email

authors:

~benharri

~xwindows


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 and EDITOR environment variables properly; unless you really want to view your emails through more and/or compose your emails through ed. (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.