Originally published at Random Geekage You can comment here or there.

For a while I have been trying to get used to using the command line for all of my application needs. One of the sticking points for me is email. As far as I can see, the two main text based email clients are Alpine and Mutt.

Mutt seemed to be a pain to configure, I couldn’t find an entry in the config file to put in my details and it brought in a whole bunch of other packages onto my system. Mutt seems to only be able to retrieve mail on its own. Sending requires the extra software which is a downside to me. Extra stuff to update, more possibility of security holes. Alpine on the other hand, has no such problems.

The other main part of email for me is GPG functionality. The default email client in Ubuntu, Evolution, has a really simple way of configuring GPG, just put your key ID into a text field and it does the rest. However, Evolution has a ton of bells and whistles like calendars and address book functionality. Plus I can’t have it backgrounded.

Klaatu did a Hacker Public Radio episode on how to integrate GPG and Alpine but I felt that during the main part he spoke too fast and never went over the proper syntax of the configuration lines, like the need for correct capitalisation. After hunting around a bit more, I found a page that had the correct lines ready for copy and paste (Edit: the symlinks are needed to use the filters properly).

First, open a shell and do the following commands:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gpg /usr/bin/encrypt

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gpg /usr/bin/sign

Then open your .pinerc file and amend the display and sending filters to this:

display-filters=_LEADING("-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE")_ /usr/bin/gpg --decrypt,
_LEADING("-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE")_ /usr/bin/gpg --decrypt

sending-filters=/usr/bin/encrypt --encrypt -r _RECIPIENTS_ -a,
/usr/bin/sign --clearsign

Whack that into your .pinerc file in the right places and so long as you have GPG set up encrypted mail should work.

Originally published at Random Geekage You can comment here or there.

A lot of folk these days are using Gmail as their email provider. There are some good (interface is the best I have used) and bad (the whole cloud computing thing) points to this. An entry on Digg popped up in my news feeds with a link to a program called Gmail Backup. It does exactly what it says. You give it your login details, pick a folder and it dumps all your email into that folder so in the event of Google being evil, you have a backup of all your mail. Very handy.

Comes in both Windows and Linux flavours. The Linux one needs a copy of wxpython installed. There is a command line mac version but it is unsupported.