The software developer prx, his website is available at https://ybad.name/ (en/fr), released a new software called prose to publish a blog by sending emails.

I really like this idea, while this doesn’t suit my needs at all, I wanted to write about it.

The code can be downloaded from this address https://dev.ybad.name/prose/ .

I will briefly introduce how it works but the README file is well explaining, prose must be started from the mail server, upon email receival in /etc/mail/aliases the email will be piped into prose which will produce the html output.

On the security side, prose doesn’t use any external command and on OpenBSD it will use unveil and pledge features to reduce privileges of prose, unveil will restrict the process file system accesses outside of the html output directory.

I would also congrats prx who demonstrates again that writing good software isn’t exclusive to IT professionnal.

If you ever receive a mail with an attachment named “winmail.dat” then may be disappointed. It is a special format used by Microsoft Exchange, it contains the files attached to the mail and need some software to extract them.

Hopefully, there is a little and effecient utility named “tnef” to extract the files.

Install it: pkg_add tnef

List files: tnef -t winmail.dat

Extract files: tnef winmail.dat

That’s all !

In this article we will see how to fetch, read and manage your emails from Emacs using mu4e. The process is the following: mbsync command (while mbsync is the command name, the software name is isync) create a mirror of an imap account into a Maildir format on your filesystem. mu from mu4e will create a database from the Maildir directory using xapian library (full text search database), then mu4e (mu for emacs) is the GUI which queries xapian database to manipulates your mails.

Mu4e handles with dynamic bookmarks, so you can have some predefined filters instead of having classic folders. You can also do a query and reduce the results with successives queries.

You may have heard about using notmuch with emacs to manage mails, mu4e and notmuch doesn’t do the same job. While notmuch is a nice tool to find messages from queries and create filters, it operates as a read-only tool and can’t do anything with your mail. mu4e let you write mail, move, delete, flag etc… AND still allow to make complex queries.

I wrote this article to allow people to try mu4e quickly, you may want to read both isync and mu4e manual to have a better configuration suiting your needs.

Installation

On OpenBSD you need to install 2 packages:

# pkg_add mu4 isync

isync configuration

We need to configure isync to connect to the IMAP server:

Edit the file ~/.mbsyncrc, there is a trick to not have the password in clear text in the configuration file, see isync configuration manual for this:

iMAPAccount my_imap
Host my_host_domain.info
User imap_user
Pass my_pass_in_clear_text
SSLType IMAPS

IMAPStore my_imap-remote
Account my_imap

MailDirStore my_imap-local
Path ~/Maildir/my_imap/
Inbox ~/Maildir/my_imap/Inbox
SubFolders Legacy

channel my_imap
Master :my_imap-remote:
Slave :my_imap-local:
Patterns *
Create Slave
Expunge Both

mu4e / emacs configuration

We need to configure mu4e in order to tell where to find the mail folder. Add this to your ~/.emacs file.

(require 'mu4e)
(setq mu4e-maildir "~/Maildir/my_imap/"
      mu4e-sent-folder "/Sent Messages/"
      mu4e-trash-folder "/Trash"
      mu4e-drafts-folder "/Drafts")

First start

A few commands are needed in order to make everything works. We need to create the base folder as mbsync command won’t do the job for some reason, and we need mu to index the mails the first time.

mbsync can takes a moment because it will download ALL your mails.

$ mkdir -p ~/Maildir/my_imap
$ mbsync -aC
$ mu index --maildir=~/Maildir/my_imap

How to use mu4e

start emacs, run M-x mu4e RET and enjoy, the documentation of mu4e is well done. Press “U” at mu4e screen to synchronize with imap server.

A query for mu4e looks like this:

list:misc.openbsd.org flag:unread avahi

This query will search mails having list header “misc.openbsd.org” and which are unread and which contains “avahi” pattern.

date:20140101..20150215 urgent

This one will looks for mails within date range of 1st january 2014 to 15th february 2015 containing word “urgent”.

Additional notes

The current setup doesn’t handle sending mails, I’ll write another article about this. This requires configuring a smtp authentification and an identify for mu4e.

Also, you may need to tweak mbsync configuration or mu4e configuration, some settings must be changed depending on the imap server, this is particuliarly important for deleted mails.

This is the kind of Port of the week I like. This is a software I just discovered and fall in love to. The tool r2e which is the port mail/rss2email on OpenBSD is a small python utility that solves a problem: how to deal with RSS feeds?

