Choosing an Email Client


Back in the days of UNIX, there were various text-based email clients such as elm and pine (Pine Is Not Elm). Although they looked basic, they allowed the average user to interact with his email, both for composing and reading correspondence. With the advent of mainstream computing and the realization that people needed friendly GUI interfaces to be productive, came a plethora of email clients, with some of them being cross-platform and compatible among Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, not to mention UNIX.

A Brief Introduction to Email Terms

The email world is filled with acronyms and technical terms. The first of these covered here describes the components of the email system. Some applications combine features from among these three groups.

The mail user agent (MUA), mail client, or mail reader enables the user to read and compose her email. This is the application most users are familiar with; it presents a text or graphical interface to the user. Examples are Evolution, Balsa, mutt, Mozilla Mail, and KMail. All are provided by Ubuntu Core.

The mail transfer agent (MTA) works behind the scenes to send and receive email between computers. Examples are Sendmail, Postfix, Fetchmail, Exim, and Qmail. All but the last two are provided by Ubuntu. A mail delivery agent (MDA) is similar to an MTA, but does not handle deliveries between systems and does not provide an interface to the user like an MUA. Examples are Procmail or Spamassassin; both provide filtering services to the MTA, and the latter is provided by Ubuntu.

The protocols used for email are a hotbed of acronyms; these are covered next.

RFC The Request For Comments is as close to an Internet rulebook as one can get. See the "Reference" section at the end of this chapter for links to specific RFCs. By changing the number in the link, you can look at any particular RFC. If you have Fetchmail installed, author Eric S. Raymond has included a list of RFCs (with descriptions) that are relevant to email in the file /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/NOTES.

POP Defined by RFC 1939, the Post Office Protocol is a mail server for delivering mail to clients. (It isn't used for sending mail to servers; that's SMTP, later.) POP3 is useful when you have one mail client on one computer, such as a typical home user. POP3 is designed for local access to mail; it downloads all mail from a central server to the local client, and then deletes the files on the server. Most ISPs offer POP3 mail access.

IMAP It is the Internet Mail Access Protocol, which allows a user to access his email stored on a remote server rather than a local disk. This means that email can be accessed from anywhere if the user is employing a mail client with IMAP support. IMAP is a good solution to providing mail for a LAN. The version supplied with Ubuntu Core is the University of Washington IMAP server, found at http://www.washington.edu/imap/.

SMTP Defined by RFC 821, it is the Simple Mail Transport Protocol used for sending mail from one network to another. It is a sever-to-server protocol, so some other method must be used to deliver messages to a client application to be read by a user. Extensions to the protocol add authentication and error messages to the basic protocol.

MIME Defined by RFCs 1341, 1521, 1522, 1523, 1820, and many others, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions addresses the formatting of email messages to include non-ASCII text, encoded binary images, and multimedia content.

Certainly, this is not an exhaustive list, nor is it intended to be. You might find the Jargoogle search page useful to decipher other unfamiliar terms you encounter. It is found at http://www.catb.org/jargon/jargoogle.html.


Note

The amazing deluge of spam and Internet scams using forged headers has spurred interest in a "better mousetrap." One such project is AMTP at http://amtp.bw.org/, an enhancement for SMTP. This specification calls for mail servers needing a signed security certificate and using TLS (Transport Layer Security, RFC 2246). An AMTP mail server will not relay mail from an "untrusted source"in other words, a mail server lacking the proper authentication. Although not eradicating spam, AMTP does provide a mechanism to identify the source.


Evolution

Evolution, a Ximian/Novell product, is the standard email client that comes with Ubuntu (see Figure 8.5). If you have used Microsoft Outlook, Evolution's interface will come as no great shock. It really is a drop-in replacement for Outlook and encompasses many of Outlook's features and benefits, including email, calendaring, contact management, and task management. Here we examine how to get Evolution configured for email access.

Figure 8.5. Ximian Evolution, the default and extremely powerful email client for Ubuntu.


You need to have the following information on hand to successfully configure Evolution:

  • Your email address

  • Your incoming email server name and type (that is, pop.email.com, POP, and IMAP)

  • Your username and password for the incoming server

  • Your outgoing email server name (that is, smtp.email.com)

After you have all the information, you can start Evolution. The first screen you are presented with is the Account Setup Assistance (see Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6. You can launch and configure Evolution with just a few simple commands. The Identity screen, the first of several screens, asks you to enter your information. Click Forward to proceed.


The next screen permits you to configure Evolution to use your MTA. You can choose POP, IMAP, the local spools found in /var/mail in either mbox or maildir format, a local MTA, or None if you simply want to use the other features of Evolution. As shown in Figure 8.7, you can also set your password.

Figure 8.7. The Receiving Mail screen requires information from your ISP or system administrator.


