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How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

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Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#51

Post by dhosek »

weinzierl wrote: post #11
thedanbob wrote: post #7

Does anyone know of a good Linux email client that isn’t crippled by show-stopping bugs of this sort? I used Mailspring for a while, which has a nice modern interface, but quit after discovering that my drafts were only saved locally, not on the server. This has been an open bug for at least two years. In the end I’ve always fallen back to Thunderbird as the least bad option.

I'm afraid the genre is pretty much dead as everyone seems to do email in the browser nowadays. Apart from TUI MUAs like Pine and Mutt - that may not be everyone's cup of tea - I found Sylpheed quite useful for a while. It is not as bloated as Evolution or Thunderbird but still has all the useful features I need and like. Its development seems to have slowed down though, so I don't know if it has any future...

Man, hearing this is a reminder of why I don't use Linux as my desktop OS and likely never will. My default mix of applications has shifted over the last 30+ years, but e-mail has always been one of the most fundamental apps for me, going back to the VM/CMS mail client (and before that VMS's mail program which was comparatively a disaster).

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#52

Post by d2wa »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #35
d2wa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact. Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware…

As others have mentioned, Thunderbird is the least worst option (in our opinions :). I use it with CalDAV/CardDAV synced to my Nextcloud instance. The three good options are KMail, Thunderbird, and Evolution. Everything else is CLI or lacks features like DAV. KMail and Evolution both bring in the entire KDE/Gnome PIM suite with daemons and other programs, making them not great unless you are using Gnome or KDE - as a…

(replying where I have something semi-intelligent to add.)

> Thunderbird is the least worst option (in our opinions :).

I use TB when I use macOS. TB does weird thing to plain-text email formatting, though. E.g. it sometimes refuses to let me delete lines that contain "> ", and it sometimes freaks out when I try to insert al line break in a section of quoted text. (I reply inline, like a civilized emailer.)

> I tried Evolution for a week, about a month ago, and have used KMail and Thunderbird a lot.

I’ve used all three for years. KMail would be my preferred option if it was way more stable and less buggy. It has great features and I feel at home in it. But it works way less reliably than Evolution.

The version of KMail shipping on Flathub doesn’t even start. —and that’s when it’s running in a sandboxed environment that’s identical on everyone’s systems!

> There's also a 'send later' add-on available.

I know. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/kmail-cve-2017-9604-openpgp.html On a related note, I couldn’t login to my IMAP account with KMail maybe ten years ago. My password back then contained an apostrophe. KMail didn’t encode it properly and would crash every time it tried to submit the password to the server. The bug also made it impossible to overwrite the saved password with a new one from the UI.

> Actually, after seeing your article's screenshot of Evolution with KDE titlebars.

The screenshot is manipulated, see disclaimer at the bottom of the article. It’s indeed running under Plasma, though.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#53

Post by upofadown »

lucb1e wrote: post #29
lixtra wrote: post #3

Of course recoverin an email is an innocent disguise. The same approach works for recovering any secret information that people used on a computer that an attacker can access. Of course there are plenty of possibilities. But it’s eye opening to see them in action.

This reminded me I was still going to report this bug, but anyone else should feel free to do so before me: gpg-agent stores your password/-phrase in plain text in memory indefinitely. You can clear the cache with some command and they also expire after some time, and gpg-agent will pretend to have forgotten them and prompt you again for the password, but the memory that contains the password is not overwritten and y…

That's huge and definitely should be reported. Getting rid of the private key is one of gpg-agents primary jobs.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

d2wa wrote: post #28
annoyingnoob wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.

Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact. Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware…

Have you looked at Geary?

I haven't personally used it, I just know that it shares a lineage (?) with the elementaryOS project, and they seem to be making great stuff.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#56

Post by OJFord »

b212 wrote: post #33
annoyingnoob wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.

I love Linux for what it is, for the whole idea, being open, free and "democratic" but I tried using it while my Macbok was in service and oh boy, it's like having a Hackintosh 10 years ago, for work it was bearable but for "personal use"? I'd rather pay 5x more for something that "just works". And I did.

My personal machine runs Linux because my professional experience is that macOS doesn't 'just work', and Linux is easier and less opaque to fix.

I don't want to trawl through 'have you tried turning it off and on again' on Apple support forums, I want to find the text-based config solution in the Arch wiki, a man page, or unix.SE.

(Yes that order, not `man` first, typically. 'Sue me'. Other than for executables I don't find it that 'discoverable' for what's available or might be relevant. I only recently discovered `man [7] hier` - but how was I supposed to know the page is called 'hier' (for hierarchy of course, but even that)? I got it from a unix.SE answer.)

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#57

Post by warent »

hollander wrote: post #21
warent wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulate macOS in a VM and download Spark ;) I recently discovered this email client and it completely revolutionized how I do email.

A 5GB limit, and the $6/month (?!?!) has a 10GB limit??????

For their file storage/sharing service unrelated to emailing.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#58

Post by thedanbob »

petepete wrote: post #16
thedanbob wrote: post #7

Does anyone know of a good Linux email client that isn’t crippled by show-stopping bugs of this sort? I used Mailspring for a while, which has a nice modern interface, but quit after discovering that my drafts were only saved locally, not on the server. This has been an open bug for at least two years. In the end I’ve always fallen back to Thunderbird as the least bad option.

Have you tried Geary? I helped a colleague get set up with ElementaryOS a while back and it looked really nice and, compared to Evolution, was much lighter and faster. I haven't used it in anger though, I tend to stick to email in the browser these days.

I did use Geary for a while, I can't remember now why I stopped. I appreciated how lightweight it was but I think it was just a little too lightweight, missing one or two features that I'd rather put up with thunderbird than live without.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#59

Post by renewiltord »

cranekam wrote: post #12

> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…

I tolerated a lot of crap from Evolution to get sync to my Gnome calendar stuff and notifications. Eventually it was too much, though. Sad. Overall I liked the software but data loss is hard to stomach.
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