For more than eight years all of my sites, and my wife’s sites, were hosted at WebFaction. For $102 a year we had reliable, relatively straight forward to setup and use, web hosting and domain email. I originally signed up there as they would let you run Django or Ruby on Rails apps, and I was wanting to experiment.
About a year or so after signing up, I read an article online about tracking your own location using your phone, a database, and some mapping service I no longer remember the name of. I set it up, using PostgreSQL for the database (more experimenting), and once I had it working never really used it.
About two years ago WebFaction announced that their parent company had been bought by GoDaddy. I waited to see what kind of changes would result from this change of ownership. In October I learned that all the WebFaction sites would be migrated to tsoHost. Two days later I was told that might site would not be migrated, it would be terminated on December 9th. The reason given was PostgreSQL wasn’t supported on tsoHost.
A quick email to ask, “Hey, that PostgreSQL database you have that hasn’t seen any activity in years, can that go away? Otherwise we won’t be able to keep you as a customer.”, would have kept my business, at least for a while.
I spent a couple weeks in November preparing and then moving all our domains to Pair Networks. After backing up all the files on my WebFaction account, I deleted everything and let the account expire on December 9th.
The email telling me my account would be closed said that a refund for the unused portion of my annual fee would be refunded, and that this refund would take about 45 days to process. I created a calendar reminder and forgot about it.
When day 45 rolled around and I still hadn’t received any refund I contacted WebFaction. Their refund process requires PayPal. I don’t have, and don’t want, a PayPal account. Apparently they are unable to refund it to the credit card I used through PayPal’s payment portal. I asked if they could send me a check. Nope. Can’t do checks.
Today I got an email saying the could maybe do a wire transfer. They need the bank’s name, the account number, the BIC/Swift code, and the account name. Oh, and a screen shot of this information from the bank’s site. Any fees incurred for accepting the wire transfer, which I believe is coming from England, are on me.
I always liked WebFaction, but the way this account termination and refund have been handled have left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I’d advise against signing up with them, but they no longer exists, at least by that name.
Tomorrow I’ll gather all the numbers they need and send them off. I am not going to provide a screen shot of those details from the bank. And I’ll eat what ever fee my bank charges me for accepting an overseas wire transfer.
Online trolls exist because they can be anonymous. Companies, especially those that exist solely online, have some of the same characteristics. I can’t go to the WebFaction building and get my money, there isn’t a phone number, or a mail address. Just a URL that leads to a page with information posted pre-December 9th on it. Since there is little consequence, it is easy for a company to abuse their physical and metaphorical distance. All to their customer’s detriment.
I have been using Spark as my primary email client for both work and personal email for ten days. Rather than try to produce day or even semi-daily posts about Spark, I decided to write one summary post.
Spark is a well designed, well thought out application. It is opinionated but quite usable. I particularly like the “smart notifications” feature (more on that below). I also like that it has an iOS app so I can use the same client for email on my Macs and on my iPhone and iPad. I do not care for the “Spark account” that is used to synchronize settings from one device to the next — no for security or privacy reasons, although that is a question, but due to wanting a different set of accounts on my work computer than on my personal computer.
Spark has a couple of features they label as “smart”. First up is the smart inbox. When you select the smart, as opposed to classic, inbox, messages are grouped by category. Newsletters, notifications, etc. I supposed this is useful if you have a single email account that is swamped with all kinds of different emails. I have several accounts and tend to use them for different purposes. All my newsletters come to one account, online retail and memberships comes to a different account.
The smart notification feature is very nice. Smart notifications mutes strangers and automated emails. This makes having notifications turned on useful. I wish more applications gave finer grained control over notifications like this.
Spark has you create an account (basically with the first email address you add to the client). This account is used to synchronize your settings from device to device. I won’t get into concerns about a third party being involved in your email. Unless you are using end-to-end encryption, your email is not private.
Where I don’t like the Spark account is wanting to have two distinct profiles. I keep my work email separate from my personal email. I don’t have my work account setup on any personal devices (except for my iPhone). Therefore I have two Spark accounts. One for my work machines, and one for my personal machines. Not a huge minus, but cumbersome. It’d be nicer if you could select which email accounts were active on each device.
There aren’t any themes for Spark, beyond the ability to have a light or dark interface. I can take or leave themes. I do want to control the font and appearance of my email, and you can do that with Spark. The compose settings are only available when you are composing an email. Again, not a terrible decision, but unnecessarily hidden in my opinion.
I don’t like that you can alter the sort order of the messages. I like my messages oldest first, so that as I work my way through the inbox the oldest is at the top and the newest at the bottom.
