authors:
table of contents
Your shiny, new tilde.club account comes with an email account.
alpine
is a command-line email application to use it, as is
mutt
. Good
old-fashioned mail
works too, once configured properly;
although it’s a little cryptic.
alpine
is menu driven, and the menus are
self-explanatory; it’s surprisingly easy to learn, and surprisingly
powerful when you want to customize it.
From the command line (after logged in via SSH), type:
pine
and [return]
Follow instructions and use
the menus at the bottom and top. (Note: When you see the ^ in front of
the letter it means you need to use CTRL, otherwise just use the
letter.)
non-cli options §
alternatively, you can use the webmail or standard imap/smtp.
some clients will automatically detect the right settings (tested with thunderbird).
connection settings:
- imap.tilde.club port 993 with ssl
- pop3.tilde.club port 995 with ssl
- smtp.tilde.club port 587 with starttls
please remember to use only your tilde username as the login name,
excluding the @tilde.club
; for example invalid
instead of invalid@tilde.club
if you’d like your @tilde.club mail forwarded elsewhere, you
can put an email address in a file called ~/.forward
sieve filtering §
our dovecot configuration supports sieve and managesieve.
this means that you should put your scripts in a
~/sieve/
directory, symlink the active script to
~/.dovecot.sieve
, and make sure to compile it with
sievec ~/.dovecot.sieve
.
you can find some example sieve scripts here.
alternately, you can use webmail’s filter settings to configure your filters.
mailing list §
we now have an official mailing list!
if your account is old (pre sept 2019), you should be subscribed with the email you originally signed up with. if your account is newer (post sept 2019), then you should be subscribed with your @tilde.club address. if you don’t fit either of those categories, you can subscribe by visiting the web portal or by sending a mail to tildeclub-subscribe@lists.tildeverse.org with “subscribe” in the subject line. in either case, you can change the email you’re subscribed with on the web portal or by unsubscribing and re-subscribing from the other address.
list archives are available on the web here.
as of september 17, 2019, we’re still seeing quite a few pending mails to gmail, yahoo, and fastmail. help get our list delivered by making sure to mark list messages as not spam and adding the list address to your contacts. if you’re feeling especially motivated, please reach out to the support on your mail provider and ask them to look into why you’re not receiving the messages.
Login-Time New Mail Notification §
If you use an on-server email client to handle your Tilde.club inbox
and have ever received any email there, you probably noticed that there
was no incoming mail notification (You have new mail.
or similar
message) appearing at login time. This is due to the mailbox format used in Tilde.club not being
the traditional centralized-folder MBOX; but fret not: if you wish to
bring back this old-timey function, it can still be done by a one-line
script.
To add this notification, add the following one-line Bourne shell snippet to your login script:
ls -U ~/.mail/new | grep -F -q "" && echo "You got mail."
If you are using Bash (default) as your login shell, your login
script file would be ~/.bash_profile
; but if you are
using Dash, your login script would be the traditional
~/.profile
. (For other shells, check your manual)
However, if you arranged for a terminal multiplexer to start
automatically at the login time, you would not see the notification
added this way. So in this case, you would rather want this notification
to be shown at each start of your shell: instead of adding the snippet
to your login script, you would have to add it to your shell’s startup
script: in case of Bash (default shell), your startup script would be
~/.bashrc
. (For other shells, check your manual)
Note that this code snippet only checks your main inbox folder. So,
if you have explicitly written some Sieve
or webmail filtering rules to deliver some of the incoming emails into
specific folder other than the main inbox, those emails would not
produce notification. (This can be a desirable outcome in most cases,
where people write Sieve filter to redirect unsolicited emails into
Junk
folder)
Using Traditional Unix Mail Program §
A traditional Unix mail
program provided on Tilde.club
is Heirloom
Mailx. In its default configuration, it works for sending emails,
but not receiving; due to the incoming mailbox
format used in Tilde.club not being the old style system-wide
centralized inbox folders used in the olden days, which the program
expects by default.
However, for anyone who are soughting for a traditional Unix mail
experience, or is experimenting with Tilde.club using a real
teleprinter; Heirloom Mailx could be configured to operate directly on
your Tilde.club mailbox, with some quirks, by adding the following lines
to your ~/.mailrc
or create it with the following lines if
not already existing (substitute USERNAME
part with your
Tilde.club username):
set MAIL=/home/USERNAME/.mail
set folder=.mail
set emptybox
set newfolders=maildir
set record=+.sent-mail
Once you did so, running mail
would now show the list
your emails if you have any in your inbox. (Type q
and
press Enter to quit)
Tips:
Set your
PAGER
andEDITOR
environment variables properly; unless you really want to view your emails throughmore
and/or compose your emails throughed
. (Even if you are really using a teleprinter, it is still a good idea to set these explicitly however)Type
?
and press Enter for in-program help. Also read a manual (man mail
from the main system command line).Heirloom Mailx does not understand the Maildir++ subfolder structure; so you will have to type the name of subdirectory as seen in the filesystem (including its dot prefix) when changing folder. For example, use command:
folder +.sent-mail
to view the emails you have sent. (See mailbox format below for the default folders available)
When changing to view mail folder other than inbox, you nearly always want to prefix it with
+
; which means the folder is a subdirectory of the main email folder.When changing to view the main inbox folder, simply use
%
as folder name without any prefix.Marking email as junk here does not do a thing you would normally expect from modern email clients or webmails; so don’t do it.
Mailbox Format §
Tilde.club uses Dovecot as a
local mail delivery agent as well as an IMAP server. It is configured to
deliver your emails into a .mail/
subdirectory within your
home directory on the server, structured in Courier
MTA’s Maildir++ format.
Maildir++ format is essentially the same as Maildir mailbox format,
but with a concept of subfolders added in: apart from the usual
cur/
, new/
, and tmp/
subdirectories for normal Maildir operations; there would now also be
dot-subdirectories which are email subfolders. Each dot-subdirectory
would contain usual Maildir subdirectories, but not any more
dot-subdirectory inside it.
In Tilde.club, the default layout of your Maildir++ folder hierarchy would be as the following:
Email Folder | Filesystem Directory |
---|---|
(Inbox) | ~/.mail/ |
(Sent) | ~/.mail/.sent-mail/ |
Junk | ~/.mail/.Junk/ |
Drafts | ~/.mail/.Drafts/ |
Trash | ~/.mail/.Trash/ |
So, if you would like to use command line tools to tinker with your mailbox, then more power to you. Also, note that email access via IMAP and webmail actually read/write emails directly onto these directories; so now you know where to grab a copy of all your emails data if you ever need a backup as well.