ve been using Neomutt for the past few months. I’ve enjoyed it quite a lot. But if I am being honest, I still haven’t taken the time to get to fully know my way around it. Stuff I am used to, like using drag-and-drop to move mails around, create folders and the like, I still haven’t figured out.
This is why a blogpost by @bbhltz about Claws Mail, made me want to try it out once again, since it’s a graphical email client with a really minimal set of features, as he said:
It does email. It can do some other things, but really, it is all about email.
And ain’t that enough!? I’ve used and enjoyed Thunderbird in the past, but I am not a fan of its current metamorphosis phase, I know its quickly evolving, but right now having a sidebar and tabs in the same view, displaying the same thing, as well as other small UX details, keep me away from it, for now.
Cleaning and setting up
Thanks to Claws Mail I can quickly move stuff around and sort it however I please. Its so light and simple, at least with normal IMAP and SMTP accounts.
To organize my email, I mostly just sort by Sender and delete in bulk whatever comes from subjects like “no-reply” emails and the like. I can also drag and drop threads and conversations to some special folders I made for them.
I use Disroot as my email provider, and it lets me create filters using their web interface to automatically categorize my email as I want.
Back to Claws, I had a bit of trouble setting up Google accounts with their OAuth options. But I barely get any emails there anyway, I could go using an App Password, but I don’t feel like logging in to it to be honest. Decent email providers are quite easy to setup, as with any Desktop client.
I think one of my goals this year will be to understand Neomutt more, for stuff such as selecting multiple emails, moving them around and swapping between inboxes. But for now, both programs are extremely light, and I don’t feel too bad about keeping them installed in my system.
Reviving memories
In other news, I read a couple of old email threads once again, reliving moments like the first time I sent an encrypted email, that one time I sent an email to Kev and I didn’t refer to him as Kev (mistake), as well as those few times I’ve gotten emails related to my blogposts (and not how borked my website is sometimes).
So yeah, Neomutt, Claws Mail, whatever. Everytime I mention email there’s always someone mentioning its outdated and insecure.
Look. For me, there’s something about reading old threads, with a subject, with a good bottom posting nicely quoted style and a simple plain text view, without feeling forced to reply as soon as I open it, that makes it quite appealing to me from time to time. I know, I know.
You don’t know how many good conversations I’ve lost in my phone, for so long I ignorantly used WhatsApp, still the king of messaging in my country, and many times I ended up losing conversations, that I’ll admit, are probably super cringe for me today, but still memories I would like to have back. Email is just there, and we even got subject lines and stuff. Just plain cool.
