[GTALUG] Sane Email System?

[Peter King]

Hello!

I've just been informed that "legacy authentication" is going to be
disabled at the University of Toronto for my email account.  Well, I
suspected something like this was in the works when they adopted MS Outlook
365+ as the mail server, but it still isn't welcome.

Up to now, I've been able to use mutt and getmail for all my needs; I run a
daemon that picks up (and then deletes) email from a variety of servers
(University of Toronto, GMail, and so on) onto a single computer.  There
I apply all the filters, spam protection, sorting into various inboxes,
and so on.  To read email I just ssh in from any computer anywhere and run
mutt.  All configurable with nice text-based scripts.  The email files are
automatically backed up and sychronized to other computers, too.  When I'm
out of town I have the mail be downloaded/deleteed manually, and I have
full fallover capability, so if one machine is offline I can switch to
another without any hiccups.

But it looks like that is all going away, since Microsoft only supports
what they call "modern" email clients, and on Linux only Thunderbird.

I could switch.  But then rather than the fetch-and-store model, which has
worked fine over the years, I would either have to change to a view-in-a-
browser model (and so have to be running a GUI locally and store all my
email somewhere else out of my control), or chuck my university email
account and set up something else.

At the moment I'm really inclined to do the latter.  I'll just set up some
way of forwarding all my email to some text-based *NIX server somewhere
that is happy to let me run scripts to deal with email.  But maybe I'm not
being fair to the former alternative.  I have *no* experience with any of
the "modern" email clients, and have been stubbornly clinging to the plain
ASCII text as how email should work.  Maybe there are perfectly reasonable
email clients these days with powers I know nothing of.

(I am currently teaching a few courses at UCLA and was forced to use their
webmail system, run by Google, and I have to say I despise it: graphical
for no good reason, with limited search/sort capabilities, threading of old
messages not clearly visible, and so on.)

Any advice, suggestions, hints?  War stories?  Ways to thwart the powers
that be?  Thanks in advance.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		   (416)-946-3170 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

=========================================================================
GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC  36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42)
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20220303/e7885360/attachment.sig>