E-mail paradigm shift: From IMAP to POP on the clichéd wings of Thunderbird

IMAP is designed to replace POP3. Sure, Thunderbird isn't the greatest IMAP client but there are many, many other IMAP clients that do work wonderfully. If you worry about al your e-mail being on someone else's server then the solution isn't moving backwards to POP3 but to create your own mailserver (IMAP of course). It's easy. Grab any distro, install qmail for MTA, Dovecot for IMAP and SpamAssassin for your filtering and you're done. While you're at it you may want to take control of your DNS as well because you're going to need to change your MX records to point to your new e-mail server.

Also worth pointing out that the next version of thunderbird will have improved imap handling.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjkxNQ

Sander, point us to a tutorial, please.

Just as soon as he's done writing it.

Sander: That's almost exactly how I have my email system setup. Except my box retrieves mail via pop3 from my host into procmail for processing (with clamassassin, dspam, and spamassassin), and I use postfix to relay back out to my hosts's smtp server (can't send directly to destination as places are tending to drop messages sent from broadband IPs). I have horde setup on the server for a webmail imap client. I really should write up an article on it, especially as I just rebuilt it after a disk failure. (I have an old version on my wiki, but it's rather out of date and doesn't cover all the config stuff).

I probably should just set up my own mail server, or at least do what most of my collegues do, which is forward their work mail through a personal Gmail account. I didn't think I could get the few-thousand old messages into Gmail with their folder-based hierarchy still intact. I'm still in the process of figuring out how to move them from one Thunderbird installation to the other.

One thing that Thunderbird is either missing or keeping too well hidden is any built-in backup functionality. The app needs a utility that can gather and pack up a users mail for easy portability.

As I write in the article, I've never been a fan of mail clients, and I have spent years using IMAP ... but there are problems. I didn't mention the frustration at the speed of IMAP. While the flexibility of IMAP is great, having all the mail POP-ped down to my hard drive enables me to deal with it much more quickly.

I also didn't mention my time spent in the purgatory of Mutt/Fetchmail/MSMTP in the console. I did manage to get my mail working that way with IMAP, but I was so, so, so far from getting a tricked-out system working with Procmail, Spam Assassin and whatever other half-dozen utilities the hard-core Unix geek can bring to bear. It was just too hard, and it made a traditional GUI e-mail client look like God's gift.

I probably should have given Sylpheed another try before I committed to Thunderbird ...

I used both sylpheed-claws and tbird quite a bit before I just switched over to using horde and ignoring desktop clients. Both quite nice, but both had some issues with IMAP as I recall. But it's hard to find a client that has really good IMAP support and speed.

I think the IMAP speed issues were related to the mail server itself and not to the client software at all.

Exactly. Put your IMAP server at home on your local network and the speed issue is a thing of the past.

Quoting:One thing that Thunderbird is either missing or keeping too well hidden is any built-in backup functionality. The app needs a utility that can gather and pack up a users mail for easy portability.

It has. Just copy ~/.mozilla-thunderbird to your backup disk/server. It's just a bunch of mbox files.

That mbox is really the weak point in Thunderbird IMHO. For backup reasongs (easy rsync) I want maildir, not mbox. That's the entore reason I want an IMAP server.

Quoting:Sander, point us to a tutorial, please.

I haven't written one yet (I still have to move to IMAP myself) but here are some: * Dovecot wiki: http://wiki.dovecot.org/ * Maildir (Dovecot) with Postfix and SpamAssassin on Ubuntu: http://townx.org/blog/elliot/simple_spamassassin_setup_with_...

I once also came across a great tutorial on SpamAssassin with Dovecot where you could make a special "spam" folder. Any message you'd manually move there would get marked as spam by SpamAssassin. Sadly I can't find it at the moment.

PS: Note that since Lenny you can install Qmail from the package repositories. In Etch and before you always needed to compile it from source because of the license (which stated source distribution only). So, with Lenny it has become a whole lot more interesting to use Qmail instead of Exim or Postfix.