The smart inbox feature also messes with ordering. It wants to roll up messages, so that the overall list is shorter I supposed. So you end up having to click to expand the roll up, and then click a message to start reading.
As a whole the user experience Spark provides is polished and comfortable. My quibbles are personal preferences rather than egregious design mistakes.
You can select which set of keyboard shortcuts you want active, and you can customize that set further.
There’s no provision for email encryption.
There is no way to prevent loading of images. Once you select an email any tracking embedded in the message has already phoned home.
Long term the answer is no. It is not at all objectionable. It also isn’t compelling. I’d give it a solid B+, or say an 86 or 87 on a scale of 1 to 100.
The next email client I am trialling is Spark. I no longer remember how I became aware of Spark, but I do know that I briefly used it in May 2018.
Spark has several noteworthy features. It offers a combined inbox, like many other email clients, with a twist — it automatically categorizes incoming emails, making it easy to see what is unread. Spark offers a classic inbox too, if you prefer to see your emails without the category groupings.
Spark also offers smart notifications. With smart notifications turned on you won’t be notified for mails from strangers or automated emails. You can control this notification filter per account, making it easy to see only the notifications that are important to you.
There’s a natural language search feature that allows you to search for “attachments from David” or “links sent yesterday”
And like nearly all modern email clients, Spark offers the ability to snooze emails.
Perhaps the nicest feature is the availability of Spark on mobile platforms too. I can have Spark on my macOS desktop or laptop, and on my iPhone or iPad.
Spark also offers a set of collaboration tools for teams.
Spark uses a “Spark account” to synchronize your email accounts across devices. This allows you personalizations and settings to be quickly setup on a new device. The Apple App Store Privacy report for Spark shows that Spark has contact info, user content, and identifiers linked to you, while they don’t track usage data or any diagnostics.
Spark doesn’t offer any themes other than a light or dark mode. Dark mode looks good, but I personally don’t like dark mode for things like web browsing or email. Having white content starkly outlined by dark windows and controls is not an appealing look for me.
You can assign a color to each email account. This color appears as a small vertical line just ahead of each email’s subject. When you are viewing the combined inbox this makes it a little easier to see which emails are from which accounts.
There is also a mail preview feature that allows you to see a 1, 2, or 3 line preview of the mail’s content in the list of mails. You can also show an avatar for each email, based off the sender.
Instead of a global setting for the font used when composing, there is a formatting option in the composition window. Changing the compose font there is sticky — meaning once set it stays set — but it wasn’t obvious that was the case until I played with it.
One nice feature is being able to choose the set of keyboard shortcuts you prefer. You can have Spark’s shortcuts, the Gmail ones, the Apple Mail ones, or you can create a custom set for yourself.
Signatures support plain text or HTML formatting.
There is no encryption support.
Currently Spark is available on macOS, iOS and Android mobile support. Work is underway for a Windows client.
I like many of the features that Spark has. I do like that I can have the same tool on all my devices. On the whole Spark is fairly low key. It has a simple elegance that is appealing.
I haven’t yet decided if I’ll use it for my work email or not. At first glance it doesn’t look like you can turn accounts on or off per device. I don’t like to have my work email on my personal computers, although I do have it on my iPhone. I could setup a second Spark account that only had my work account in it for use on my work computers. That wouldn’t make getting both personal and work email on my phone easy. That will bear some further investigation.
My experiment to try mutt for thirty days is over today. After ten days I realize that I enjoy tinkering with mutt more than I enjoy using it as my primary email client. Consequently, I’ll be switching to a different email client for the next ten days.
I’ll continue to maintain my mutt setup. When I’m using my Linux laptop, which has only the Sway Window Manager, and I need email, I connect to my local server and access mutt. I guess mutt is a reserve email solution. Nice to have, enjoyable to tinker with, can be used in a pinch, but not what you want for day-to-day use.
Eight days into my month long test of mutt and I’m starting to have second thoughts about the duration of the experiment. My thinking was that 30 days would be long enough to firmly develop habits with mutt. However, I am finding some of the hindrances that come with mutt (or at least my configuration of it) more than I want to deal with.
Ultimately I was going to trial several different email programs, each for 30 days, to see which one came the closest to my ideal. I am relatively neutral about email. It is my preferred method of communicating. Composing an email allows me to order my thoughts. And the social contract, from my perspective, is that the recipient can take their time in composing a response. I treat chat or messaging the same way. I don’t expect an immediate response. Chat is ephemeral whereas email has longevity.
Mutt introduces slightly more friction to my desired work flow than I think I am willing to abide. The handling of file types that may be attached to the email is the single largest pain point. Since I run mutt on a server and access it through ssh and tmux, I can’t use any mechanism to open a browser from the email, as the browser would be on the server and not on the computer I happen to be using. Image files are not possible with my setup.