You must also choose between SMTP or Sendmail for sending your mail; enter your email address and choose a time zone (important for your calendar). Finally, you will see the opening Evolution window in Figure 8.8.

Figure 8.8. The standard Evolution display. On the left you can see buttons to choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks windows.


Each icon in the left pane of the main Evolution window opens a different window when selected. Each view has options that you can configure to suit your needs; just click each window's Tools menu item, for example, to open the Tools screen, shown in Figure 8.9.

Figure 8.9. The email companion to Firefox, Thunderbird is fast at handling mail, news, and RSS feeds.


Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is the sister program to Firefox. Whereas Firefox is designed to browse the Web, Thunderbird's specialty is communication. It can handle email (shown in Figure 8.9), network news (see later in this chapter), and RSS feeds.

Thunderbird is not installed by default with Ubuntu, so you will have to use either aptget or synaptic to install it. As with Firefox, many plug-ins and extensions are available to enhance your email and news reading.

Balsa

Balsa is an email client designed to work with GNOME. Configuring Balsa is similar to configuring Evolution, although most of the configuration is done from the Preferences menu item, and the basic functionality is similar. Figure 8.10 shows a screenshot of the Balsa interface.

Figure 8.10. The Balsa email client. It should not take long for users of Outlook Express or Mozilla Mail to get comfortable with the interface.


KMail

If you are using the K Desktop Environment (KDE) rather than the Ubuntu default GNOME desktop, you will also have KMail installed. As with Balsa, it will not take users of Outlook Express or Mozilla Mail long to get used to the KMail interface. Some useful features found in KMail are the choice of mbox or maildir formats, improved filter creation, the ability to sort mail into threads, and the ability to apply filters at the MTA. Figure 8.11 shows the KMail email program. KMail offers IMAP access; extensive filtering; mbox and maildir formats; and the ability to easily integrate MTAs such as Procmail, Spamassassin, or custom processing scripts.

Figure 8.11. The KMail email client, part of the KDE.


Mozilla Mail

Mozilla is more than a browser: It is a mail and newsgroup reader. The Mail and News Setup Wizard and preferences can be found under the Edit menu item. When you select Mail & Newsgroup Account Setup, you see a lot of different options, as shown in Figure 8.12.

Figure 8.12. This is where you set your email and newsgroup configurations. Mozilla provides many choices to accommodate your individual needs.


Configuration via the wizard is easy: Mozilla prompts you for the necessary information. The Mail interface (shown in Figure 8.13) is familiar to many users. If you use Mozilla for web browsing, using it for email is a natural extension. Mozilla Mail is also a good choice for those who do not need all the features offered in the Evolution mail client.

Figure 8.13. The interface to Mozilla Mail is familiar to many. It is similar to Microsoft Outlook Express, KMail, and Balsa and is easy to use.


The mail Application

A UNIX utility named mail is included with all UNIX and Linux distributions. Because it has a very Spartan interface, it is not commonly used interactively. However, mail is still an extremely useful program to use in shell scripting because it can take all the information it needs to send mail from the command line. No user interaction is required. mail is also useful for sending quick notes because it starts up quickly and doesn't require going through menus to send a message.

Using mail

To begin sending a message in mail, simply type mail at the shell prompt, followed by the email address that you want to send mail to:

$ mail paul@hudzilla.org 


mail then prompts you for the subject of the message. Enter the subject and press Enter. The cursor then moves down to the next blank line. You can now start entering the body of your message. When you finish, press Ctrl+D on a blank line to exit the mail program and send the message. (You might be prompted for Cc:. If you do not want to send carbon copies to anyone, simply press Enter.) The message is handed off to the MTA, and your shell prompt returns. To abandon a message you are currently writing, press Ctrl+C.

If you want to retrieve your email using the mail program, simply type mail at the shell prompt. The system responds with something similar to the following:

Mail Type ? for help. "/var/mail/andrew": 1 message 1 unread >U  1 paul@hudzilla.org   Sun Mar 20 07:15 18/551 "Birthday" >N  2 spam@ebay.com      Sun Mar 20 08:25 18/542 "A large and obnoxious spam message" >N  3 paul@hudzilla.org   Sun Mar 20 09:21 17/524 "Ubuntu 4 Update" >N  4 nick@veitch.org      Sun Mar 20 09:24 17/528 "Issues" & 


The & prompt is mail's way of prompting you for input.

The first column in the list of messages is a flag that indicates the status of the message. For example, U means that the message is unread. N means that the message is new. The rest of the columns are self-explanatory.

To read one of these messages, simply type the message number and press Enter.

