Back in the day I was a big Usenet fan. What’s the modern solution to the spam issue? At the time, folk wisdom was that the demise was being caused by spam, and that due to the nature of the protocol it was somehwhat unsolveable.

I also wonder to what extent activity pub is the barrier to offline use? For reddit, the Slide client had offline reading and iirc posting. I have been disappointed it isn’t available for Lemmy. My guess has been it simply isn’t a priority for the devs. Maybe eventually we will get it.

I think it would be cool if RSS got put into Lemmy clients. Example you could make a unified inbox for all accounts by automatically getting the private RSS for incoming messages for all logged in accounts. I have manually set this up a couple of times but its tedious. Completely lacks smoothness when it comes to clicking a link, replying etc. But a client could add a little finesse to fix that.

It’s Open Source

If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this.

nope

Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the “based on” drop down menu.

I’ve tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.

But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.

yes it is just about the license. i think gpl is better for humanity.

i don’t have a better argument than that. i guess i am just turning into that kind of person lol

Ive been using zsh for most of my linux time cause it is trendy.

Im actually planning a move to bash. All else being equal, i prefer gpl-style to mit-style. (Tried fish didnt like it.)

Dyk the “monopoly man” illustration was created by the grandparent of the original developer of bash? And was uncredited by the company who owns Monopoly until a relative publicized this recently.

Honestly i could live without fast. If its a text file there is always grep, ripgrep, silver searcher etc. But there is nothing in my deleted email demanding immediate attention. Any situation i forsee would accommodate waiting hours or days. I was kind of hoping to continue interacting with it in a webmail kind if way because piling up too many new things for something i wont be working on regularly is just asking for a mess.

The mutt/notmuch proposal is a solid solution for the right person. To me, learning like 5 new major tools just for one project is a big risk. I played around with this stuff a couple years ago and failed at creating even a simple setup to do regular mail stuff. It is absolutely not clear.

So i might try one if the intermediate solutions mentioned elsewhere. A solution that digests mail be acceptable as an addon extra.

Oh no!

This kind of tool needs to be something you can rely on if it’s to be used in the way I am intending. If there is a master copy of the mail (as it sounds like you are working from) it’s not as big a deal as you can always go back to that. But if the application is relied upon to be doing its job, possibly in silence for long stretches, it can’t just combust.

I am not sure I really like the word “database” in this context. I don’t understand them and I can’t fix them. Am feeling that maildir, where each email is simply a text file, should be the primary storage. If there is another tool that can index or interact with the maildir then that’s handy, but the mail itself should stay in a plain, interoperable filetype. (Unless that is how mailpiler works? I might be mis understanding.)

I also see that mailpiler encrypts everything. I do not love that. My hdd is already encrypted. I do not want things further encrypted because it also means I am unlikely to be be able to fix any problems.

I think this application is too complex for me. I need something that I can easily administer. Hopefully set up and leave it to be for a long time and not have too much to relearn if something needs to be fixed. It is perhaps suitable for a more advanced user/admin.

Did it work?

If you didnt already, see rest of comments on this thread.

Now that I look, I see I am wrong.

A while ago I was trying out betterbird which actually is a TB fork and I guess I kinda just generalized from that. But looking through a list of linux email clients it is clear that only a couple are related to TB.

In looking up suggestions made already I found 2 other projects that might be useful. Does anyone have comments about these? I have just looked at them a little bit.

OfflineIMAP

OfflineIMAP is software that downloads your email mailbox(es) as local Maildirs. OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.

There are a few different overlapping projects by same developer(s). It is a bit messy.

• OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3 - I think this repo is the one with the most active and up to date version of the software
• OfflineIMAP - ArchWiki
• Home · OfflineIMAP/offlineimap Wiki

imapsync

Imapsync is an IMAP transfer tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts.

Imapsync is a command-line tool that allows incremental and recursive IMAP transfers from one mailbox to another, both anywhere on the internet or in your local network. Imapsync runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. “Incremental” means you can stop the transfer at any time and restart it later efficiently, without generating duplicates.

• imapsync home page
• Mailbox Imapsync Online
• Imapsync issues and tips about archiving - FAQ.Archiving.txt
• Imapsync similar softwares and external services - if there is an answer it is probably here. Looks pretty comprehensive.

Thanks I am looking at these. Do you think maildir format is the best to try to work with? When I was researching I find there are other formats such as mbox, or more program-specific formats. I was not having an easy time discerning which is the most portable, robust format.

Well it is literally exactly what I was asking for. :) But as you allude to the setup is not trivial and would be a bit of a project. It is useful to know about because it could help find a somewhat simpler alternative. And I will add it to my own list in case I find none.

edit:

Led me to polo2ro/imapbox: Dump imap inbox to a local folder in a regular backupable format: html, json and attachements. Which is a different take on the same problem. I am not sure if I like the email all being converted to html like this. It could be a really nice addition but somehow I feel that keeping more original-formatted emails would be wise too. It does also create for each message “A gziped version of the email in .eml format” alongside the html but I would have to look more into what can be done with that.

