Interwebs Master your email
Bobby Moss is on hand to put some order back into your 21st century life, by helping you take control of your emails, appointments and address book.
Take back control and manage your emails, appointments and address book with Bobby Moss’s email masterclass.
In the age of cloud email providers, smartphones and machine-compiled JavaScript you’d be forgiven for thinking that the mail client should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Yet every Linux distribution, commercial operating system and mobile device bundles one by default.
There are many reasons why you should use one. The most obvious is you can still access your contacts, calendars and email on your laptop when there’s a broadband outage or you’re travelling without Wi-Fi. You can also encrypt messages with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys instead of relying on fallible encryption schemes from your service provider. The elder statesman of the Linux mail client world is EvolutionMail. This was the de facto favourite across Linux distros for many years, but despite falling out of favour with maintainers it still has a dedicated following, is actively maintained and works across different desktop environments.
Get evolving
After installing Evolution from your distribution of choice’s repositories, launch the application and set up your webmail account. A wizard will appear on the first launch, offering to do this for you by finding all the necessary settings automatically. Typing in your name and an email address will work in the vast majority of cases.
However, this isn’t an infallible system. First, if you’ve enabled two-factor authentication for your online accounts (and you should, wherever possible) then you’ll need to create an application password to set up Evolution. Second, the settings that are detected might not be correct and so you could find that you can’t fetch or send email as expected.
To fix this, head to Edit>Preferences and you should see a list of synced accounts in Mail Accounts. You can highlight an existing entry and click Edit to make changes. Selecting Add will relaunch the wizard you saw earlier and create a newly synced account.
The most important parts of the Edit window are the Receiving E-mail and Sending E-mail tabs. These define the mail servers addresses, port numbers, security level and authentication method. You need to ensure these settings match those provided by your email provider. We’ve provided links to the help pages of the most common webmail providers in the table ( left).
Under the Defaults tab you’ll spot that Drafts, Sent Messages, Junk Mail, Deleted Messages and Archive mail all point to local folders. You may want to change these to point
at locations hosted on the email server to ensure they’re still synced between machines. You can also set the default behaviour for people who request read receipts for emails they send to people.
You’ll also find the Receiving Options tab helpful for defining how often your client syncs with the webmail server. It’s easy to sync new mail more often than once an hour, for example. If you’re using IMAP rather than POP3 you can choose specific folders to watch and fetch new email from.
Thunderbird is go!
MozillaThunderbird is the default email client across a wide variety of Linux distros, and that’s a well-deserved accolade. While the project has recently had a few organisational changes behind the scenes, this continues to be a wellmaintained project that’s easy to pick up and intuitive to use.
Much like Evolution you’ll see a window pop-up on first launch, but you’ll likely want to click the No thank you, I want to use my own mail button. This launches a Mail Account Setup wizard that asks for your credentials and tries to find the required sending and receiving server settings.
Regardless of how successful (or not) it is, you’ll see a summary of the settings it detected. You should verify these match the settings provided in your webmail provider’s help pages, and if they don’t you should click the Manual Config option to make the necessary changes. You can use the Re-test button to get back to the auto-detected settings at any point before clicking Done.
You can fix any settings that didn’t work or add new accounts later by heading to Edit>Account Settings and then using the Account Actions drop-down menu or the Edit... button on the highlighted server. You can also use the Account Actions drop-down to set the default SMTP server for outgoing mail if there’s more than one configured.
Inbox zero
If you’ve yet to encounter the concept, inbox zero is the oftpursued-but-hard-to-achieve idea of keeping your inbox empty for as long as possible.
Of course, you could achieve this by giving everyone the wrong email address, but at LXF Towers we tend to assume you want to at least receive some of your emails!
The route to inbox zero is to make sure that only emails you intend to action today are stored there. Everything else should be redirected to a folder for later reference. Optionally, you could apply a flag to remind you to action it later.
The most effective way of achieving inbox zero is with automated mailbox rules. While webmail providers often offer this functionality in some form, it’s often buried deep in the settings where most of us can’t find it, and is often limited to just applying labels instead of actively steering mail away from the inbox and into a folder that we can check later.
Evolution has the concept of filters. Before we explore how to use these you should double-check they’re enabled for your account. You can check in Edit > Preferences and then by clicking the Edit button for the highlighted account. Under Receiving Options you should ensure the box next to “Apply filters to new messages in Inbox on this server” is checked. You can optionally enable it for all folders, but we’d caution against that because you may end up accidentally filtering mail that you weren’t expecting to.
To add filters, dismiss the preferences window, re-select the email window and then head to Edit>Message Filters. Ensure you’re applying a filter to incoming (not outgoing) mail and click the Add button. The window that pops up will be split into three stages. The first is the rule name, and the second will the condition for your filter such as a specific sender or subject header.
The lower section enables you to define custom actions such as moving the email to a folder. We recommend you always include a Stop Processing action at the end of each rule if you chose to apply them to every folder, otherwise you run the risk of email being caught in redirect loops! Once you return to the Manage Filters window you can then move them up and down according to priority.