want advice juggling multiple email accounts and email servers
 

Like many "geeks" I have multiple email accounts for all sorts of reasons. Also, like those same "geeks" I read and reply to email messages very VERY (too often?) frequently.

Please suggest tools and techniques to gather messages, sort spindle and mutilate them, and reply such that the correct persona gets used for each mailbox.

Please suggest tools and techniques for the filing and archiving of messages for both personal and various compliance reasons.

NOTE -- I'm hoping that I'm not the first to have this problem, though "Similar Threads" did not appear to offer any help.

Merci d'avance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

Maybe I'm missing something here, but Mozilla Thunderbird does all of this by default ...

It occurs to me that more details might yield better answers. My hosted server permits me to have "unlimited email mailboxes" and "forwarders" and "auto-responders" I also have mailboxes as part of my membership in various organizations that require my use of their email for "official business." As a result, I have unique mailboxes for each of the various activities in my life. Any mailbox might get messages about any of those activities. Currently, I have filters that direct messages into mailbox-specific folders. Next I manually forward messages from the activity folders to the activity-specific mailbox. When messages arrive at the activity-specific mailbox, its filters move messages into folders where filters got to work ... and the cycle repeats. Don't forget that there is anti-spam and other junk-mail filtering that happens along the road -- "junk" for one mailbox may not be "junk" in a different mailbox.

There is a lot of manual forward processing that I want to get rid of where possible.
The email program "filter" utilities don't do enough often enough so I'm looking for anything that works without

I've seen fetchmail, but that seems to require a local sendmail or similar mail transfer agent. I'd also want something like procmail

Maybe I'm the one missing something...

It seems that Thunderbird and its derivatives like SpiceBird simply put all of the messages into one Inbox. Alternately, you have the choice that each mailbox gets its own tree of folders. Granted, I would only have one place to look -- the XXbird desktop -- but it reminds me of the letter box at the fraternity house:
... here is a message ... Ah? Who is it for? ....

Also, the XXbird message processing only seems to work for the original arrival of messages and not all of the time. For example, "move to folder ABC if older than 45 days" does not seem to happen routinely. Another "filters" missing feature is a facility for message re-write or re-format when it matches criteria. For example, if I get email from my wife, I'd like to pass the subject line and some date-time details along to my mobile phone email mailbox. Something like: "Message from {special name}(blush) to {target email} re: {subject line} at {date time} ..."

Merci d'avance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

I use the fetchmail / procmail / dovecot combo.

I assume you have a number of POP mailboxes, I have only two where all mail is being directed to. Then I fetch the mail with fetchmail from both POP boxes, and have it filtered with procmail. The procmail rule system is based on regular expressions and quite powerful. Procmail drops the mail in the intended dovecot mailbox. The great thing is that filtering is not necessarily applied based on the POP box the mail was originally delivered.

With my e-mail client I use IMAP to access dovecot. In that way I can access my mail from any computer, and see the same folders for received mail, sent mail, drafts etc.

E-mail client is Thunderbird which can send mail using any one of your identities, I just don believe it can choose automatically based on the inbox you are sending from. I have used Kmail as well, but on some machines it hung while retrieving mail more often than not.

Setup of this took me initially less than half a day.

jlinkels

I've always heard about procmail but I've also heard that it is a bear to setup and use. Your "half day" effort belies that point, but then (laugh) Anything is easy if you know what you are doing. I hardly know enough to ask the questions. I don't know about dovecot so I'll go do some reading. Otherwise, this sounds exactly like what I'm wanting to do.

As I understand, part-1a (sendmail, fetchmail, etc) puts messages into the designated spool area. Part-1b (spamassassin, clamav, etc) deals with scumware. Part-2 (procmail, exim, etc) spindle and mutilate the spool area. Part-3 (evolution, t'bird, etc) reads the messages from the spool area. Do I understand this correctly?

I suppose that fetchmail or similar will gather messages into associated but nonsense mailboxes in the spool area and rely on procmail or similar to work the magic needed to (a) move messages from the nonsense box into the real mailbox, and (b) do something useful with whatever gets left behind. Whew and WOW!! (grin) That is four new applications to learn. (grimace)

I hope there is a solution to the problem of sending as the correct "persona" or "identity" or similar. I'll make sure to post whatever solution I find for that. What I'd REALLY like to have would ask: "... when I send a message to XXX, do that using persona ABC ..."

Thanks again,
~~~ 0;-Dan