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So I'm finally making a break from Pine, my email client since ~1994 or
so. I tried to switch to Mutt in January, but my tired old brain wasn't
up to it. I've been trying Mozilla mail again this week, augmented by
the rather handy 'enigmail' add on which integrates GPG/PGG signing (see
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ although site currently seems down). Since
SpamAssassin + whitelists has mostly removed spam from my life, the only
remaining spam annoyance is forged 'From:' headers, particularly the few
that claim to come from me or my friends colleagues. So I've been
looking to integrate GPG-signing into my mail routine. Although I got
this working in Pine, I couldn't figure out how to have it remember my
passphrase (and didn't like doing this on a remote box anyhows). Hence
revisiting Mozilla and my venture into the exciting world of graphical
user interfaces. More context: I've also taken to signing some of my RDF
files (eg. the http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ schema or
http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/rdfweb/webwho.xrdf) so harvesters can
consume that info. So anything that gets GPG into wider use fits with
those ambitions.

The Enigmail add-on installs pretty easily. I just clicked on a couple
of .xpi Mozilla self-installing packages; so long as the running Mozilla
has access to the appropriate directories, and you configure the path to
GPG correctly, you're all set. I have this working on Linux and Windows
(where Mozilla is generally faster and slicker).

So anyway it looks good enough to use. Hmm, that's ungrateful. It looks
pretty good (and knowing it is built from XML and javascript is
strangely re-assuring). I can connect to my huge bloated inbox just
fine. The only remaining headache is replacing the 'add to whitelist'
feature (see Gerald's whitelist howto below) from my Pine mail filtering
ritual. In Pine, I can hit '|atw' and get the sender of a
msg added to my whitelist. I'm not sure yet how best to replicate this
in Mozilla, so was wondering if folk here had any experience, ideas...

Mechanisms I'd thought of:

~ * save a copy of msg to a 'sender-now-known' folder, have a
~   mailserver crontab harvest the sender addresses into my whitelist
~   periodically
~ * use the labelling facility built into Mozilla mail ('todo', 'urgent'
~    etc categories come pre-installed), and similarly harvest these on
the server.
~ * hack something directly into the Mozilla UI (eg. a right-click
option). This seems (a) too hardcore (b) to duplicate similar
functionality, eg labelling.
~ * use Pine once a day to deal with spam whitelisting


So the nice thing about running the 'atw' script from Pine was the
potential for cheap/easy extensions. I could imagine spending an hour
or so building a similar gadget that created further metadata about
received msgs or their senders, eg. a 'mailtodo' script that stashed
the msgid, a category and a comment, eg 'someday-pile: reply to gerald's
p2p msg with url for sha1 rdf example queries'. I've no idea yet how
I'd do such a thing in Mozilla. Saving to folders, or fwd'ing to a
special address seems the easiest (and most mail-client independent) way
to proceed.

Suggestions welcomed! What is everybody else doing?

Dan

ps. sorry if this turns up in HTML format with terrible line
wrapping. still learning the ropes...

see alsos:
http://impressive.net/archives/fogo/[email protected]
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/12/spam-filtering.html
http://www.w3.org/2001/12/rubyrdf/util/foafwhite/intro.html
http://impressive.net/archives/fogo/[email protected]

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