email
benharri; xwindows
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[1], 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[2] 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[3] and managesieve[4].
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[5].
alternately, you can use webmail’s filter settings[6] 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[7] 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[8].
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[9] 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[10] 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[11]. In its default configuration, it works for sending emails,
but not receiving; due to the incoming mailbox format[12] 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[13] 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[14] 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[15].
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.
[1] #using-traditional-unix-mail-program
[2] https://webmail.tilde.club/
[3] http://sieve.info/
[4] https://wiki1.dovecot.org/ManageSieve
[5] https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/examples/
[6] https://webmail.tilde.club/#/settings/filters
[7]
https://lists.tildeverse.org/postorius/lists/tildeclub.lists.tildeverse.org/
[8]
https://lists.tildeverse.org/hyperkitty/list/tildeclub@lists.tildeverse.org/
[9] #mailbox-format
[10] #sieve-filtering
[11] https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
[12] #mailbox-format
[13] #mailbox-format
[14] https://www.dovecot.org/
[15] https://www.courier-mta.org/imap/README.maildirquota.html