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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Most "Security Experts" are working for consultancy, tech firms, and government agencies so they probably use plenty of other clients. The majority will probably run Outlook since Exchange is the defacto mail-server standard for any organization (that isn't tied to Lotus because 45 years ago the CEO had to sacrifice a goat to appease IBM to spare his 1st born), the rest will probably use Gmail or any other web-based mail that their smaller company is using. Most "experts" don't necessarily follow their own advice just as alcohol, drug use and smoking is more common in Doctors than any other diploma based profession out there, so can security "experts" run just as much as a shitty setup as everyone else and think that slightly better common sense and opsec will keep them safe which more often than not it would.

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You can use mutt with Exchange servers and Gmail servers

Mutt and Exchange? Bliss! Would you happen to have a doc link handy?

I'm not sure about builtin support but there is always davmail (http://davmail.sourceforge.net/) for exchange

IIRC Exchange does offer IMAP and SMTP...

Exchange server sometimes choose to not provide smtp which is a pain. Their IMAP support is sometimes lacking too (i.e. imap-mail.outlook.com times out alot).

Exchange has supported IMAP, MAPI, POP, and SMTP for at least a decade.

In large implementations (such as Exchange Online in Office365) they may not support some of those services. IMAP can be very resource intensive and bog down a CAS or storage server.

Mutt doesn't support retrieving mail very well, but you can use sync programs (getmail, offlineimap, isync, exchange2mbox) to create local mailboxes and make mutt use the local mailbox directory instead.

you can send email using external programs (local smtp server and openxchange for exchange).

Mutt is not a traditional mail client, it is more of a glue between multiple programs so you can have one interface for all of your emails need.

If Mutt is not a traditional mail client, then what is? heirloom-mailx?

I read my mail with less. That's a nontraditional mail client.

When I first started in the industry my colleagues told me that I should be using the read-mail program. It has a mode that allows you to use regexps to read your mail really fast. I was told that the normal way to run read-mail with the "really fast" mode was:

rm -rf *

Disclaimer: For the Unix impaired, this is an "expert only" utility. I am not responsible for the loss of all the files in your home directory should you attempt to use it.

Do NOT suggest people try a command which will recursively remove all files ignoring file permissions. Most people will be aware of the hazard. Those who aren't will suffer irreparable harm.

"I read my mail with less."

How? Sounds like you just grep your way through the mailbox?

Yes.

Be careful with which Exchange servers you try offlineimap with. There was a severely bad interaction in Exchange with how offlineimap operates. Exchange used a global database with a small limit (I want to say 2^16) for unique message headers. Offlineimap injected unique headers for synchronization purposes. This quickly led to resource exhaustion and essentially blocked the server.

each email is supposed to have a globally unique Message-Id header, offlineimap or not.

No, this was a unique header name, X-offlineimap-????; not a value. My understanding is the DB table was a list of unique header names.

Do you wind up with plaintext emails that look gross when opened in Outlook?

It is HTML emails that are gross, not plain text.

Not necessarily for the Outlook users. The default setting of my Outlook was to ignore double line breaks and (paragraphs), which makes plain text mails less readable.

Same for me, I cannot think of the use case for this - maybe it was introduced in the embrace/extend/extinguish era to nudge people into using Rich Text format emails?

It is Outlook that is gross.

Unfortunately, sometimes in the real world we don't all get to always choose our own tools.

Sure, but you still shouldn't blame plain text for Outlook's failures.

I didn't lay blame at all. I just asked: "Do you wind up with plaintext emails that look gross when opened in Outlook?"

My presumption, based on your defensiveness/evasiveness, is that the answer is "yes."

Fine, but Outlook does not make plain text emails look nice.

I think the idea is that a security professional should use, on a regular basis, multiple email clients.

It's a funny trick of the english language that when we say someone uses an email client, it comes across as an exclusive use. We need an explicit patch.

Off-topic:

> [...] just as alcohol, drug use and smoking is more common in Doctors than any other diploma based profession out there [...]

What I could find with a quick search pointed in the other direction. Do you have some evidence?

I can attest to that. When my sister was in med school (in Switzerland), I got to see just how much this is true.

> (that isn't tied to Lotus because 45 years ago the CEO had to sacrifice a goat to appease IBM to spare his 1st born)

Those blood magic spells seem to be wearing off hard in the last year or so. I've been seeing a huge number of our customers migrate from the Lotus stack to Office365. Of course, IBM has already put their software divisions out in the back yard, and are popping the cartridges into their rifle to put the old girl down.

Even IBM is moving off Notes for email. It remains to be seen if the "cloud" replacement is an improvement.

Lawyers have higher rates of alcoholism by far.

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