[Alpine-info] formats for both Alpine and Thunderbird

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:


> As a further thought along those lines, if you're willing to invest some 

> time in it, it can be an educational experience setting up an IMAP 

> server on your own machine.  Time commitment varies greatly depending on 

> your O/S and/or distribution.  (e.g., under Gentoo Linux, I was able to 

> install Dovecot with a single command and then configure it within a 

> span of about 20 minutes [with the admittedly big caveat that I'd gone 

> through the process several times before].)  Same is true of installing 

> an SMTP server (which can be very useful while travelling, for example).



I can run these things, and do have Postfix running, but the problem is 
that the port is blocked by a firewall that I cannot control.  So I cannot 
receive email and I cannot send it using my own SMTP server.  So I use 
Gmail as the SMTP server and I use POP with fetchmail to download messages 
from Gmail every 5 minutes.  I can use SSH, so I connect via SSH to access 
the email on my server.

If you ask me, this kind of thing happens because people in our 
administration, and in the administrations of other universities, are 
influenced by lobbyists/salesmen from powerful corporations like Oracle or 
Microsoft, to shut down every server they can find and centralize control 
under Microsoft/Oracle/Sun/whatever systems.

Which reminds me -- I had a question about email formats.  Alpine supports 
what exactly?  There must be list somewhere.  I found a web page saying 
there was a patch to make Alpine support maildir, so I guess it doesn't do 
that natively.  It almost looks like mbox (agreed -- it isn't good) is the 
one way to go if you want to use both Alpine (without patching) and 
Thunderbird.  Is that so?  Or maybe Tbird can use mix.

Mike