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Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

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Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#121

Post by [deleted] »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #42
hackuser wrote: post #32

Thunderbird has, or had, a plain text mode and a "Simple HTML" mode (other than only recognizing a subset of HTML, I don't know what it does) for displaying messages. You can leave it in plain text mode and, in the event you really need to view HTML, switch it to "Simple" or full HTML. It also can block remote images and, I think, all JavaScript. The wonderful Nostalgy add-on provides a very responsive keyboard inter…

I use Thunderbird and keep it set as text only for sending and remote images loading is disabled by default (as it should be). JavaScript in emails is not loaded or run.

[deleted]

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#122

Post by twic »

eru wrote: post #89
raverbashing wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm biased towards (Al)pine, would be interesting to know how does Mutt compares with it

I started with Pine, and used mutt for a bit later. Mutt is ok, if you invest the time in learning it. (If you can handle vim, you can cope with mutt.)

Interesting. I've been using (al)pine for years, and there are bits of it which really frustrate me - mostly how slow it is when dealing with large mailboxes - so i have been considering a move to mutt for a while. I'm not a vim fan, so i might have to reconsider!

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#123

Post by dfc »

mfincham wrote: post #29

There are several slightly less hardcore alternatives to Mutt for those wanting a more modern e-mail experience without the security baggage of running an entire browser. Sylpheed for instance is a very pleasant text-only MUA ( http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ ). For added peace of mind it does not take long to write an AppArmor profile to further confine Sylpheed to just the parts of your filesystem you'd like it to be…

Text-only? I could have sworn sylpheed was a GUI program.

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#124

Post by simoncion »

mappu wrote: post #107
simoncion wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wish [mutt] was more user friendly and ran well on Windows... I would be shocked if Cygwin's mutt port didn't run just as well on Windows as it did on Linux. Remember that UNIX software that you compile with Cygwin becomes a native Windows executable.

Software you compile with Cygwin's GCC becomes a native Cygwin executable, with its own concepts of paths, processes, symlinks and environment. All binaries compiled with Cygwin always inherit GPL virality. The Cygwin OS is coincidentally hosted on Windows and mostly plays nice with it. Software you compile with Mingw(-w64)'s GCC becomes a native Windows executable.

AFAICT, Unix software that you compile with Cygwin's tools understands both Unix paths and Windows style paths. [0]

It also understands Windows environment variables. [1]

Cygwin is aware of Windows processes. [2]

Cygwin is aware of the Windows registry. [3]

The executables that are created by the default Cygwin build process are PE executables that have a dependency on the Cygwin DLLs and run on any Windows system. They are native Windows software, with a dependency on a third-party DLL.

If you build open-source software against the Cygwin libraries, that software can be distributed under its original license. If you modify the Cygwin build process to produce executables that do not depend on the Cygwin libraries, then you can distribute that software under any licence you like. Regardless, if you have cash you can always reach alternative licensing terms if you reach out to Red Hat. [4]

Cygwin symlinks don't make use of NTFS junction points, but I imagine that that is for two reasons:

1) Cygwin might be run on a FAT32 system.

2) There are many, many, many pieces of Windows software (some of it is big name software!) out there that blow up spectacularly when they encounter a Junction Point. (Indeed, it was my direct experience that Windows Explorer behaved very poorly when asked to recursively delete a folder containing a couple of Junction Points in -I think- pre-SP1 Windows 7. I haven't tried JPs in AGES, so I can't speak to whether or not MSFTs own tooling has gotten better.)

At a minimum, software compiled against Cygwin meets the most basic definition of Windows software (A PE executable that runs on Windows systems). I hope that I have made it clear that the Cygwin libraries also provide a large amount of interoperability between Unix software and software originally written for Windows.

[0] Try it out. Fire up a Cygwin Bash shell and do the following (assuming that you're running on an English-language Windows):

echo "hello there" > "$USERPROFILE\Desktop\helloThere.txt"

then check the new file on your desktop. rm works just fine, too. Forward slashes work in paths, also!

[1] Try this out in a Cygwin bash shell:

echo $APPDATA ; echo $LOCALAPPDATA ; echo $SYSTEMROOT

[2] Again, in a cygwin bash shell do:

ps -W

[3] Do (in a Cygwin bash shell):

ls /proc/registry/

[4] https://cygwin.com/licensing.html

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#125

Post by hiq »

nextos wrote: post #116
rekado wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another Emacs person here. I'm using offlineimap+msmtp together with mu4e. I prefer not to do IMAP sync or mail delivery in Emacs itself.

