Some of them were related to my feed organization struggles, some of them are about my thoughts on constantly seeking entertaining, a few others, old friends, and people I’ve emailed before, all of them were really nice to read. ^^

This was a nice way to remember that there’s people who read me, and it has encouraged me to keep on writing for those who have found me worthy. It’s nice to know that it’s not just bots crawling around my archives, but real human beings surfing the web and seeking to interact and communicate with each other.

I know I didn’t ask for your permission, but I am giving a shout-out to y’all anyway. Thanks for reaching out via email, the conversations have been great!

• Raul
• Anita
• TK
• Thomas Rigby
• Amin
• Basic
• Nikki

If you reached out and I didn’t mention you, I am sorry, please let me know!

Knowing that I’ve also inspired some people to create websites, and to participate in challenges and respond to my posts with their own articles, brings me joy! I’ve tried to read what I can, and to send emails back as well.

This is what the web is all about.

This is day 66 of #100DaysToOffload

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.

This is day of 9 of #100DaysToOffload

No big deal, I decided to just download the tarball provided in their website, and simply use that. It worked fine, but when I tried to add my existing profile folder, the program just crashed, and I was unable to restore my settings, my gpg keys, filters, calendars and so on.

This is what ultimately made me go and try out Neomutt, and I have been using it ever since.

My last post I talked about a terminal application known as khal, and how to integrate it with my Nextcloud server via CalDAV. So i just wanted to say what I’ve done for contacts for neomutt, as well as my android device.

I went ahead and tried khard, a tool that works similarly to khal, integrating with vdirsyncer to keep my contacts synced with Nextcloud, the setup is pretty similar to what I did for my calendars, and you can read their documentation to check out how to do it. Adding a cronjob to automate these updates and checks was no big deal.

I also integrated it with Mutt, so now when filling up the To: in an email I can just hit and get some suggestions, as well as adding a contact email quickly.

When it comes to android, I think I’ve already mentioned it in other posts, but it doesn’t matter, DAVx5 is a fantastic app that allows me to add a DAV account and sync everything, it integrates wonderfully with the contacts and calendar apps I use, it just works.

If you have the Nextcloud app installed, you can also auto-connect to DAVx5 in the settings, so its not even that complicated to setup, just do it once, and forget about it.

So, both vdirsynced and DAVx5 are amazing applications that allow me to easily access my contacts and events in a pretty easy way.

The UNIX philosophy is pretty interesting. Programs and tools dedicated to one thing, able to simply be connected to each other and delegate tasks to whatever does the job best.

I am particularly amazed at how my contacts and calendars are now simply a set of files and folders in my Linux system, that can be integrated with these simple programs without too much trouble. I am really happy with how it works, no longer will I deal with random broken profiles and settings, hopefully. And its pretty easy to backup too!

This has been day 88 of #100DaysToOffload

Funnily enough, I never got to talk about Thunderbird, but I have recommended it multiple times and you might have seen an email reply of mine, with my signature saying “Sent from Thunderbird” if you ever sent me an email.

I have tried some other terminal clients such as pure mutt, alpine and aerc, but I was not really convinced about any of them.

Regardless, I have decided to test Neomutt once and for all, and in order to make that as easy as possible for myself, I installed mutt-wizard, a program created by Luke Smith that helps you do it, with a nice default config, keybindings, password management with pass (which I already use) and I gotta admit, its pretty good! But I have some points I would like to explain, as well as the changes I had to do to deal with some things.

Encryption problems

Passwords are stored with pass, that’s not a problem for most people, but I am a bit finicky, mw, which is the program you call via the terminal, creates a new pass gpg entry, so I have duplicated things, and yeah I guess I don’t like that. Thankfully it’s a matter of changing the msmtp configuration file, which is used by the program of the same name which is a dependency to actually send the emails I write. it should have something like this:

account mail@example.org
# content
passwordeval "pass mail@example.org"
# other things

account mail2@example.com
# content
passwordeval "pass mail2@example.com"
# more content indeed

So I just have to change the values of the passwordeval of each account, which is not hard to do at all!

Another small detail I was unable to figure out is that I could not encrypt email to send and I also could not self-encrypt it, so once I managed to send one, I was unable to open it.