For example,

& 4 Message 4 From nick@veitch.org Sun Mar 20 09:24:35 2003 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2006 09:24:34 -0500 From: andrew@andbhudson.co.uk To: nick@veitch.org Subject: Issues Hey Nick, The new issue looks great! Where did you get the idea for the cover from? Seeya & 


If you want to respond to this message, you can type respond and press Enter. You can also simply type r and press Enter. By default, the command is applied to the currently active message, which is indicated in the message list by a, (and will be the last message that you read). If you want to have the command applied to a different message, you can simply specify the message number after the command. For example, typing r 2 will respond to message number 2.

A complete list of commands is available within mail by typing ? at the prompt. Note that you can abbreviate all commands to the shortest abbreviation that is not ambiguous.

Shell Scripting with mail

As mentioned previously, mail's most useful application is its use in shell scripting. The complete instruction to create and send a message can be done from the command line. For example, suppose that we have a shell script that generates a report and stores it as a text file. Now we want to email that text file to a user at the end of the script. With mail, we could use a command such as the following:

$ mail andrew@andbhudson.co.uk -s "Report from shell script" < report.txt 


The -s specifies a subject line on the command line, and then we use simple shell redirection to use the file report.txt as the body for the message (see Chapter 15, "Automating Tasks"). It is simple, clean, and requires no user interaction to send the message.

For other options available on the mail command line, see the man page for mail.

mutt

mutt is a relatively new command-line mail client that is rapidly becoming popular with users. The client is called mutt because it is known as "the mongrel of email clients" in that it attempts to combine the best features of several other clients such as elm and pine. Mutt is an extremely feature-rich email client, although it is not as easy to use as pine. It is, however, more secure than pine. Figure 8.14 shows the mutt interface.

Figure 8.14. mutt combines the best features of elm and pine (aside from ugly default screen colors). Ubuntu defaults the editor to nano, but you can choose any other editor.


To check the version and see the compile time options, use mutt -v like this:

$ mutt -v Mutt 1.4.2.1i (2004-02-12) Copyright (C) 1996-2002 Michael R. Elkins and others. Mutt comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `mutt -vv'. Mutt is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `mutt -vv' for details. System: Linux 2.6.11.1177_FC4 (i686) [using ncurses 5.4] Compile options: -DOMAIN -DEBUG -HOMESPOOL  -USE_SETGID  -USE_DOTLOCK  -DL_STANDALONE +USE_FCNTL  -USE_FLOCK +USE_POP  +USE_IMAP  +USE_GSS  +USE_SSL  +USE_SASL +HAVE_REGCOMP  -USE_GNU_REGEX +HAVE_COLOR  +HAVE_START_COLOR  +HAVE_TYPEAHEAD  +HAVE_BKGDSET +HAVE_CURS_SET  +HAVE_META  +HAVE_RESIZETERM +HAVE_PGP  -BUFFY_SIZE -EXACT_ADDRESS  -SUN_ATTACHMENT +ENABLE_NLS  -LOCALES_HACK  +HAVE_WC_FUNCS  +HAVE_LANGINFO_CODESET ?+HAVE_LANGINFO_YESEXPR +HAVE_ICONV  -ICONV_NONTRANS  +HAVE_GETSID  +HAVE_GETADDRINFO ISPELL="/usr/bin/ispell" SENDMAIL="/usr/sbin/sendmail" MAILPATH="/var/mail" PKGDATADIR="/usr/share/mutt" SYSCONFDIR="/etc" EXECSHELL="/bin/sh" -MIXMASTER To contact the developers, please mail to <mutt-dev@mutt.org>. To report a bug, please use the flea(1) utility. 


If you want to change the options (such as any paths), you need to recompile mutt from the source code.

The latest versions of mutt, as well as news and information about it, are available at http://www.mutt.org/. mutt is proud to be a bug-free program, but its authors believe it might have a few "fleas"thankfully, these are few.

The systemwide configuration file is kept at /etc/Muttrc, and each user can have his own ~/.muttrc files. mutt configuration is often an evolving process, as each user attempts to configure this feature-rich mail client.

Before you can use mutt, you need to configure a .muttrc file for each user's home directory. A sample file is found in /usr/share/doc/mutt-*/sample.muttrc; just copy it (or the systemwide file) to .mutTRc in the appropriate home directory. There, edit it to reflect how you have your mail system configured and set your preferences; you will find mutt highly customizable, awkward to configure, and simple to use.

Sending and receiving messages using mutt is easy; the colorful display provides a subset of common commands, and F1 brings up the online help documents.

Other Mail Clients

The mail clients included by Ubuntu are only a few of those available. Sylpheed-claws (not included) is popular because it offers spell checking while typing and is well suited for use in large network environments in which network overhead and RAM usage are important considerations. You can find other mail clients and applications suitable for use with Ubuntu by browsing through the selection on offer in synaptic.



Ubuntu Unleashed
Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 10.10 and 11.04 (6th Edition)
ISBN: 0672333449
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 318

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