Usually, I read mail using emacs+notmuch. To avoid leaving tons of messages on servers, I use the POP3 protocol: all correspondence is downloaded by a periodic task with the help of an application included in the standard package of every popular distribution — mpop. Its settings are quite simple: you can describe several mailboxes in the configuration and sort mail into folders, launching notmuch tag with regular expressions for preliminary message tagging after each session. The account password can be left in the config or stored in a keychain, from which it will be retrieved using the passwordeval directive. As a result, I can process mail completely asynchronously offline.
Today, I discovered a real gift for myself: among Rust crates, there is one very suitable for my refined mail handling algorithm — mop3. This is a server responding to mail client (MUA) requests via the POP3 protocol and converting them into API queries to a Mastodon instance. Thus, I can receive posts from all authors I follow as email messages. It’s much cooler than using Emacs modules for Mastodon or TUI tools like toot, tut, etc.
#emacs #notmuch #mastodon #rust #crates #pop3 #email #mailbox #mpop #mail #linux #tui #rustlang
