@ StDoodle:

Heh, the directors at my place are “computer savvy” in the sense that they know excel, so they essentially every problem is an excel macro problem. As in:

“So I was thinking if we could build a survey in excel, and then put int on the network, and then the employees would open it up, take the survey and save it. But we need a macro to save all the result, not just the latest. Can we do that?”

Then I’m like – why don’t we just make it an online survey and make it part of the intranet information/reporting/employee review thing that we already have. And we can plug in the results into the employee performance review page, which is the next thing I know you will ask me. And they are like:

“I don’t know… Won’t that be difficult to maintain? I mean, why don’t we do the excel thing and then have the online thing import from it. That should be easier, no?”

If we didn’t constantly fight for every little thing, the entire business would be running from within excel. :P

@ Stephen McQuay:

Nope, I haven’t tried that. Duh… :P

It was more of a spur of a moment thing – “Well, Mutt is being stupid, let me give Pine a try.” Plus I used pine extensively back when I was in college because I could. When we were given unix shell accounts it was like Christmas to me. :P

Oh, and no – we don’t use PGP or GPG. Our idea for encrypting internal email is SSL. Zimbra portal runs behind SSL and port 80 is blocked. We also use SIMAP and force SSL on SMTP. Internally when we email each other, the server is smart enough just to move emails between inboxes on the same machine. So as long as we send email internally everything is secure:

1. Employee laptops have full disk encryption
2. The communication between the laptop and the server is SSL encrypted
3. I don’t know about the server because someone else handles that but I think there is some encryption going in there too.

For communicating with the clients we usually use whatever they use. Our thing is that we are flexible at technology and have IT department whereas a lot of our competitors do not. So we usually ask them how they want to handle encryption and the answers range from:

– LOL, wut?
– AES encrypted Zip files
– Their own PGP mail portal
– Bunch of other crazy shit

One client used a some deprecated encryption software that was once upon a time maintained by McAfee but then they discontinued it. As in the removed the binaries from their site and put a note saying “do not use, this is deprecated and probably broken. So the client told us “no just go to olversions.com and get it from there. Sigh…

Oh, and one client likes to use shared folders in Dropbox. I’m like “you guys know that Dropbox has a back-door key to decrypt all their files on their network, right? It was like a big thing and they had to change their terms and conditions because of a PR backlash” and they are like “herp, derp, no it says it secure on their website so it must be true”.

But, you know – customer is always right, so if they want to use broken encryption that’s their funeral. We try to do our best to be secure on our end, and once it’s out of our hands and our servers it’s their problem.

1) Have you told mutt to cache headers/messages?
set header_cache = ~/.mutt-caches/mcquay/cache/headers
set message_cachedir = ~/.mutt-caches/mcquay/cache/bodies

should yield snappy setup. I migrated from alpine to mutt, so I’m surprised to see someone go the other way. More than convert you back, I’d be interested to know what you like better about Alpine by comparison to Mutt.

2) Does your organization use PGP or GPG? Otherwise, it mostly doesn’t matter where you email is hosted (someone elses servers (called cloud), or on your servers). If you do, what is the magical recipe to training the technomuggleborns to use encryption?

Thanks for coining the term “Techno Muggle”, by the way; I use it bi-weekly.

email client = Claws-Mail
A good email client which I prefer over Thunderbird, Kmail, Outlook etc, Integrates well with Clam AV or ClamWin AV, which have blocked malicious content. Bsfilter can be added for spam reduction (not especially effective so far)

webmail #1 = fastmail
No advertisements, portals, news or stuff I don’t wan’t. Fast and efficient. Uses https.
webmail #2 = gmail – Okay for non-sensitive emails…
webmail #3 = Yahoo! Free version is slow, clunky and has intrusive features – winding down my accounts but will retain at least one due to Yahoo! groups
The spam filtering is good though.

The owner’s comment was “I fucking hate computers.” That’s the top-down philosophy that drives our technology, unfortunately. He went on a rant about the “good old days” before everyone used so much technology… yeah. *I* know we need to do something else, his daughter (who runs most things these days) knows, the sales guy knows… but we’re powerless against the Luddite in Charge. I mean, for us, with no dedicated IT guy and four people using email, it’d be $200/yr to use Google A4D (which is probably not the best choice overall, but likely the simplest); that’s two hours of outsourced IT. But again I say: *shrug*

@ JuEeHa:

Yeah, Gmail works surprisingly well in Links. :)

@ Alphast:

Yeah, emailing things via gmail – that’s kinda frowned upon here. Anything cloud is verboten because if it’s not on our server it is not considered secure. That said we do handle financial info for our clients so the privacy/confidentiality concerns are completely justified.

