One side effect of me finding out about and subsequently getting
onto SDF that I did not expect was that I got really into emails
for a few days there. For some reaon I had never really thought
about CLI email clients until using them on SDF, and it didn't
take long before I started thinking about using one on my home
machine as well. And before I knew it, I was completely
migrating away from Gmail (finally!) and setting up two remote
mailboxes for my own domains. Well, it took me a while and a bit
of research before landing on how I wanted it to be set up, but
the entire process was overall fun anyway (and i learned a
litle bit more about how email works in the process).
Although, contrary to what I just said about learning along the
process, I did end up using neomutt as my client and then using
mutt-wizard to set up the connection to the first mailbox as
well as some more personally intuitive keybinds. But the second
mailbox I largely set up manually. I essentially have a bunch of
mail aliases set up with my DNS provider that are pointing at
one of these two mailboxes, and then on my end I use imapfilter
(a program I absolutely love, by the way) to sort the incoming
mail into folders based on what alias it was addressed to. This
way I can keep everything nice and separate, and it makes it
easy to know which address I should use to respond any given
piece of mail. Then I sync the remote mailbox state down to my
local mailboxes, and open neomutt. This is all aliased to "mutt"
so that it happens for me automatically when I open my email,
and every time I open neomutt any local changes I've made (like
deleting mail) get synced back up to the remote mailboxes. It's
really, really nice. Having effectively as many "accounts" as I
need for each specific purpose is very convenient.
Now, part of the reason that this is such a huge improvement for
me is that I NEVER took good care of my emails before this. Way
more Gmail accounts than anyone should have, using them willy
nilly all over the Internet, thousands of unread junk emails
piling up. It was horrid. The fact that I've put this effort
into an email setup that registers to my mind as novel and fun
means now I get EXCITED to look at my email and set up new spam
filters for the onslaught of garbage being forwarded in from my
old accounts (and finally unsubscribing to all this nonsense,
too). My inbox is empty each day and it feels GOOD. And because
of how I've got it set up, it's barely costing me anything too!
So yeah. Turns out emails can be fun and cool and useful instead
of a wasteland full of spam you have to crawl through
occassionally. Who would've thought?
