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[ Amendment IV ]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.

Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/


DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages

!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with

$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org

and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email

$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt

to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)

SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR KEY ON YOUR WEBSITE (or try using http://biglumber.com/ instead to host your key and help c

Pine!? Eww, haven't you heard of mutt?

I have personal email going back 10 years or so. I'm also on a couple of high volume email lists and get ~500 emails/day.

I keep everything in mbox format. I archive high volume mboxes with archivemail, so everything older than 90 days gets gzipped. Procmail sorts all my mail, spammassassin strips out the garbage, etc.

I use mutt as my email client. It's as powerful as any other program I've used, and because it's text mode I can ssh into my home machine and check my mail from anywhere.

I suppose this is somewhat of a stoneage type setup, but I've been using it for years and I've never seen a reason to upgrade.

Convert everything into mbox format. formail will help you with that.

Use mairix to search through email.

mutt is the best mail client ever.

-rsw

Get shell access to your mail server and use Mutt.

Repeat after me: E-mail clients on Linux are NOT a problem.

* Mutt (console based and unlike PINE its Free and better)
* Evolution (for GNOME)
* KMail (for KDE).
* Sylpheed (for GTK+).
* GNUMail (for GNUstep)
* More at Freshmeat.net > Communications :: Email :: Email Clients (MUA)

Perhaps redundant links here and there, but this is a good overal start. I excluded Thunderbird and Mozilla because those are heavily known already. Also, some of the above clients might run on other Unices, other OSes -- including MacOSX and Windows.

Mutt (http://www.mutt.org) is your best friend. No HTML, no scripts, no images, only text, only message.

The real test for me is, "Is the link back to the official site? Or does it look like a link and take you to some mysterious 3rd party server?"

That's no longer sufficient.

I've recently received some phish spam claiming to be from US Bank (I've never had an account with them) demanding I "verify my account information." Naturally, it came in an HTML-only email. I read my email with Mutt, configured to filter through Lynx. Lynx took it apart and revealed it for what it was.

However, this one engaged my interest a bit more, and I looked at the HTML directly. Those of you who revere Netscape might want to sharpen your axes for inflicting JavaScript on the world. Basically, the link that took you to the scammer's site looked something like this (my syntax is probably wrong):

To update account info, click <A HREF="http://identity-thieves.com/USBank/" onMouseOver="javascript:setStatusBar ('http://usbank.com/');">here</A>

In other words, mousing over the link activates JavaScript, which re-writes the status bar with 'http://usbank.com', thereby hiding the actual URL you'll be taken to.

So being observant is now no longer enough -- you now have to be dilligently paranoid. Oh, and shut off f&#%ing JavaScript!

Schwab

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995

I don't know what OS you're using (assuming OS X), but there are email programs that handle using different transports fairly easily. Take Kmail for instance. It easily allows you to switch mail transports whenever you're composing a message, and it keeps that setting for each subsequent sending until you change it again. If you didn't want to do something like that, you could always set up a text based reader like Mutt and just ssh into your machine at one location and have all of your mail facilities available from wherever you happen to be as long as you can ssh...

• shell: bash
• editor: vim
• email: mutt
• audio playback: cplay front-end
• mixer: aumix
• irc & im: irssi
  • im/irc gateway: bitlbee
• web browser: w3m
• p2p:
• • client:giFTcurs
  • daemon:giFT
• news aggregator: raggle

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

Back on topic, my favorite console app is the Mutt E-Mail Client. Who can argue with the powerful searching and flagging, lightning-quick interface, integration with dozens of UNIX editors, encryption tools, and the like, as well as the security and accessibility benefits of a text-based UNIX mailer?

These are not just for "old" machines, but also for remote work, and just the apps you use regularly when working primarily with a CLI -- especially an editor.*

'nuff said.

*) Be it emacs or vim. Both also come with GUI's.

Vim to edit text

Mutt for email

elinks to browse the web

MPlayer to play any media file (even videos in text mode)

mICQ for ICQ (also centericq for a multi-protocol IM client)

BitchX for IRC

lftp for ftp

Along with Screen, Irssi and Naim, I've come to love Mutt, it's everything I've wanted from a mail client. Bit of a steep learning curve, but so worth it.

After several attempts to live solely on the console, here are the best apps I've found:

Links: a superior web browser alternative to Lynx that formats things correctly on your screen.

Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.