@ Scott Hansen:

I will have to check that out.

@ Morghan:

Isn’t it strange when mobile email clients suck less than their desktop equivalents?

@ StDoodle:

I think that if our email was down for a couple of days my boss would straight up murder someone. Probably me, cause my desk is closest to his office. :P Which is why our email server is enshrined in a data center and maintained by warrior monks who are sworn to prevent downtimes upon the pain of death.

Oh, and I know all about shitty power. Our building has “generator power” which is low voltage but enough to power a desk lamp or charge up your laptop (albeit slower than normal) but not enough to keep the UPS on our rack juiced up. So if we loose power, most of the lights stay on and most people’s computers work just fine, but the network goes away. I kinda wish we didn’t have any back-up power.

Here is the thing – if the entire building is pitch black, then no one can do any work and everyone just hopes for the best. When everyone’s lights and computers are up and working, but the network is dead because the generator power is too low voltage to power the beefy servers the entitled users get royally pissed off. They just can’t understand why some stuff works, and other stuff doesn’t. Like why can’t they print to a network printer on their desk – after all it’s right there, next to the laptop and it has noting to do with internet being down. :P

It’s a funny coincidence to see this subject now, as we just had our server go ka-boom* at work during a power outage Thursday. Maybe it will be up tomorrow? Granted, I’m hunky-dory not having email for a couple of days (but AutoCAD has been a bitch, certain features — some mandatory for my current workflow — cause crashes when the server goes away), but the sales guy (who goes on vacation … uh, now) was less than happy. Which prompts me to ask… for a small shop (four people with email accounts in the company), is locally hosting your email on one of the low-end, six-year-old Dell tower-style servers really the best idea, when you have no in-house IT staff? *shrug*

* Apparently, fried one of the hard drives. Which took out the whole thing, ’cause that’s just how it’s set up. The only solution apparently is a Dell-replacement hard drive — don’t ask me why. To be fair, while it was UPS’d, the power in our location really, really sucks… and since we kinda need our quarry, we don’t really have the option of just moving.

K9 on my tablet and phone, the only time I open my laptop nowadays is to upload music to my Google cloud.

I probably don’t work on enough different public wifi networks to comment, but I certainly see your point about the ‘normal’ ports often being blocked. I fought with this at work until I figured out which port was open to enable my SSH tunnel.

IMO, the best way to use Mutt is in combination with Offlineimap. This not only gives you the advantage of a built-in mail backup, but makes Mutt start instantly as well…regardless of the state of your internet connection. I’ve got it nicely configured to handle two different gmail accounts (including setting correct From: address depending on which mailbox you are currently in.

As long as you have a server someplace with the ability to handle an SSH Socks proxy, the tunnel setup with autossh (perfect for roaming laptops) is just a .bashrc entry something like:

socks_port=5500
socks_server='homeserver'
mail_port=5505
smtp_outgoing_port=587
smtp_server='smtp.gmail.com'
autossh_options=( -M 0 -f -q -N -o "ServerAliveInterval 60" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" )

if [ "$(hostname)" != "$socks_server" ];then
if [ -z $(pgrep -f "autossh.*$mail_port") ]; then
autossh "${autossh_options[@]}" -L "$mail_port":"$smtp_server":"$smtp_outgoing_port" -D "$socks_port" "$socks_server"
fi
fi

and in muttrc, configure your SMTP server like:

set smtp_url='smtp://mailusername:password@localhost:5505/'

Now if your Socks Proxy port is blocked as well…back to webmail :) But using Offlineimap means the transition between using webmail when necessary and using Mutt is completely seamless. There’s just a small lag depending on how often your cron job runs to sync offlineimap (mine’s 5 minutes).

Don’t give up on Mutt!! With Offlineimap and a Socks Proxy, you should be able to work from almost anywhere…

Scott

I use gmail as my main client. I use yahoo mail as a spam trap. And I use Outlook via VPN and remote desktop for my work. All of this works quite fine. There are a couple of issues when I need to pass a non-text file from my local environment to Outlook, but it is rare and in that case i simply send myself an e-mail with gmail.

I used to use pine as my main client but nowadays I just use gmail.sh shellscript which starts links in text or framebuffer mode depending on arguments and loads mail.google.com.