sick of yahoo and the such, command line email application?
 

hi. im sick of email providers like yahoo. Are there any that would let me store them and sort through them and keep them organized with shell scripts?

google gives you a POP3 access. If you are geek enought you could find a way to download your mail from a shell script connecting to their pop3 server, then to store and sort them. Shell doesn't have much to do with mail,this wouldn't be easy, thought.

well lets say i have it periodically sort my inbox - make copies of the ones i want to keep (mainly my LQ emails for reference) then i should be able to put it back to their servers right? that is the plus of the web-based emails because you can store your email on their servers.

I haven't heard of any ways to "upload back" mails to a server, once emails will be downloaded to your computer, it will not be possible to send them back.

hmm so maybe it is possible to just download copies of the email? Or find a way to email from th command line and just email them back to the same address. hmmm.

Well yes, it is probably possible, but not easy. Bash is very powerful, in the worst case you could call a C/C++ programs or a perl script to do stuff bash can't do.

IMAP
 

What you are looking for may be an IMAP email. This is similar to what Yahoo has, in the sense that the email is stored on someone else's server. You can then read the eamil, and download or copy it, but the actual email stays on the provider's server.

I agree that there are other, and better, providers than Yahoo (I do have a Yahoo account). You might want to try webmail.com or fusemail.com, or thefreecountry.com. I know people who use these and like them.

My main IMAP account is with a web site that I have.

You can always pay Yahoo and they will allow a POP access and you can use anymail to manipulate the mail.
The problem withs this approach is that Linux tools are in constant flux ... and I would rather leave mail at a trusted server than download it to my sparkling new Linux distro/apps and find it foobard ..