I want to keep mail on the server at about 80-90% of quota. Because when I am outside of my home, that will continue to be what I have access to. So the local copy will only be as a backup in case I delete something that I later realize I need to refer to. Since most emails are very small individually I should be able to keep the majority of them on the server. I will selectively delete either very large emails, or emails which there are so, so many of like notifications, which I will probably never need to look at.

I have used Sylpheed a bit in the past. I prefer it and a very similar project called Interlink to tbird. I just said tbird because I figured everyone would know it. But also I thought all of those were forks of tbird and wouldn’t differ much in how they work. Do they have much different internals?

Hi that is kind of you to reconsider. No offense taken or intended. :) It’s just that 3 people commented to tell me to make an issue as though asking a question about linux software was inappropriate. Whereas 0 people commented with anything about my question. I still wonder if I am doing commenting wrong somehow.

I am pretty sure I opened some kind of issue with these folks in the past and it was closed because I couldn’t submit a PR. I thought it was some sort of policy but I can’t find anything about it; either I am misremembering or whatever I read before is gone.

I really truly do not begrudge any devs for running their FLOSS projects how they feel is best for them. It takes all types to make up the world. I think on the whole it is better for the FLOSS community to be open to feedback even from those who aren’t able to provide a solution, in order that the needs of non-developers can be met. But when it comes to a project which is explicitly aimed at developers, idk what can I say? It’s probably better that people who prefer issues be in the form of PRs be creating tools for other developers rather than normy end users.

Didnt they?

Kitty terminal has a lot of configurations for fonts. I beleive you can get down to adjustments for specific charecters. Idk if it uses the specific technology you are suggesting. But it is explained in the kitty.conf docs.

Actually you have to stay in more to get into this sort of thing.

Oh man fonts for coding are such a huge thing. There are people making their own forks of so they have certain glyphs, or a line through the zero (or vice versa) or little changes to other specific chars.

OK I went to their tracker. Which jogs my memory even further on why I gave up on it and am unmotivated to open issues in this case.

Here is a similar but not exactly the same issue: Tool to Comentent lines fail and can be more elegant · Issue #3554 · geany/geany. I suspect my issue is probably related to theirs. The developer response is:

Since nobody has asked for this formatting before (@osergioabreu you did search for existing open or closed issues before you raised this didn’t you? 😁) users either don’t care because they only use it to temporarily comment out code and will remove it quickly, or they like it like that.

So if “somebody” made a pull request which made the formatting an option it likely would be accepted so both tastes are accommodated.

Or it was put in a plugin (if it isn’t in one already?)

1. If my request is unique they are not interested because if it was important someone would already have posed it. If it isn’t unique than it would be a duplicate anyway. Unlike my problem, this issue #3554 is a real bug. The feature simply fails to work even on its own logic because it produces comments in such a way that the application itself does not recognize as comments. So impossible to later uncomment!

2. They are basically open to PRs rather than suggestions. It isn’t just this particular case; it is the project as a a whole. It is a tool with a primary user base of developers so it is expected that many users will have the ability to do this. So-called “do-ocracy” I’ve heard described elsewhere. Which, fair enough, it is a FLOSS project and they have no responsibility to cater to me. I always am grateful for FLOSS developers and respect the right to runt heir project as they see fit. However I have no capacity to make a PR.

3. Like me this dev wonders if it is a plugin. Also like me doesn’t have a way of finding out because the plugins are poorly described.

Obviously we do not know each other but I will say that I have opened lots of issues like this in the past and will do so in the future. I don’t need a push to do it. That said, I appreciate the encouragement because for a long time I would never open issues and lots of people feel intimidated to do so. As I got more into FLOSS I came to understand that there is a sort of responsibility from users to give useful and constructive feedback to developers. And I have been blown away at how receptive developers are to my feedback, especially knowing that 90% of them are doing it on their own time. It really changes the way I look at commercial software when I have to use it at work. :) Where the relationship is transactional between my employer and the developers, rather than reciprocal between myself and the developers. My expectations are now so high based on FLOSS that commercial software seems so deficient. All that to say I understand what you are getting at.

However I have also learned to evaluate the project prior to engaging with it to determine if my contribution would be welcome. When I am not the target user of the project, I find I am often wasting everyone’s time. The target user of this project is programmers.

So in this case a forum post is more appropriate because the odds of a solution from the devs are like 1%. Maybe I will make an issue next time I’m logged in to github idk.

A forum is a good place to learn from other users about undocumented features, or maybe there is a plugin someone knows about. That would actually be helpful.