To fix that, I had to ultimately trust the public keys I tried, I think I could do full trust instead, but I don’t really understand why I can’t just have the keys as they are, I guess its just Neomutt being finicky.

In order to self encrypt email, it looks like there is no real way to adjust that with Neomutt, there is this set pgp_self_encrypt = yes option but it looks like it no longer works, and most variables start with set crypt_*, so maybe it gets re-implemented one day.

I also added these lines to the config file in ~/.config/mutt/muttrc

set crypt_opportunistic_encrypt = yes
set crypt_replysign = yes

There are some other settings and I don’t actually get how the ones I’ve enabled work, but well, encryption works, I just have to trust the keys of people I encrypt messages to.

Email management problems

I had created a few nested folders using Thunderbird, but none of them seemed to work properly. I could probably have made them work but I didn’t want to bother trying, some of those folders were not important or I just moved them to the “root” directory instead of having it under the Inbox.

I had to remove my account and set it up again, but it worked just fine.

Another thing I wanted to fix was setting up Neomutt as default XDG email app, so I could open mailto links with it.

Editing the Neomutt desktop file was necessary, I changed the Exec line to alacritty -e neomutt %u. It all looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Office;Network;Email;
Comment=Simple text-based Mail User Agent
Comment[de]=Einfaches, Text-basiertes Mailprogramm
Exec=alacritty -e neomutt %u
Icon=neomutt
Name=neomutt
Name[de]=Mutt
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;
NoDisplay=false
# Terminal=true
Type=Application

So far, happy with it, I still have some keybindings to learn, but it worked out just fine.

Mailing lists and formatting

I really like mailing lists, although I kinda hate the archaic interfaces of some web archives (if you know some good looking ones other than source hut’s, let me know via email).

This is another thing that I struggled a bit to understand, but only because I could not find the Reply All keybinding, once I did, it worked out alright.

Another detail was that K-9 was displaying emails wrong, but that’s because the format_flowed option was not set, once I did that, everything turned out fine.

A small Neovim configuration

I created a simple config file specific for email writing and formatting, located at ~/.config/nvim/ftplugin/mail.vim, so I am also sharing it here. I just works. Notice the color set for comments, since quotes were hard to read with the Nord color scheme, so yeah I changed the color of them and its alright.

" ftplugin/mail.vim
setl tw=72
setl nojs
setl nosmartindent
setl noautoindent

" Flowed format
setl fo=watqj
set comments-=fb:-
setl list
set listchars=trail:•

highlight Comment ctermfg=green cterm=italic

Wrapping up

I have to credit Rinzewind for helping out a lot, I found a blog of him talking about the mail formatting, sent an email to ask some questions and gave me a lot of tips and tricks to fix a lot of problems.

I have managed to adapt quite nicely. I still haven’t moved all of my accounts yet, but if it all goes fine, maybe I will try. Quite promising.

This has been day 82 of #100DaysToOffload

This started as a response to Kev’s latest post, about what’s wrong with the Linux community. His posts are always quite enjoyable, but this time I felt like I got something to say

If I understood correctly, one of the main problems with the Linux community, is the tendency of promoting overly complicated solutions for different problems and software utilities. However, I don’t really think that’s completely true.

I kinda think most of the software that Linux nerds like to use is just hard to explain, but that’s just because we like to complicate our own lives for the sake of having an easier time later. Of course, most of the time we are infinitely looking for ways to optimize our workflow and we end up never actually working

Lets look at the Email clients example, one of the main reasons they are useful is because they allow to manage multiple accounts at a time. The average user seems to have less than 2 email addresses.

Of course a feature rich native client will make not sense for them!, but its going to be worth it for a lot of advanced users, I personally have 6 email accounts logged in with Thunderbird, and I can’t see myself using a web client for each, it’s one of the reasons using Protonmail kinda sucks, because the free tier doesn’t allow the use of IMAP clients.

So yeah, there is no problem here, the complexity of the solution exists because of the complexity of the problem, a problem that an average user would probably never have anyways.

