Posted by: Anthony E. Greene
on April 17, 2003 06:55 AM
The best (most efficient) mail system for Linux is fetchmail+procmail+mutt+sendmail_or_postfix.
The GUI mailers are okay if you get a few dozen or less messages a day, but once you get into the hundreds for incoming and the dozens for outgoing, speed and efficiency during use start counting for a lot more than ease during the learning phase.
Procmail is especially useful. You can make it do just about anything with a message. I have filters that add a Reply-To header for those mailing lists that default to replying to the sender instead of the list. I have filters that check my whitelist and blacklist, and filters that change the MIME-Type headers for some PGP messages to enable automatic decrypt/verify processing by my mailer. Each filter that delivers to my Inbox adds a header that tells me which filter delivered the message. That makes it easy to make any required adjustments. I have filters that delete duplicate messages and filters that automatically detach and store certain attachments. Procmail is by far the most powerful mail filtering I've ever seen.
Mutt is so configurable that I don't even want to get into it here. No other mailer I've seen even comes close, and I've used lots of them on Windows and Linux.
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Re:Why Bother?
Posted by: Anthony E. Greene on April 17, 2003 06:55 AMThe GUI mailers are okay if you get a few dozen or less messages a day, but once you get into the hundreds for incoming and the dozens for outgoing, speed and efficiency during use start counting for a lot more than ease during the learning phase.
Procmail is especially useful. You can make it do just about anything with a message. I have filters that add a Reply-To header for those mailing lists that default to replying to the sender instead of the list. I have filters that check my whitelist and blacklist, and filters that change the MIME-Type headers for some PGP messages to enable automatic decrypt/verify processing by my mailer. Each filter that delivers to my Inbox adds a header that tells me which filter delivered the message. That makes it easy to make any required adjustments. I have filters that delete duplicate messages and filters that automatically detach and store certain attachments. Procmail is by far the most powerful mail filtering I've ever seen.
Mutt is so configurable that I don't even want to get into it here. No other mailer I've seen even comes close, and I've used lots of them on Windows and Linux.
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