Nano: My favorite text editor. I refuse to feel guilty that it's easy to use!

Micq: a very nice ICQ client that works much better than the various AIM console clients that are out there.

Finally, last, and well yes, basically least, Seatris: This is the best -- the best! -- of all the console tetris games. It takes me back to wasting hours in the various UC Santa Cruz computer labs.

Um, Go Banana Slugs! Go Stevenson College! I think that takes care of this year's quota of school spirit.

A bazillion years ago. I used a email reader called elm. Now I use mutt. The <B>ounce key is used to retransmit an original message to a new recipient. The <F>orward key is used to send a new message based upon the original message.

In MTA land, the .forward file is in effect doing what elm and mutt call bouncing. And bouncing is no such user or whatever.

I agree that retransmitting someone else's message to a new recipient will be seriously problematic in SPF land and will break ".forward" files all over the world.

There is another way of quickly uploading all your messages to Gmail (or any other service for that matter): The Mutt Email Client. Mutt has a feature that I haven't seen in any other email client, and that I wouldn't want to miss ever: Bouncing. That's similar to forwarding, except that the message stays completely unmodified - upon receiving, all the difference you see is an additional "Received:" entry in the mail header. Very cool, and extremely useful!

Give me a mutt anyday

The Zaurus is a tiny linux box. A powerful, tiny linux box. The first thing you should do when you get a Z is wipe the OS and instead install the excellent OpenZaurus (OZ). OZ is better than the original Linux install in nearly every respect. Don't think of your Z as a PDA, it's more like a tiny laptop. Some of the things I do with mine:

email: I recently compiled Mutt with a IMAP header cache patch. One of the most powerful email clients in the palm of my hand :-)

wireless sniffing: As you know, Kismet rules the land of wireless sniffers. Pop a wireless card in your Z (or get a 6000 :-) and your neighbours will never be safe again :-)

mp3/ogg playing: Using either Opie-Player2 or the excellent tkcplayer. Unfortunatly, I can't use the tkcplayer on the very latest version of OpenZaurus, not because it won't run (because it DOES almost start up when using "runcompat" but then tells me it can't run on this platform-- which it CAN otherwise it wouldn't be able to tell me that :-) TKC are you listening? Remove the check please :-)

Video playing: using a port of the best linux movie player mplayer. I've encoded a bunch of movies down to ~200MB with great results. You can pop a couple of these on a 512MB card for those long flights :-)

Coding: Of course, I've got gcc and perl loaded on the puppy. Hell, without perl I wouldn't be able to run Chaosreader, makes those long hotel stays much more interesting :-)

Exploit testing :-) Since perl and gcc work fine, I really haven't run into any common exploits I can't compile or run properly.

A couple of hints and tricks:

1) If you want to extend your battery life while doing things like mp3 playing or wardriving, grab something like Qoverclock and use it to UNDERCLOCK your Z. Turn down (or off) the display as well. Poke at it a bit and realize you can easily make a shell script to do without the GUI.

2) To maximize your space on root, ram, sd and cf, the single best thing to use is UCLX which works just like UPX. UCLX/UPX are executeable file compressors-- you compress your executable and when you run it it decompresses (to ram) on the fly. The compression it uses is AT LEAST as good as gzip (or better) and the decompression is very fast. When using slower media like SD (or even CF) you'll find that executables will run FASTER compressed then they would uncompressed-- the CPU can decompress much smaller exe faster than the much larger uncompressed exe could be loaded from media and run.

3) When choosing a root/ram disk size for OpenZaurus, it's a good idea to pick a small root with a much larger ram disk. If (when) you need more ram, you can simply make some ramdisk swap files.

4) While you can run gcc right on the Z, it's also nice to us a cross compiler on your (much faster) desktop and then just cp the binary over. If you're too lazy to do cross compiles (or don't want to set up a ton of additional packages like ncurses, etc), you can also just ssh into the IPAQ development cluster and compile your code there. Typically it will run without issue-- sometimes you may want/need to statically link your programs or just grab the libraries from the ipaq and throw 'em on your Z. I haven't found a single thing yet I couldn't get to run.

5) Assuming you grab the required libraries, you can run basically all of the sw in th

Space is not vacuum.

Vacuum is relative.

I agree (I use fastmail.fm also) It's awesome; the only option they don't really offer in there Webmail service is a calendar.

