users March 2019

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OT: F29+ alternatives to evolution for fetching and sending e-mails with multifactor authentication
by Ranjan Maitra 02 Mar '19

02 Mar '19

Dear friends, Over the past 20 years, I have had e-mail set up in the following way: Use fetchmail and procmail along with filtering to get things into folders, and then use a mailer (sylpheed for the last 15 years along with sylfilter) to read and send e-mail. The biggest advantage of my approach was that I did not have to keep my MTA running in the background, I could keep my e-mail locally besides having filtering using procmail that I am able to control. Also, I have a standalone mail monitor which informs me of e-mails that I have and whether I should bother reading them. (I wrote this by modifying xbuffy for sylpheed which was not trivial to do). I have survived several changes in how mail is handled, including the move to Outlook, with very few (ultimately minor) hiccups. However, the IT folks at our university have decided to show that they are even more relevant and decided to require multifactor authentication. This brings my entire ability to read e-mail to a thundering stop. The IT folks in my department have actually been very helpful and have found that evolution is a possible alternative for linux users. They have actually written a pretty detailed set of notes for RHEL which I am told also applies to Fedora 28+. The instructions are: https://www.stat.iastate.edu/evolution-mail-linux-users My question is: are there other alternatives to evolution in using MFA? Evolution looks to be like Outlook which is not a surprise given that it is meant to, in some sense, mimic that (from what I have gathered). However, it is a beast and slow (96M compared to 7.6M). Ideally, I would like an alternative that allows me to pull e-mail in the same manner as fetchmail, do the filtering and so on. However, from what I have read, evolution can be used in the background without actually running the client (sorry if my terminology is not correct). I am also interested in continuing to use sylfilter (I am after all, also its maintainer on Fedora) because it would be good to continue to use a package I maintain. Any alternatives and advice (including new but efficient approaches) would be very appreciated. Many thanks and best wishes, Ranjan -- Important Notice: This mailbox is ignored: e-mails are set to be deleted on receipt. Please respond to the mailing list if appropriate. For those needing to send personal or professional e-mail, please use appropriate addresses.

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