[Alpine-info] alpine and whitelisting?

[Carlos E. R. via Alpine-info]

On 2024-11-28 22:07, Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Nov 2024, Carlos E. R. via Alpine-info wrote:

> 

>> On Linux, you can use a tool to download email, like fetchmail. This 

>> handles the mail to an MTA, this to a sorting tool, like procmail, 

>> which calls spamassassin as a part of the process, then finally Alpine.

> 

>    Yes, I sort of second this approach. But there may be caveats.

> 

>> But you loose the immediacy of imap.

> 

>    True. I have a ~5 min delay (the time interval between my fetchmail

>    runs, controlled bu crontab). What you gain is that e-mail is stored

>    forever on your local machine, and not on anybody else's computer.

> 

>    Of course you can't access the mail on the local computer from another

>    computer unless:

> 

>    - you ssh onto your local computer and run alpine there (what I do now)

> 

>    - you run a local IMAP server (I did it long ago when travelling)


Or you copy email to your computer, leaving it in the server.

I used the fetchmail approach in the past, but it is important to me to 
be able to read email in at least two computers.


> 

> I precise the "sort of" and caveats above.

> 

> ------

> 

> In the past (quite som years ago) my institution managed its own 

> sendmail on a server. This might deliver to the user local machine. We 

> had spamassassin on the server, trained on our ham-and-spam message 

> base. We had also a daily crontab warning each user about quarantined 

> messages (we had global quarantine, not user's spam directories).

> 

> I also had procmail privately on my machine, with a further tier of spam 

> filters (and also sorting-in-folders-per-subject).

> 

> We had very few false negatives and false positives. I mean I received 

> very few true spam, and almost never had to recover good messages marked 

> incorrectly as spam in the quarantine.

> 

> ------

> Then my institution moved to Gsuite (gmail).

> 

> I arranged fetchmail to get my Gsuite inbox (then it was easy, today is 

> not so easy) every 5 min, so I could run all my procmail filters, 

> sorting by subject etc.

> 

> For Gsuite Spam folder I instructed alpine to (then easy) to access it, 

> which I did once per day. I found a bit more false positives (good 

> messages marked as spam by the wondeful Google filters). At the time 

> what I did was then to use the Gsuite web interface and tag the messages 

> as "not spam". I hoped that would uinstuct the filters, but this is NOT 

> the cass. so I gave up. Now if I find a false positive in  Gsuite Spam 

> folder when looking at it with alpine, I just save (mov) it to my local 

> inbox.

> 

> ------

> Recent complication with Gsuite.

> 

> They disabled support to "less secure apps" (they call fetchmail or 

> alpine so, apparently because of refusal to pay a bribe, to say it in a 

> politically uncorrect way), forced 2FA and/or OAUTH2, etc.

> 

> There are two ways to overcome that:

> 

>   - one is to use an "app password" (different from the normal user

>     personal password) for alpine and fetchmail


That's what I do.


...


many nuances.

-- 
Cheers / Saludos,

		Carlos E. R.
		(from 15.5 x86_64 at Telcontar)
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