Until last week, I was using a “web app” named selfoss which was aggregating my RSS feeds and displaying it on a web page, I was able to filter by read/unread/marked and also filter by source. It is a good tool that does the job well but I wanted something that doesn’t rely on a web browser. Here comes r2e !

This simple software will send you a mail for each new entry in your RSS feeds. It’s really easy to configure and set-up. Just look at how I configured mine:

$ r2e new my-address+rss@my-domain.com
$ r2e add "http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=rss"
$ r2e add "https://dataswamp.org/~solene/rss.xml"
$ r2e add "https://www.dragonflydigest.com/feed"
$ r2e add "http://phoronix.com/rss.php"

Add this in your crontab to check new RSS items every 10 minutes:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/r2e run

Add a rule for my-address+rss to store mails in a separate folder, and you’re done !

NOTE: you can use r2e run –no-send for the first time, it will create the database and won’t send you mails for current items in feeds.

Today I encountered an unknown issue to me with my Imap server dovecot. In roundcube mail web client, my Inbox folder appeared empty after being reading a mail. My Android mail client K9-Mail was displaying “IOException:readStringUnti….” when trying to synchronize this folder.

I solved it easily by connecting to my server with SSH, cd-ing into the maildir directory and in the Inbox folder, renamed dovecot.index.log to dovecot.index.log.bak (you can remove it if it fix the problem).

And now, mails are back. This is the very first time I have a problem of this kind with dovecot…

I have been using mbox format for a few years on my personal mail server. For those who don’t know what mbox is, it consists of only one file per folder you have on your mail client, each file containing all the mails of the corresponding folder. It’s extremely ineficient when you backup the mail directory because it must copy everything each time. Also, it reduces the system cache possibility of the server because if you have folders with lots of mails with attachments, it may not be cached.

Instead, I switched to maildir, which is a format where every mail is a regular file on the file system. This takes a lot of inodes but at least, it’s easier to backup or to deal with it for analysis.

Here how to switch from mbox to maildir with a dovecot tool.

# dsync -u solene mirror mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=~/mail/inbox

That’s all ! In this case, my mbox folder was ~/mail/ and my INBOX file was ~/mail/inbox. It tooks me some time to find where my INBOX really was, at first I tried a few thing that didn’t work and tried a perl convert tool named mb2md.pl which has been able to extract some stuff but a lot of mails were broken. So I have been going back getting dsync working.

If you want to migrate, the whole process looks like:

# service smtpd stop

modify dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf, replace the first line
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u   # BEFORE
mail_location = maildir:~/maildir                # AFTER

# service dovecot restart
# dsync -u solene mirror mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=~/mail/inbox
# service smtpd start

I switched to mu4e to manage my mails at work, and also to send mails. But in our corporation we all have a signature that include our logo and some hypertext links, so I couldn’t just insert my signature and be done with that. There is a simple way to deal with this problem, I fetched the html part of my signature (which include an image in base64) and pasted it into my emacs config file this way.

(setq mu4e-compose-signature 
  "<#part type=text/html><html><body><p>Hello ! I am the html signature which can contains anything in html !</p></body></html><#/part>" )

I pasted my signature instead of the hello world text of course, but you only have to use the part tag and you are done ! The rest of your mails will be plain text, except this part.

I have not found any answer about this so I share my fixed. I wanted to use mbsync with one IMAP server and encountered the following error.

IMAP command 'AUTHENTICATE DIGEST-MD5' returned an error: NO Authentication failed

A fix is to add the following to your ~/.mbsyncrc IMAPAccount declaration.

AuthMechs LOGIN

Using LOGIN instead of DIGEST-MD5 is still secure if you have an encrypted connection (IMAPS or STARTTLS). The login will be given plaintext inside the connection.

I am learning mutt and I am lost. If you are like me, you may like the following cheat sheet!

I am using it through imap, it may be different with local mailbox.

Case is important !

• Change folder : Y
• Filter the display : l (for limit) and then a filter like this
• ~d <2w : ~d for date and <2w for “less than 2 weeks” no space in <2w !
• ~b “hello mate” : ~b is for body and the string is something to find in the body
• ~f somebody@zxy.abc : ~f for from and you can make an expression
• ~s “Urgent” : ~s stands for subject and use a pattern
• Delete messages with filter : D with a filter, if you used limit before it will propose by default the filter of limit
• Delete a message : d (it will be marked as Deleted)

Deleted messages will be removed when you change the folder or if you exit. Pressing $ can do it manually.