A Better Email System
My last post promised a writeup of my new email yesterday. Yesterday I finally figured out the last few pieces!
First, I really wanted a local backup of all my email; de-platforming is a thing now, and GMail (my email provider of choice) isn’t shy about terminating accounts of its critics and other undesirables. Not to mention Google reads all my messages and is generally very efficient at productizing its users… When I chose to use GMail, I knew that free services only mean the consumers are the product; advertisers are the real paying users; Google really cares about the advertisers, not about the consumers.
But, it doesn’t make sense to stop using GMail entirely, as long as I have a Google Pixel phone anyway, because everything I said about GMail is doubly so for the phone! Still, given my new setup, I could switch later if I wanted… of course I would have to join the Borg and buy an iPhone.
So anyway, long story short, at least I now have a local backup of all my work mail, my personal mail, and my side project mail, due to OfflineIMAP. OfflineIMAP downloads each message to a Maildir folder.
The next step is to read the messages. Maildir support amongst desktop mail clients is spotty at best. But all clients support IMAP very well. Dovecot to the rescue; Dovecot provides an IMAP interface over a Maildir folder, so email clients are just talking to a regular IMAP server.
Next is the email client. Thunderbird became my go-to tool; an all-in-one interface for mail, calendar, and tasks; and much nicer-looking and less clunky than Evolution. Not to mention, Thunderbird handles typical corporate HTML-formatted messages very well; lack of good HTML message support made the Emacs mail modules unusable for me.
Yesterday I resolved my one gripe about Thunderbird. OfflineIMAP and Dovecot give me a single IMAP namespace for all 3 of my mail accounts. Until yesterday, I thought I needed 3 Thunderbird accounts, even though I have a single IMAP server with all my messages, since I thought Thunderbird only supported one outgoing SMTP server per account. Yesterday I figured out Thunderbird does support multiple identities per account. So now I have everything I want: a single Thunderbird account with messages from all 3 of my mail services; and I can send outgoing messages through the appropriate email server (Outlook 365 for work, Gmail for personal).
Thunderbird supports my calendars too. I had to install some add-ons:
- Lightning: the calendaring and scheduling framework
- TbSync: Exchange ActiveSync provider
- “Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) provider for TbSync”
- “Provider for Google Calendar”
With these addons, Lightning handles my work calendar and my personal calendar. The desktop notifications and reminders are designed perfectly; noticeable without being too intrusive, with just enough information right in the notification, so I don’t have to open the full event.
Now I have a setup that meets all my needs and desires. Local copy of all messages; single unified interface for all my email and calendar services; fast and speedy local access; and a nicely-designed user interface.