Have you tried isync? I was using offlineimap before, but found it buggy and inefficient.

What are the bugs you are referring to? I have been using it for a few weeks for a couple of mail accounts without trouble so far. It could probably be faster though (customizing 'maxconnections' does help).

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#126

Post by kevinmobrien »

therealmarv wrote: post #85

Security Experts... let me quote Linus Torvalds: "the security community tends to be very black and white. Either it's security or it's not. And if it is security, they care deeply. And if it is not, they don't care." So who cares if you write your email in text mode but browse the web with Chrome/Firefox? No offense against Mutt... I can understand that some terminal pros like it but I cannot understand using it for…

With tremendous respect to Linus, this isn't a fair characterization of the "security community", whatever that means. There are both practitioners and vendors who take the view that security should enable business, not block it; there are groups of experts who run contrary to this, and believe in a reductive and restrictive approach to everything. The continuum of thought around what it means to be secure, especially when dealing with organizational security, seems to be shifting towards the former, rather than the latter.

As far as Linus' statements go, saying that security is imperfect by design isn't a new take on it, and I'm in complete agreement with you that it needs to be something that regular users can benefit from.

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#127

Post by deong »

hiq wrote: post #125
nextos wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried isync? I was using offlineimap before, but found it buggy and inefficient.

What are the bugs you are referring to? I have been using it for a few weeks for a couple of mail accounts without trouble so far. It could probably be faster though (customizing 'maxconnections' does help).

It never reliably functioned as a daemon for me. It would just stop checking for messages randomly after an hour or two. And if you give up on it being a daemon, then it's horrifically slow because it's doing full syncs all the time.

I ended up having a script running out of cron that would kill and restart the daemon process every 30 minutes so that I could get reasonably fast incrememntal updates but still have it continue to work properly.

And then it started losing track of what the server looks like. If you delete a label on the Gmail side, then of course offlineimap wants to recreate it. For a little while, it was tolerable to stop offlineimap, delete all the local metadata for a folder, go delete the folder from Gmail, and then restart offlineimap, but eventually that stopped working too, and it was recreating deleted folders on the server that I never managed to find a reason for.

isync just worked exactly how I wanted to after spending a bit of time setting it up, and it's been pretty solid since then.

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#128

Post by deong »

toothbrush wrote: post #95
nickpsecurity wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you here. Further, I'll add that it being 100kloc and not Thunderbird etc tells us nothing about its security. It will have plenty of flaws that show up when hackers decide it's worth the time just maybe less. I do like simple, console apps for all the security tech I can easily use with them. Doubt the mutt users are doing that outside MAC, jails, etc. But just using mutt is giving up much usability and…

Honestly, depending on what you're comparing to, i consider mutt a step forward in terms of usability. How long does your search for a specific email take using the Gmail interface? I bet it's longer than using an indexing backend like notmuch or mu locally :)

I generally agree with you (I use a text-based mua myself), but your specific example isn't great. Gmail -- probably rather predictably -- does search as well as or better than anyone in the world, including your local installation of mu. In Gmail specifically, it's instant.

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#129

Post by deong »

toothbrush wrote: post #96
michaelsbradley wrote: post #21

I use mu4e[1] to read, search and refile my emails, and there's a keyboard shortcut for viewing an HTML email in a browser. offlineimap[2] handles inbound messages. I love it! But for writing email, I still tend to jump over to Apple Mail. msmtp[3] handles outbound messages on those occasions when I choose to fire off a message from within mu4e. [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html [&] https://github.com/…

I also use mu4e, and i'm curious, why do you switch to Mail.app for composing? I love the fact that all my editor customisations (of which there are many) are still there when i'm writing email.

To each their own, obviously, but this does seem profoundly weird. I can't imagine anyone choosing an Emacs-based mua and not using the editing ability for composing mail.

Re: Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt

#130

Post by insertnickname »

qw wrote: post #78
insertnickname wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is HTML emails that are gross, not plain text.

Not necessarily for the Outlook users. The default setting of my Outlook was to ignore double line breaks and (paragraphs), which makes plain text mails less readable.

It is Outlook that is gross.
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