2021-06-30 Getting Sent Mail

I read and write mail on the phone, and every now and then I move the mails in my “INBOX” folder to my laptop using POP3, and read and write some more, there.

Yeah, it’s confusing. Here’s what I want:

I want to read and answer new mail on my phone. That is, I want to read it on the server using IMAP.
I want to move junk into the Junk folder on the server.
I also want minimize my data footprint where it would be easy to do.
Thus, after a while, all my mail should be moved from the server to my laptop.
On the laptop, I use Rmail in Emacs to read mail. Rmail uses mbox files. I keep them all in “~/mail”.

Therefore, every time I use Rmail, I run “mpop” to move all my mail from the IMAP’s INBOX to “*/mail/inbox”. Rmail then sees new mail in that file and moves it to “*/mail/current”. This is the mbox I work with. From there, mail is moved to “*/mail/trash” or to “*/mail/archive” or to a few other files.

When I send an email from Emacs, a copy gets saved to “~/mail/sent”. But what happens to mail I send on my phone? It’s stored in the “Sent” folder on the server. I can’t get it via “mpop”. How annoying!

I can always start Evolution on the laptop and manually move my sent mail from the server to an mbox. Unfortunately, Evolution writes a corrupt mbox: every now and then, there’s no empty line between two mails, resulting in one “mail” actually containing three of them, all of them concatenated together. That’s terrible!

To fix the mess Evolution creates, I’ve had to open the mbox file in Emacs and do some global searching and replacing. Awkward!

So here’s what I’m using right now.

A Makefile to split my “*/mail/archive” and “*/mail/sent” files into smaller files, to delete older mails from my “~/mail/trash” file, and a way to get mail from the “Sent” folder on my IMAP server using “fetchmail” and delivering it using “maildrop”.

all:
	mail-expire 30 archive sent
	mail-expire --delete 30 trash

get-sent:
	fetchmail --folder Sent --all --proto IMAP --ssl \
	  --user alex@alexschroeder.ch \
	  --mda "maildrop /home/alex/mail/.maildrop-sent" \
	  imap.migadu.com

The file “~/mail/.maildrop-sent” controls how the mails are dropped. It is very simple:

to /home/alex/mail/sent

Therefore, if I run “make get-sent” it fetches all the mail I recently sent on the phone and puts it in the right folder.

#Mail #Administration

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

⁂

Why not save a lot of hassle and use Maildir format? It’s a lot more reliable than mbox and easier to sync from place to place.

– mathew 2021-07-01 12:57 UTC

mathew

---

Because Rmail only supports mbox.

– Alex 2021-07-01 13:49 UTC