[Discuss] Running a mail server, or not

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> writes:

> On 6/28/2018 4:03 PM, Mike Small wrote:
>> client side I think it can be made bearable. Or probably I should just
>> go find the instructions on sdf for setting up an IMAP client and
>> install one on the phone. One of these days.
>
> K-9 Mail. Get it. Setup is straightforward for reading and retrieving,
> maybe not so straightforward for sending depending on what account types
> you have at SDF.

Eventually, sure. sdf has IMAP set up and can also be used as an smtp
smarthost if you pay for the right account features (very reasonable,
his fees), so I assume it will be relatively simple:
http://sdf.org/?faq?EMAIL?03

But it's not something I frequently want to do, check email on my phone,
so I'm not in a hurry. Generally speaking, I'm in front of a good
computer all day, one with a monitor and keyboard. Then I leave and the
only person I want to communicate with will soon be sitting nearby. And
besides I've got a TODO list with 10 or 20 similarly sized tasks I care
more about.

An issue I expect to run into is that when I read my email at a real
computer I'll ssh in, start emacs with it loading Gnus, and that takes
email out of my spool and splits it off into different folders based on
a list of regular expressions (there are various options Gnus supports
for mail storage but I chose nnml:
http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_84.html#Mail-Spool). I'm thinking IMAP
won't pick up the mails where Gnus put them. Doesn't IMAP have it's own
idea of what a folder is and how that's to be set up?

And then the IMAP client wouldn't have Gnus's killer feature, the
ability to "expire" a mail so that it 1. isn't visible again unless I
open the folder to show read articles and articles with similar kinds of
marks and 2. in some number of weeks, but not the day before tomorrow
when I decide I want to keep it after all, it will automatically age out
and really delete those expired mails. With that and some other things,
I'm half thinking featurewise, the IMAP client might be such a
relatively impoverished interface to email that I might even prefer,
often, still reading it under termux/ssh, as clunky as that is.

On the other hand, it will be useful sometimes, like that time in the
airport where I was on vacation and hadn't started Gnus so the mail
would still be in the spool for IMAP to see. So eventually, sure, I'll
try IMAP.

What I'd really like is if someone made a mobile version of emacs,
somehow, maybe with some complicated gesture scheme for input. There's
some emacs person, I think, who's done something to make it possible to
keep two Gnusae's set of folders in sync across two machines. So if I
could run Gnus on the phone and use that person's scripts, that would be
the ideal. Probably will never happen.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org