Using Google Mail: do you really want Google to know what lists you read? If you’re already letting Google read your private email, all hope is lost for you already, but even just letting them know what lists you subscribe to, gives them an awful lot of information about you. I would not feel comfortable with Google knowing that much. But I don’t feel comfortable with Google knowing *anything*, so I’m statistically irrelevant. In fact, it annoys me a little that I communicate with people who let Google read the email I send them and the email they send me but there isn’t really anything I can do about that.

IMAP subscriptions: these are (supposed to be) server-side, not client-side, so you don’t have to configure them per machine. Unfortunately, IMAP subscriptions don’t really seem to work most of the time. Mutt completely ignores subscriptions as far as I know, and Apple Mail.app doesn’t seem to be able to understand Dovecot’s subscriptions. It hasn’t annoyed me enough to try to figure out why (I “subscribe” to all my mailboxes anyway).

List aliases: I used to subscribe with philip+listname@ to mailing lists, but many, many mailing lists have started hiding behind ridiculous “web” front ends that seem to think that “+” is not a valid character in an email address (it is!). Also, this caused mailing list spam which wasn’t caught by bogofilter for some reason to get filed with the mailing list. I prefer for any spam the filter misses to land in my INBOX so I can immediately feed it to train the filter (happens rarely enough these days though). I’m too lazy to edit /etc/aliases on my mailserver every time I subscribe to a new list.

GMANE and stuff: meh … I don’t like webby things. And as I wrote I really like a local archive of all my mail. Using a header cache and reasonably well-implemented IMAP server, syncing large volumes of mail isn’t too big of a problem. Dovecot is perfectly happy (on a 64bit machine) with mailboxes with hundreds of thousands of messages in them (I have some of those).

In addition to the ‘archival’ filters based on ^List-Id or ^TO_, I also have some more intricate filters that put a copy of very interesting mails in a separate mailbox. A cron job keeps that mailbox mostly empty. Similarly, I have procmail put IMAP flags on some messages it delivers (using a very sick hack in Perl which speaks IMAP directly, rather than using some module for it). My procmail setup is quite sick in general.

Other than that, I also use Apple’s Mail.app as a mail ‘reader’. It has a concept of “smart folders” which works quite well. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to write mail with Mail.app, so I can’t migrate to it completely. Nor do I really feel like being tied to a fruit machine all the time. Mutt will remain my primary mail client for the forseeable future.

The big drawback it has, that is not too annoying for me so far, is that you can’t easily synchronise your emails between different clients/machines (especially the “read” state). This is OK for me because:
– I have only one computer that I use for email (my laptop)
– Not reading work emails on my phone turns out to be a life improvement :)

I still use gmail for my personal emails though (in that case, I prefer to be able to get them on my phone).