Granted I could replicate my mutt setup on each computer and rely upon local tools to handle images, etc. It is a non-trivial amount of work to setup mutt. Off the top of my head there’s mutt, mbsync, msmtp, neovim, GnuPG, and urlview to install and configure. Currently mutt is on an Ubuntu machine. My other computers are macOS and Arch Linux. Adapting the install to those operating systems should be straight forward.
Maintaining the setup in multiple locations would not be fun. I don’t want to have to Sysadmin my email program. I want to read, reply, compose, and archive my email.
I may give mutt another day or two. Ten is nice round number. Then I’ll write up an evaluation of it, comparing it to my ideal email client. And I’ll move on to the next candidate.
Having not used mutt regularly for some time now, I’ve had to relearn its built-in keyboard commands as well as some of the macros that I created.
I currently have four separate email accounts setup in mutt. I’m actually using neomutt which has the sidebar already baked in. I have the sidebar setup to list each account with the folders I’m interested in: INBOX, Drafts, Sent, Junk, and Archive.
I have two sets of macros that let me jump to the inbox of any account directly. I can key .1 or
.2 or .3 or .4 to access the accounts by their relative position in the list. I can also use a
letter designation: m, r, n, c, preceded by a dot to accomplish the same thing. I set the
letter shortcuts up first, and later added the numbers.
I also have a shortcut, .s to save an email to that account’s Archive folder. And a shortcut to
move mail to the junk folder, .j. Both of these work in conjunction with to built-in tag, t
command to operate on multiple emails.
I can also move up and down the list of mailboxes using the arrow keys. Once a mailbox has focus, pressing the right-arrow key refreshes the contents of that box.
Finally I have some filter defined as macros, allowing me to view unread mail only, .u, to see
only today’s email (read or unread), t, to see this week’s mail, .w. .a removes any filter
allow all mail to be viewed again.
Being able to customize the possible interactions with mutt is one of its most compelling features.
Mutt is attractive to me for several reasons. And there are some things about it that detract from it as a everyday email solution.
Nearly every facet of mutt can be customized to your liking. Colors, layout, key bindings, even the tools used to receive or send emails can be selected. Setting up mutt and getting everything just the way you want is no minor task. I dare say your understanding of how email is sent, received, and stored will improve as a result of installing mutt.
Email encryption ought to be included in every email client. It should be dead simple to use. Unfortunately it is neither wide spread nor easy to use. However, once you put in a little effort to add encryption to mutt, using for emails is very simple. While it may not be a true first class citizen, as a feature, it is very close to that. Too many other email clients ignore encryption altogether, or only provide it through 3rd-party add-on libraries.
My mutt install is on a single computer. I have my home network setup to allow me to access this computer from anywhere. Mutt (and weechat for that matter) are always running on this computer. By running them inside a [tmux[(https://github.com/tmux/tmux “tmux”) session I can remotely access the computer, attach to tmux and get to my mail. I can be attached to that tmux session from multiple computers at the same time. All are seeing the exact same running process. Instead of having my mail synced to every computer, it is synced to one computer, where I can access it.
Finally I like mutt since it is nerdy. Getting it up and running is a bit of a hurdle. Learning the ins and outs and adapting to it are another hurdle. As with anything difficult, there is satisfaction is mastering it.
On the minus side of the equation, mutt does require more effort and more dedication than using Gmail, say. My mutt setup consists of mutt, mbsync, msmtp, GnuPG, and urlview. This doesn’t include the Ubuntu OS it’s running or, or some ancillary tools like tmux and Neovim. I guess you could say mutt is like a kit car. One that requires an effort to construct, and that will require on-going maintenance to keep in good running condition.
Reading emails that are basically web pages is cumbersome at best. Some HTML emails are surprisingly easy to view and read. Others expose horridly complex, obfuscating HTML, wrapped around very little actual content.
If there is going to be one reason I don’t keep mutt as my email, it will be the difficulties around HTML email,
Yesterday, when I was unable to send email from mutt using msmtp, I solved the issue by replacing
the symbolic link to the .msmtprc file with the actual file itself.
In searching for an answer I had posed a question on the mutt IRC channel about the problem, and overnight I got an answer and an explanation.
“Permission denied” errors are most likely due to AppArmor and a profile that interfere with msmtp. msmtp permission errors: disable apparmor! explains that by running this command:
sudo aa-disable /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp
The offending profile can be disabled. I had to install the apparmor-utils package before I was
able to run the aa-disable command.
After running the command, I deleted the .msmtprc file from my home directory and replaced it with
a symlink to the file in my dotfiles repository. Emails are once again sending.