I download all my email accounts into my fastmail account (including hotmail), and just access it using WebMail/IMAP.
I think I could cope with Gmail if I could download all my other email accounts into my Gmail account.
The only problem with that is I can access my IMAP account using Mutt on a plain text terminal. With Gmail you need a browser that is JavaScript capable.

• OpenSSL - support program
• OpenSSH - connections in and out
• Mutt - email
• nmap - scanning tool
• libpcap - support library
• Ethereal - network sniffer
• mtr (Matt's TraceRoute) - trace problems
• whois (ARIN compatible) - find where the problems are
• tf (tinyfugue) - BBS client
• mangband - multiplayer ascii game

Since /. decided to post this story, I guess they really badly want to know what software I use. So here goes.

I only use operating systems that will run the bulk of software developed for Linux and/or *BSD. I'm assuming that compiler toolchain (cc, make, ld, etc.), net utils (ping, ftp, etc.), ssh are installed.

screen (terminal multiplexer)
netcat (tcp and udp from the command line)
elvis (lightweight vi clone*)
Some X11 implementation (usually XFree86)
WindowMaker (window manager with efficiency)
Mozilla Firefox (great web browser)
mutt (fast and versatile mail client)
Gaim (multi-protocol instant messenger)
wget (download over http or ftp)

* I personally think vi is a prime example of horrible interface design, but it proved hard to find a text editor that is similarly efficient and powerful as elvis. I only with they would get rid of the HTML (and Latex?) view mode and just show me the source so I can edit it.

Try Mutt or Elmo instead of pine. Good console mail clients.

It's not that pine is not GPL, it's that pine is altogether Not Free Software. Specifically, the University of Washington will not allow anyone to distribute modified versions, they've even threatened to sue people who do this with older versions of Pine. This makes it hard to work the software into a distribution like Red Hat, and even harder to want to.

Personally, I use Mutt, and I love it. Other people seem equally pleased with elm. With both of these clients, "all you need is an xterm".

If you really prefer Pine, there are two projects to create an Free replacement for it: Hydrant and OSERP. I don't know how far along and usable either project is. If you just miss Pico, there's an excellent Free clone called Nano, which is very usable and included in most Linux distros already.

If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll start to see viruses for those operating systems.

I'd like to see someone try to write a virus or worm that affects plain-text-only mail readers like Mutt. That would be a clever hack. I also suspect it'd be damn near impossible to pull off. How badly would you have to screw up something that displays plain text for a vulnerability to appear?

The moron who had the "bright" idea to start sending HTML in email needs to be taken out back and shot.

pine (or mutt)

"Next Generation" means GUI based, I assume? Thanks, but I don't see anything that compels me to abandon Mutt anytime soon. Newer != Better, that's the BloatMoat(tm) people tend to fall in.

Mutt will do this with folder-hooks.

2) Single key (space bar) navigation down each message, unread messages in folder, over all folders (except trash)

Mutt will do this easily, just rebind the keys.

Mutt will do this with folder-hooks.

2) Single key (space bar) navigation down each message, unread messages in folder, over all folders (except trash)

Mutt will do this easily, just rebind the keys.

I've said it a thousand times.

1. Mutt
2. Spamassassin
3. Greylisting
4. Profit!

If it weren't for /., I'd have never noticed.

I could easily imagine a productive environment based around GNU screen and a terminal-based editor, mail client, news client, and IM client. Throw in something like w3m, and other for images, its good.

Yup, that's pretty close to the way I've worked for most of the last year or two. For me it's screen, of course, along with:

• editor - vim,
• mail client - mutt,
• news client - tin,
• web client(s) - a combination of w3m, lynx, and wget for most downloading tasks,
• spreadsheet - sc, which is surprisingly useful,
• P2P client - mutella, though I think there are console options for other protocols,
• IM/IRC client - irssi along with the fantastic bitlbee (and if you haven't heard of bitlbee before, take a look).

...and then I use good 'ol ratpoison for my window manager in X for the occasions that I need graphics (ie. some web browsing, viewing PDFs, playing graphical games).

Strike that. In most cases, multi-tasking can be very counterproductive. Shell escapes and $EDITOR_OF_CHOICE is good enough.

It varies :-), though I agree generally speaking. I'm using KDE3.2beta at the moment for a bit of a change, though most of the action is still inside my screen(1) terminal(s). You do tend to (or at least I tend to) find yourself more productive when you don't have stray graphical bits and pieces around the place to distract you.

