💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 03 › 06 › goldberg-email-rube.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:44:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Gmail is painful even with mutt; there is too much lag. And the login is slow. One might expect mail to be at least as fast as it was in the 1990s, but instead we got...the web. Dun dun dunnnn! I may misremember how quick pine wasn't in the fishbowl era. OAUTHBEARER was also a pain to setup; the website was horrible, go here click that go there revisit that, all very Java-y Object-y Enterprise-y and too complicated. And the CPU fan was running. People who want to run mutt are not their demographic, I'm guessing. And gmail labels too much of the OpenBSD mailing list mails as spam spam spam spam lovely spam!
If the serious software is no good, why not some comedy?!
So in theory we can setup a virt and DNS and MX and SPF and DKIM and SMTP and STARTTLS and then the MTA talks to the MDA (using maildir, of course) and finally SFTP over SSH to pull messages over to the laptop (me being weird, IMAP is typical here) and the less said of outgoing mail, the better. You can tell this is great, because, acronyms!!
More sane might be to pay someone else to do all that for you, but I'm, like, not that sane.
The maildir thing is pretty important. The previous format was typically mailbox, an example of which follows.
>From sensations common to the whole body, we proceed to those of particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be caused by contraction and dilation, but they have more of roughness or smoothness than is found in other affections. Earthy particles, entering into the small veins of the tongue which reach to the heart, when they melt into [blah blah blah blah lovely blah]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1572/1572-0.txt
The reason for the funky >From is that in all probability someone copied and pasted from a mailbox file, which uses qr/^From / as the message delimiter which means no message may contain a line starting with that, so any
From ...
in a message body typically become
>From ...
and then folks blindly copy from that and funky >From! Boogie down... Good thing this is only in Timaeus and not anything critical. Whew! Bullet dodged.
Anyways lets see if hosting my own email thing works out, again.
No really. The RFC are insane. It's like they asked at every point what is most opposite thing of "Keep It Simple, Stupid"? Recursive comments? Sure! Random whitespace in the data layer? Sure!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s9IjkMAmns
$ randline /usr/share/dict/words
aeonian
$ echo foo | mail -s aeonian '(@thrig.me)jmates'
$ ( cd ~/mail/inbox && grep -rl aeonian . )
./new/1678116888.451550_87942983_61935.gear
Let's see you get that address past a web-form. If anything, crappy web forms do a service here, and that is to tame the gibbering insanity that are valid addresses. On the other hand, the same crappy web forms tend to shoot down user+foo plus addresses that one might filter message by, which the spammers are probably not too unhappy about.
P.S. If you change the User-Agent of Firefox to something like "bloaty bloat browser", gmail will redirect you to a basic HTML page by default. This seems pona.
P.P.S. Not sure how I got trolled into downloading Timaeus. Maybe it was "oh, another work by Plato, I should read that!" Sucker.
tags #email #mutt #plato