I am steadily getting angrier this evening as I realise I have not sorted e-mail. By this I mean minimising the time e-mail takes in my life while having it still be useful. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it’s still taking ages despite me not even having a job or a degree course to do at the moment. And secondly, I think I’m going to have to change mail clients again.

My beloved alpine is failing me. Currently it is connecting to my e-mail provider’s IMAP server and it is sending by connecting to localhost port 25, which causes xinetd to fire up an SSH connection to a remote machine which in turn uses netcat across its LAN to the my e-mail provider’s SMTP server. This is a bit of a hack but it’s been working fine for months.

Until I realise that I really need certificate verification on my provider’s IMAP server… which is using a self-signed certificate. Alpine doesn’t like this and I’ve tried a variety of things to make it work with no success. So I thought, let’s try offlineimap (always nice to have that speed boost) which can deal with the certificate problem better, and then have alpine connect to a local IMAP server that feeds off offlineimap’s data store. Can’t persuade alpine to connect to this local IMAP server.

I could keep trying here to save alpine, or I could just switch to mutt+offlineimap. It would take less time to set-up and would result in a cleaner setup. The only reason I adopted alpine over mutt was because I thought it was cool when I switched to SDF as my e-mail provider.

I really thought I was over hopping between mail clients. Seems not. Can’t see myself having any reason to leave mutt, though. And it will be nice to have OpenPGP back.

But the real problem is that I’m still taking ages on e-mail. I have a method of reading e-mail designed to be really efficient… but it still takes ages. Am I getting too much junk? Do I need to check on every Facebook posting I get alerted to? I thought I had it cut down but it seems not. Angrier and angrier.