Of course, Kev’s point might still be valid when it comes to people that actually just need a single email account and just want to setup their own server to feel cool, but that’s more of a personal thing, not a problem with the community itself.

Simple solutions exist too

Besides, if you look at it that way, any email client, or even RoundCube, is not that complex of a solution for managing dozens of accounts at once!

Outside of email, there are countless tools that do make life easier while still being user friendly.

• Syncthing is still one of my favorite tools, and its extremely simple to setup compared to similar solutions, and its probably the best tool for the job.
• KDE Connect, while a little buggy, is also a really cool program that mostly works and its awesome, its also, the best tool for the job.
• Bitwarden, while not used by me, is still the best solution for most people. And I am kinda tempted to return to it.
• OBS Studio, while a little complex, is the one and only streaming/recording solution worth using, and while there are some FFMPEG elitists out there, they don’t count.
• Czkawka, while not as well known, its the best thing I’ve found to find duplicates, similar images and the like, it has saved me a lot of storage

While typing this, I realized that these are simple solutions for complex problems, but most people still don’t want to deal with them.

Final thoughts

Yes, there is a a lot of elitism in the Linux community, I kinda feel like an elitist while writing this, but I still believe that there is something to be said about the simplicity of open source tools that are still being ignored by the average guy.

Despite the effort, people will still use the same password everywhere, people will still send files via email to themselves, people will keep logging into 4 different web clients to check their mail and they won’t even bother cleaning up their system from unnecessary files.

I know that we might be at fault sometimes, because of the way we present these tools, some people think they are too good to be true, or that its still not worth the hassle.

Sometimes a small pebble is enough of an excuse to avoid the easier way. People like to stay with what they know, and yes, we should not force them to change. In the end, what works for you is fine, I guess.

This has been day 61 of #100DaysToOffload

I am quite a FOSS advocate, but I am also a bit pragmatic. I still use Google services often, a lot more than I would like to admit. So if I was already using them, why wouldnt I give away more of my freedom for the sake of convenience, right?

Yeah, that’s the train of thought I have sometimes. But other times, like today, I am feeling a more privacy conscious, and I decided to look for an alternative email client. I had already tried Fairemail a fairly decent app that works wonderfully. However, it contains unobtrusive, privacy friendly ads, which are not bad at all and are completely understandable, but I didn’t want to deal with them, besides, I had already tried it, and I wanted something new.

And here is where K-9 Mail comes to the rescue. The app was a bit dead, but last year, the app got a visual redesign that caught my attention and convinced me to give it a chance. I knew about the app for years, but just by looking at its icon and the screenshots showcased on F-Droid, I never installed it.

Setting up my accounts

I was pleasantly surprised, setting up my Gmail account was as simple as Google lets you, using the so called “App Passwords” needed for anything that doesn’t wanna use their login authentication methods.

Adding the rest of my accounts was a piece of cake, I had to add my school account with IMAP because the domain was weird and unable to be automatically setup like my personal one, however, it was no big deal.

A Microsoft account I got had no trouble at all, although I should add 2FA to it, since it’s not active.

The User experience

K-9 Mail pretty much looks like the Gmail app before they changed to Material Design 2.0 a couple years ago. And that’s a good thing for me. It has a bit of similarity to Fairemail, but I liked K-9 a bit more since its more simplistic and a bit less cluttered. Besides, the starting screen of Fairemail its their settings, and its really overwhelming, which was a reason I wanted to avoid K-9, since I thought it would be even worse. But I am quite happy with how it is.

There is a really good Dark Theme, a nice amount of settings and customization and it even applies a dark mode to the email contents, which is good for those nasty non-plain text emails that have their own styling.

Overall

It is a pretty great experience! so nice and comfy I did a whole blog about it. Like, I can’t believe I spent so many years not using this (being fair, it looked terrible 2 years ago, but still).

The only thing I disliked for a bit was the non-instant arrival of emails, which is normal for most email clients that once again don’t depend on Google immediately. I wonder if there is some way to trigger the update, but at the same time, I don’t really need email to be instant.

With this setup, I am very happy again with my FOSS mindset. It has reinspired me to check out even more alternative, free software applications. This is day 36 of #100DaystoOffload