One Thing Well

Find Big Mail

Find Big Mail scans your Gmail, labelling the large ones so you can reclaim some space.

-M

-M gets one days worth of commit messages, creates a beautifully designed email and sends it to a list of recipients.

A nice way to keep tabs on a Github-hosted project. Also, the developers noticed an interesting side-effect:

Since our beta testers are reading a list of commit messages everyday, we started to feel self concious about what we write. The result is that we are making better commits and better commit messages.

Reminder Thing

Reminder Thing sends you one email a week listing upcoming birthdays and anniversaries gleaned from your Google contacts and calendar.

Thanks, Geoff and Richard!

Shortmail

Shortmail is an email service that strictly limits messages to 500 characters, no attachments allowed.

Also of note:

• Public conversations, which look like this.
• Open conversations (as above, but anyone can join in).
• Tight integration with Twitter (excessively so, perhaps—you need a Twitter account to get a Shortmail account).
• A widget that lets any reader of your site to send you a Shortmail.

I’m not entirely convinced that the 500 character restriction is practical for everyday email, but the enforced brevity and ‘social’ features make Shortmail a good choice for a secondary account tied to your weblog, Twitter account, &c..

Notmuch

Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn’t receive messages (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn’t send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that work is provided by an external library, Xapian. So if Notmuch provides no user interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what’s left here? Not much.

Self-deprecating description notwithstanding, Notmuch is well worth a look if you have a large archive of email and want to find messages quickly. It can be used with mutt, from within Vim or Emacs, or via dedicated client alot.

lbdb

The Little Brother’s Database is an address book that can search its own database, and many others—the Mac OS X Address Book, Google contacts (via goobook), mutt aliases, GPG keyrings, VCF files, &c..

OfflineIMAP

OfflineImap operates on a REMOTE and a LOCAL repository and synchronizes emails between them, so that you can read the same mailbox from multiple computers. The REMOTE repository is some IMAP server, while LOCAL can be either a local Maildir or another IMAP server.

I linked to offlineimap last year, but since then it’s improved a great deal—it’s faster, thanks in part to a new SQLite backend, and much more stable—so I thought I’d give it another plug.

Here’s the ~/.offlineimaprc I use to sync with/backup my Gmail account:

[general]
metadata = ~/.local/share/offlineimap
accounts = GMail
maxsyncaccounts = 1
ignore-readonly = no

[Account GMail]
localrepository = Local
remoterepository = Remote
status_backend = sqlite

[Repository Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/mail

[Repository Remote]
type = Gmail
remotehost = imap.gmail.com
remoteuser = your.email@gmail.com
remotepass = yourpassword
ssl = yes
maxconnections = 2
realdelete = no
folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Google Mail]/Spam', '[Google Mail]/Bin']

NB: Gmail’s folder names differ in different countries, so you might need to edit the last line, and perhaps add some more folders to exclude (eg. ‘All Mail’).

Handpick

An interesting way of sharing links—use a bookmarklet to save pages of interest, and Handpick will send a digest of the day’s URLs to your friends via email.

Pipemail

Pipemail is a free and secure web-based e-mail application. The project was founded in Sweden during the summer of 2008, with the intention of providing secrecy as well as security for investigative journalists and oppositional politicians that risk imprisonment or others whom may face consequences due to their religious or political beliefs. Pipemail is open for anybody who wishes to communicate freely without eavesdropping.

They use AES, further secured by a system that fragments the decryption key, storing half on the server and sending the other half in a mail’s headers.

Also notable: a ‘this message will self destruct in five seconds’ type service, where encrypted mails are destroyed after reading.

Dripread

Dripread converts your book into a daily digest that you can read by email.

The drip-drip approach to reading can work well—I’ve been reading Pepy’s Diary via daily updates since 2003, and read a page of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks every day for 1,565 days straight—but I wonder how well suited it is to books that don’t have a daily rhythm.

Via MetaFilter

dmc

An ultra-minimalist email client.

From the README:

Create a mail:

    $ dmc -m "Hello World"

Attach files to the last mail created with 'dmc -m':

    dmc -A file.zip

Manually construct the final mail with encoded attachments:

    $ cd ~/.dmc/box/myaccount/out/
    $ dmc-pack mail.lv3s6l.d/* 
 

Notes For Later

Quickly save notes to an interface you’re already familiar with: your email. No login is required, just an email address.

Install a bookmarklet to send web pages—the link, plus either the full text or a section you’ve highlighted—direct to your inbox.