26
|
JANUARY 2018
|
OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU
|
www.OpenSourceForU.com
For U & Me
Let’s Try
Email providers today do a good job of filtering junk mail.
You can do a better job with your own mail filters (
Tools »
Message Filters
). You can choose to move/delete messages
based on the occurrences of certain words in the From, To or
Subject headers of the email.
• POP: pop-mail.outlook.com
• SMTP: smtp-mail.outlook.com
Gmail
• POP: pop.gmail.com
• SMTP: smtp.gmail.com
Yahoo
• POP: pop.mail.yahoo.com
• SMTP: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
The following settings are common for them:
POP
• Connection security/Encryption method: SSL
• Port: 995
SMTP
• Connection security/Encryption method: SSL/TLS/
STARTTLS
• Port: 465/587
Some ISPs and hosting providers provide unencrypted
mail access. Here, the connection security method will be
‘None’, and the ports are set to 110 for POP and 25 for SMTP.
However, please be aware that most ISPs block Port 25, and
many mail servers block mail originating from that port.
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
Popular email clients today are Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla
Thunderbird, the latter being the obvious FOSS option. Like the
browser Firefox, Thunderbird is modern software and supports
many extensions or add-ons. Unlike Outlook (which uses
Microsoft Word as the HTML formatting engine), Thunderbird
has better CSS support as it renders HTML messages using the
Gecko engine (like the Firefox browser).
The SeaMonkey Internet suite bundles both the Firefox
browser and Thunderbird mail clients, in addition to an IRC
client and a Web page designer. SeaMonkey is based on the
philosophy of the old NetScape Internet Communication
Suite, in which the browser was known as Netscape Navigator
and the mail client was known as Netscape Communicator.
Because of certain trademark objections with Mozilla,
some GNU/Linux distributions were bundling Firefox and
Thunderbird as IceWeasel and IceDove. SeaMonkey became
IceApe. This was resolved in 2016.
If you have already opened the SeaMonkey browser,
then the SeaMonkey mail client can be opened in a flash, and
the reverse is also true. This is very useful because website
links in the SeaMonkey mails are opened in the SeaMonkey
browser. Firefox is a separate application from Thunderbird
and does not have the same advantage. For this reason, I use
SeaMonkey instead of Thunderbird. SeaMonkey is available
at https://www.seamonkey-project.org/.
By default, SeaMonkey looks like Firefox or Thunderbird.
I prefer to change its appearance using the Modern theme,
as it makes it look like the old Netscape 6, and also because
I need the browser to look different from regular Firefox. To
enable this theme, go to
Tools » Add-Ons » Appearance »
Seamonkey Modern
.
Even on a desktop screen, space may be at a premium.
Currently, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey do not provide an
easy way to customise the date columns. I use this trick in the
launcher command to fix it.
export LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 && seamonkey -mail
Figure 1: Live off the grid with no mail online. To get this Gmail note, you will
have to empty the Inbox and Trash, and also delete all archived messages.
Figure 2: Changing the format of the date columns requires a hack
Figure 3: Configure your own mail filters