Of course if you need the GUI for your normal working environment (ie. you're developing a GUI app), then, well there's not much you can do but live with it. :)

I avoided mentioning it at first, I didn't want the conversation to derail into a fight about specific clients. But, my personal taste leans toward the combination of Procmail and Mutt. It's an acquired taste, and probably not for most new users. I know better than to push it to any but the most hard-core Unix-philes. There are certainly other clients, with GUIs even, that match Mutt's power and may even surpass it; it's just what I use. (For what it's worth, I've heard exceptional things about KMail (KDE) and Mulberry (cross platform) from people I personally know and trust who have to juggle heavy mail loads.)

Or, Mutt is also good, and quite flexible.

Mutt has done this for as long as I can remember.

Sure it's text based, but that's a darn good feature when you get porn spam with web bugs at work, or want to read/send email over ssh.

Pine has threading if you patch it. Mutt also has threading. In Perl programming, Mial::Box supports them.

Seems like a reasonable compromise to help eliminate spam. If you are sending out more than that, you probably should pay for a commercial account of some kind, or a mailing service.

I smell a troll here, but I'll bite anyway.

"Reasonable?" I guess you don't run any mailing lists. I'm the webmaster for the local homebrew club. Some of our members opt to not have dead-tree newsletters mailed to them; instead, they receive notification in the mail that this month's newsletter is up on the website. I use a throwaway shell script and Mutt to send notices to the 30 members on the list. If Cox were to impose such a limit, I would end up hitting it once a month.

(FWIW, my "home" cable-modem service is actually business-grade (grandfathered from before they started using DOCSIS for residential service) and I run my own mail server on it. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other legitimate reasons why somebody might fire off a smallish quantity of messages...for instance, somebody might send a change of address to everyone in his address book.)

Er, no. Experts use mutt.

That said, for my wife and other non technical users, KDE is wonderful. I hope the stable release comes soon.

Sometimes I don't produce the same neural network or mneumonic-map that I did two years ago for the same datum, and then it gets lost.

I had the same problem until I discovered the mboxgrep tool. Now I can always find what I'm looking for. Use mboxgrep to winnow down the possibilities into a tiny temporary mail folder, then use mutt to go in and do the fine-toothed poking.

I have all of my sent and received email since, oh, 1997 or so, and I can pretty easily find anything I'm looking for using this technique.

Gnus has been handling threads in email for about a decade now, I believe. Part of the advantage of reading email as though 'twere news. Mutt attempts to thread emails; I'm not certain how successful it is, as it's been years since I've used that excellent mail reader.

What we really need is for someone to code up JWZ's Intertwingle, which would make life truly great. Not to mention that it'd be a perfect job for elisp, which means it'd be perfect for emacs, which means it'd be perfect for gnus, which means that it'd be perfect.

turn off the preview window.

The what?

Here's another suggestion: use mutt. When you receive HTML e-mail (all HTML, with no text/plain part), you won't even see the message -- you'll just see a line or two printed by mutt saying that this is HTML, and that you'll have to manually select which MIME part to view, and how to view it. At that point, you can just delete the message, unread, since any e-mail that's all-HTML is not worth reading.[0] Mutt isn't a web browser disguised as an MUA, so it won't download any web-bug images, etc. And you don't need a friggin' mouse to run it.

[0]Unless, of course, it's your domain registrar's "you have 60 days to renew" warning. But you can usually distinguish those from spam by the headers. (Why do domain registrars send such god-awful Windows-user-ish messages? Don't they know that people who register domains are generally technically competent? Eh, who knows....)

Think again, look at: mutt.org.

You may think text-mailers are lame, but mutt is fastest en most usefull mailer there is.

Although I don't know why, I sometimes switch to pine, most be something I'm missing, I guess Pine is easier.

Good points, but I would prefer a combination of SquirrelMail (or SSH / PuTTY & Mutt) and a dynamic DNS domain over a "freemail provider". :)

I had to switch back from Evolution b/c it seemd buggy and flaky.

I've been *stuck* with mozilla for a while (for cross platform purposes, though I do like it for other reasons.)

The only other option that seems tempting is mutt.

C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?

Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.

Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys :-)

Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me :-)

Sorry, but the real geeks use Mutt ... graphical email clients are for geek posers ;)