Hi all,
This effort has needfully expanded since I first asked.
Having no direct access to Linux, only via shell services, i ended up
being very thankful that a member of Toronto's local Linux group likes to
play with mail setup.
He created an ssh door into one of his machines, where in turn alpine is
being used to reach my gmail account via imap.
However, there are a few odd things. Ron has never used alpine before
finding some elements confusing.
one surprising problem seems to be getting anything saved to the trash,
others are having this issue as well.
Another odd thing I am noticing is that I cannot remove anything from
spam.
Things can be deleted from my main all mail gmail folder, but when i reach
the one gmail created..it has a folder called important for example, I
cannot remove any spam. I also cannot, as one could with the basic html
web interface, shift items that are not spam back to the inbox.
I can save them somewhere else, but they still remain in my spam folder if
all that makes sense.
Anyone using alpine in a comparative way managing to get things into the
trash folder?
Thanks,
Karen
On Thu, 28 Dec 2023, Tim Chase wrote:
Tim here. There are a number of parts involved in email, and
managing the email depends on any/all of those bits. Beware, a bit
of a flood of info falls below (you've never known me to be anything
but prolix)
On the user-facing end of things, you have your "mail user agent"
(MUA). This either stores mail locally to where it's running or
it access a remote folder-structure via IMAP (or, if you're stuck
with Microsoft, they created their own MAPI protocol just to make
it hard to interoperate). If you keep your mail locally, you can
either fetch it from a remote machine (usually via POP3), optionally
deleting it from that remote machine; or you can just have a local
cache with the authority being kept on the remote mailserver,
accessed via IMAP. Mail can be kept locally in a number of common
formats, but most frequently you'll find "mbox" (a single file acts
as a folder holding all the messages) and "Maildir" (each message
is in its own file) formats.
Email management can happen either on the mail-server itself where
the admin might define rules like "mail coming from this server is
always spam, just delete it before users ever even see it"; or mail
management can happen in the local MUA where you can manually
move/copy/delete messages, or set up filters to run (automatically
or manually) to take some of the druge-work out of it.
When you send mail, some programs just submit to the local system
utilities for sending mail and let it worry about getting the mail
to the other end. Other times your MUA talks directly to a mail-server
via SMTP to send mail. Since it involves mail-servers talking to
other mail-servers, so either side can institute management decisions
in the process.
It sounds like you're SSHing into a remote machine and running
Alpine there where it talks directly to the Gmail servers via IMAP
(where the mail remains on Google's servers).
Gmail does some internal IMAP trickery to present each label as an
IMAP folder, so deleting a message from a label-folder is more like
removing the label; and copying a file to a label-folder is like
adding a label. Though it should still have some common-type folders
(there's no standardized naming) like "Trash" or "Deleted Items",
"Junk" or "Spam", "Drafts" or "Queue", etc.
So when you ask "which system matters?" they all do in a way.
However, message *sorting* (the order in which they're presented;
different from filtering or categorizing) is usually a MUA thing.
The Gmail web interface might sort one way (IIRC it does a top-level
priority-based sort, and then sorts by a user-defined method inside,
such as by received-date or thread) while Alpine (or mutt/neomutt
or aerc or Thunderbird or whatever) should be able to sort by
whatever aspects you prefer (date, recipient, thread, etc).
Hopefully that makes sense?
-tim
On 2023-12-28 00:56, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Hi All,
Going to ask this carefully, so as to avoid confusion.
Given that there are different email clients, alpine, Thunderbird, and the
like, what actually determines how email gets managed, the client, or the
source?
there is a member of the greater Toronto Linux users group who has set up a
mail server where I use alpine to access gmail.
However, because he has never used alpine, nor has he used basic html in
gmail, he is basing the expected sorting on the standard gmail process. that
process does not use folders at all, but labels apparently.
as a result,there are things I imagine alpine expects to find which is not
here. We are using imap for gmail, but my personal experience of imap,
based on dreamhost, still has a mail folder with saved messages, sent mail,
postponed messages probably spam etc.
and an imap folder which has other elements unique to dreamhost.
I would guess Thunderbird has its own sorting system.
My question is this.
If you are using imap for gmail, or yahoo mail or whatever, in a client like
alpine or Thunderbird which system matters, the source where the email comes
from, or the client you are using?
Hope question is clear,
Karen