Nearly all email today has some formatting beyond basic bold or italics. Either they are rich text format or they have HTML embedded. Some emails might as well be web pages. Besides bloating the size of the email compared to its meaningful content, HTML emails can be “abused” to provide tracking information about the recipient. Using images with unique URLs it is possible to know when an email was opened and by whom. This practice isn’t going away, and neither are HTML formatted emails.
Reading HTML emails in a text-based tool in a terminal emulator is a problem. For my mutt setup I have tried two different text-based web browsers to display these formatted emails: Lynx and w3m. Neither is 100% successful and making a meaningful display out of the mess of HTML wrapped around the actual content. They make it possible to read the mail, but interacting with any URLs in the email is problematic.
For example, I received an appointment confirmation email yesterday. It has, a large “Confirm Appointment” button you are supposed to click on to say that, “Yes, I’ll be at my appointment.” In both Lynx and w3m I could see the image of the button in the source, but not the link itself. I had to resort to opening the email in the Gmail web interface in order to click the button.
My hope is that I can discovered in the documentation for either of these text browsers a way to better interact with these web pages masquerading as emails.
I have installed urlview and a key binding to activate it. This utility displays all the links in
an email as a list, so that you can select one and click on it. Unfortunately, most of the emails
have links that are made up of random letters and numbers - machine generated rather than human
readable.
If I am still unsatisfied with how mutt and HTML emails work (or don’t work) together at the end of the 30 days, that could well be the reason I don’t continue using mutt as my email client.
I have often tinkered with mutt but I’ve never really used it beyond occasionally checking mail with it. I want to see if it will really work for me as my primary email client. Therefore I’ve dusted off my mutt configuration, and starting today, January 14, I plan on using it for all my personal email for the next 30 days.
I keep all my “dot files” in a Git repository on GitHub. It’s very cleverly called dotfiles. On each of my machines I clone this repository and then I use symlinks to wire configuration files into the places their respective applications expect to find them.
Under the mutt directory in my dotfiles repository one of the files is the configuration for
msmtp, which is an SMTP client. I use this to send mail
from mutt out into the ether. msmtp expects to find its configuration file, msmtprc in your home
directory, or under .config/msmtp/ as config. When I set mutt up, I put .msmtprc in my home
directory.
Actually I put a symlink to the file in my home directory:
cd ~
ln -s ~/.dotfiles/mutt/msmtprc .msmtprc
I haven’t used mutt for a little while, and when I tried to send an email this morning I got an
error message saying, “configuration file not found”. After some experimenting I discovered that
everything works if the file itself in in my $HOME, but it fails if there is a symlink to the
file.
On the mutt IRC channel I was able to get a confirmation from another person that a symlinked
.msmtprc file does not work. I have no idea why.
Since I haven’t used mutt in sometime, I’ve forgotten some keyboard commands. By reading through my
muttrc file I refreshed my memory on some of my personalizations, but I still need to brush up on
things like tagging emails so I can archive them in mass.
It will take some time to adjust to reading HTML heavy emails in lynx. It works, but it’s a bit like reading the actual Matrix code rather than seeing the woman in the red dress.
I’m calling it a success. I got sending email working again, and I’ve read my incoming email.
I am by no means an Apple pundit, nor I am privy to any inside information. I’m just a long time Apple fan with a wish list.
I think Apple should take the Pro Display XDR chassis and use it as the new form-factor for the iMac (and its big sister, the iMac Pro). It’d be a sealed enclosure, i.e., not user upgradeable. With at least 4 USB-C sized ports on the back.
It’ll need a stand, probably a fixed stand version of the XDR stand.
Same thing as with the iMac, only make a portion of the back hinged to allow access to one or maybe two expansion slots. Pro users without the means to acquire a Mac Pro, would flock to an iMac Pro that had an expansion slot or two.
There’s a huge hole in display offerings from Apple. There is one display option that will run you $6000 for the base model and $7000 for a nano texture display. There is nothing else. The PC market caters to business buyers (cheap desktop monitors) or to gamers (less cheap, higher DPI (dots per inch)) offerings. There is only one 3rd party manufacturer making a retina density display - LG. Compared to Apple’s fit and finish standards, the LG is unfortunately lacking.
Apple should make a Retina Display using the XDR chassis, and the 5K screen in the iMacs. Even at 1200 or 1500 dollars, I suspect they’d be back ordered by all the people with shiny new M1 laptops or M1 Mac Minis.
It would make for a sexy combination with either of the iMacs described above.
Updating the iMac form factor (long over due), and releasing a matching monitor would nicely refresh Apple’s line up, and would provide a monitor worthy of being used with Apple computers.
I would throw money at a Mac Mini and an Apple Retina Display.