Jaro Mail | Hacker News Reader

Jaro Mail

dyne.org

78 pointsjboynyc13 comments

I have to say, I spent 15 minutes reading this page and I still have no idea what Jaro Mail is. It calls itself a suite of tools for email, but it also has it's own interface (or cli client, not sure), what does this interface do that Mutt doesn't do?

Also it's confusing that the page says to install Mutt, Fetchmail, etc. yourself, then what exactly am I getting when I install Jaro Mail if not the suite of applications?

I know that "me too" comments are frowned upon in HN, but I think in this context it would be useful for the author to know that at least one other person in addition to Touche also found the page very difficult to understand (and I am familiar with Mutt, Fetchmail, etc.)

You are both right. I've spent most time documenting this software into its manual, which is a PDF http://files.dyne.org/jaromail/jaromail-manual.pdf

And srsly I did not expected it to be #11 on HN all of a sudden. This is all so niche...

I actually did read some of the manual (which I appreciate the detail it has) but that didn't help my confusion because it seems to mostly overlap with Mutt, which would make sense if it was a Mutt competitor but it uses Mutt. As a small example, why is there a `jaro compose` command when you would normally just press `m` in Mutt?

I don't follow how you expect people to use Jaro. It seems like you use email as something that you pop in and take a look at every now and then, is that correct? It makes sense with all of the commands you support; why would I use `jaro fetch` if I already have Mutt open and it automatically fetches new mails. So am I wrong in saying that leaving Mutt open all of the time is not how you do email?

The code answering to your questions is mostly here https://github.com/dyne/JaroMail/tree/master/src/zlibs and here https://github.com/dyne/JaroMail/tree/master/src

The short answer is: makes it quick (make && make install) to setup all the mutt/fetchmail/abook/notmuch integrated yadayada plus adds whitelisting and folder filtering, both local and remote via sieve.

This helps a lot, thanks. It looks like maybe Jaro makes it easier to configure that Mutt (which is a very complex configuration), is that true?

yes... all you have to configure to be set is a file like this https://github.com/dyne/JaroMail/blob/master/doc/Accounts/de...

there can be one for each different account inside Mail/Accounts.

I think Mutt is really great software, but I cannot live without tab completion from my addressbook and I need it without spending 1h to configure it every time, so that's the gist of it...

What do you use for your address book? I just use mutt's alias so have tab-completion out of the box.

Given the reference to notmuch, I'm guessing harvesting addresses from/with notmuch index?

forgot to mention it also seamlessly integrates mixmaster, so that you can just ESC-f and set `From: anonymous` directly in mutt before sending. Then `jaro send` will will weed headers and route it via the mixmaster running. Sort of handy.

I have used console based email exclusively, and continuously, since 1993, with (al)pine.

It is tremendously efficient and works very well over low bandwidth links which, even in 2015, one encounters from time to time.

The key aspect of this setup, however, is that no mail is stored locally at all - I connect to a co-located server (you could also use a VPS) over SSH and run alpine on the remote system. Two very nice things are accomplished here:

1. No email on my local system - nothing to lose, nothing to be confiscated or intercepted or lost.

2. Many, many emails do not traverse the Internet at all. If I send email to an rsync.net coworker, that email is nothing but a local copy operation - it never travels across any network.

So I am excited and interested to see a console email client like this, especially since (al)pine is not really maintained and has fallen behind a bit in usability ... but I question the use-case of running it locally.

Hi there and thanks for your interest. I also started writing emails with Pine, straight after using Portal of Power as a pre-Internet BBS point ;^) Now keep in mind Jaro Mail is just a rather big wrapper around mutt / fetchmail / msmtp / notmuch with special support for generating sieve filters used by dovecot2. Credits are well due to all these programs for lasting so long and working well.

As I describe it in the manual, the primary use of JaroMail is to keep email local, yes. But as you well mention here there are situations in which it is very handy to have emails stored (or perhaps temporarily moved) on a server.

Jaro Mail so far works also in those situations, substituting the support for OSX-keyring and gnome-keyring with a simple "local keyring" storage using symmetrically encrypted (GPG) entries in an sqlite db. I'm not super-happy about that, but it works for now, it may change in the future.

Anything else is just the same, local or remote. To facilitate moving the stash around I use a Tomb which contains all what's needed - kudos to ZSh for being so lovely and portable, summed up to the small and very common unix programs used, you can imagine I never had a problem moving my setup around on desktops and servers really.

Please also note the difference between the 'peek' and the 'fetch' commands: you don't always need to use the latter, so one can have duplicate setups on servers where only peek is used and nothing is downloaded. Or perhaps one can fetch using the "keep" option as same options as fetchmailrc are supported per-account...

There are some reasons to run things locally:

* when your network is not so good, and the connection is laggy

* when your network is inexistent but you still want to read mails/write them so they can be sent the next time you're online

I can only assume that you always have a connection and it is always good enough to "feel" local, or that you don't need permanent access to it ?

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