When was the last time you changed mail agents or significantly changed your mail setup?

cracauer@

cracauer@

Developer
Just curious. My mail setup is very stable for decades, and not much desirable is coming down the river.

This summer was the only significant change for many years, I reverted sort order in the main mailbox view. Who-hoo.

Anybody else with earth-scattering mail changes? Anything new I should know about? Tempting new software? Thunderbird or the gmail frontend forcing changes on you?
 
For consuming e-mail, I've been doing pretty much the same thing for two decades: A really good ISP (Sonic), and whatever IMAP-based reader is most convenient; these days I use MacOS mail on the laptop, and the gmail front end on the Android phone.

The interesting change was a few years ago on my home server, when I changed from maintaining my own sendmail setup there, to just using ssmtp to directly forward e-mail to my ISP, and only store it on the ISP. Much easier and cleaner.
 
In 2020 I sacked off qmail as provided by the distro (SME-Server) I was using at the time for handling my mail when the distro went EOL and decided to build my own mail server on FreeBSD using postfix, best decision I ever made.
 
My setup used to look like a bunch of sticks held together with tape: a postfix server delivery locally to a virtual mailbox and then a cron job rsyncing the mailbox to my webmail host, which would concatenate it in a mega .mbox file, that would then be parsed by a webmail in python coded by one guy and abandoned since (www.mailpile.is).

This summer I upgraded the webmail jail. Oops. All hell broke loose. Webmail used crypto that requires openssl. Except it used APIs that have been deprecated since for security reasons. That and obsolete python versions and whatnot.

I gave up and installed dovecot and snappymail as a webmail. Postfix delivers directly through LMTP. Simpler.

Also K-9 Mail on Android connecting to my dovecot through a wireguard VPN to my setup.

I still have to reingest the emails from the old install in the new one though.
 
Late September 2024 I switched from qmail --> opensmtpd & dovecot. Couldn't be happier. Still using Thunderbird as MUA. Played around with Betterbird while doing all the experimenting with opensmtpd & dovecot in a VM. Love the port 25 STARTTLS option which most of the smtp servers are using now (couldn't get that to work in qmail).
 
Uhm ... my daily driver for reading and writing mail has been mutt+vim for, I guess, at least 20 years. I did experiments with GUI clients (e.g. sylpheed, kmail, thunderbird), but always came back pretty quickly, mostly for the efficiency off mutt's keyboard commands and its superior support for mailing lists. The most "radical" change was moving to neomutt a few years ago, still keeping my configuration, so it didn't really feel like a change. My setup also "evolved" (e.g. at first I read mail from a classic mbox file, later from maildir, finally via IMAP so I could use dovecot's native storage format), but then, still very stable from the "user experience" point of view.

Edit: If "mail setup" includes services, there were more changes. I started with using fetchmail and a local sendmail configured to use the SMTP/POP3 services provided by my ISP, but soon moved to operating my own email infrastructure. The current setup mainly consists of two instances of each exim4 and dovecot, one inside my private network, one on a VPS (connected via VPN) acting as a gateway in both directions...
 
cracauer@ said:
Anybody else with earth-scattering mail changes?
Click to expand...

Over the last two years I have gradually moved my mail traffic to my own mail server (OpenBSD & OpenSMTPD & Dovecot & rspamd). In the meantime, I have understood Dovecot's Sieve well enough that it even works halfway the way I would like it to.

For mail clients - I switched completely from Windows to macOS in 2023 - a change almost as big was necessary, of course. I thought for a long time that I could somehow manage with text-based clients, but that's not the case. I'm just too stupid for Neomutt, aerc is aimed at people with a completely different workflow than I have, and for GNU Emacs there's really only mu4e, which I sometimes use and find reasonably tolerable, but I'm unfortunately used to the convenience of a GUI by now. I use MailMate there now, but I'm still waiting patiently to see what Team HERMES does with the planned macOS version of Eudora. Under Windows I liked using Pandora (a Eudora clone).
 
Caveat:
Consumer of email, so email clients, not servers.
In the past pine/alpine. Most recently (as in the past 7 years or so) claws-mail doing imap with my ISP.
It becomes more of a pain if the ISP insists/forces 2FA, doesn't always integrate easily with clients beyond "web mail client"
 
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