I already divide my emails into folders. Example, any email that
contains [gentoo-user] goes to the gentoo-user folder. Similar for -dev etc. I also have folders for things like banking, friends, family,
shopping websites etc etc. Well over 95% of my emails goes to a folder other than the general purpose inbox. Any email that will be a regular thing gets filtered to something. Most of what is in the inbox is
either a one time thing or spam. Right now, I just have it set to emtpy
the trash, a LOT. Clicking the unsub link is doing no good at all.
What stupid politician came up with that idea anyway.
My plan is to have it so I'm not so dependent on Seamonkey. I want something, Dovecote for example, that will fetch new emails from gmail,
or any other service if I move, and also allow me to send emails as
well. The actual emails tho would be here on my puter, as they are now
but at the moment depends on Seamonkey.
Okay, a little reading will tell you that Dovecot's mail store is
chooseable between Maildir and mbox format. So your mail is physically
stored on your hard drive in a totally standard format that most mail
agents can read. I'll leave you to find WHERE Dovecot puts it, it's not
hard :-)
Seamonkey seems to be on its last legs. It's bad enough that it isn't maintained much in the tree but I don't think upstream is keeping things working either. It needs a rewrite sort of like Firefox did. Finding
or updating add-ons for Seamonkey is almost non-existant. Some add-ons haven't been updated in ages or are not even available at all. As a example, I switched from Lastpass to Bitwarden almost a year ago. I
can't find a Bitwarden add-on for Seamonkey at all. I'm stuck using Lastpass which is at a version a few years old. There's no telling what security holes it may have. Even the very common and popular adblock
hasn't been updated in ages. My concern, losing Seamonkey completely
and losing all my emails with it. I'd like to have a better way but I'm
not sure I can do that. This appears to be complicated.
Find out what Seamonkey (like Dovecot) does with its mails. If your
Dovecot service is working, you should be able to just create an account
in Seamonkey, tell it your computer provides an IMAP service, connect,
and copy your emails into this account. Dovecot will then stash them in
its cache, where you can get at them with a text editor or better.
I may search for a video on this. Maybe watching someone else do this
will helps. I dunno. I got the service to start but after that, I'm clueless.
Learn a bit more about mail transport, and which tools do which job.
Then make sure you're not using the wrong tool - like asking Postie to
drive a delivery truck ...
Okay lets start at the beginning:
An MTA (Postfix, qmail, sendmail) transfers bulk mail between Post
Offices like gmail.com, yahoo.de, youngman.org.uk. That's over port 25.
They then dump it into a PO Box.
You now have two choices. You need a mail client (mutt, thunderbird,
seamonkey, Eudora, etc) or a web client. And you can read your email
over one of three different protocols.
A mail client using POP is like you going to the Post Office (or postie
coming to you) and transferring all your mail from the post office to
your front door.
A mail client using IMAP is like you going to your PO Box at the post
office, and treating it like a reading room, reading your mail and
leaving it behind it the box when you go.
A web browser using http is pretty much the same as a mail client with IMAP.
Now the big question is, is your mail client running on the same server
as the post office? If it is, and you are storing mail locally in your
account, a Mail Forwarding Agent typically collects it on your behalf
(like postie) from the PO Box and dumps it in your account for your mail
client to find. Otherwise, your mail client has to reach out and fetch
it with POP.
If your mail client is using IMAP, it will often cache your email much
like if you were using POP, but it leaves the master copy in the Post
Office. Think of IMAP as the counter clerk looking after your mail / PO
Box for you.
If you want to have a local post office, and read your mail with a web
client, you will need a mail web server - I believe squirrelmail is one
such.
So if you're worried about the integrity of your mail, you need to worry
about where and how it is stored. And if you are using SeaMonkey as an
IMAP client, it does NOT have the master copy. If you lost SeaMonkey,
you just need a different client and the data will still be there.
That's why I use thunderbird as my IMAP client, and move my email from
my cloud "youngman.org.uk" server to my local dovecot IMAP server "youngman.org.uk". So now my email is cached in thunderbird, and stored
in dovecot. And because I know dovecot uses industry-standard mail
storage, should anything happen to that I can just import it into any
other tool that understands it.
You need to know which tool does what, and which tool you're looking for.
Cheers,
Wol
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