if my email ever broke, i'd switch to a day planner

Email. As in messaging on the internet that predates the web browser itself. Before there was browsing, there was messaging. Why? Because it's just text, and that's the smallest, simplest data you can transfer.

I use email to organize my life, so I get all sorts of super nerdy when it comes to using it exactly the way I want. Very recently, I just did a major switch in how I use it.

And by the way, yes, I really do mean it when I say that if email wasn't an option for me, I'd switch to a day planner. Or to be more accurate, a day planner with sticky note tabs for whenever I need to make minor corrections or place a higher importance on certain tasks by using bright colored tabs.

The very specific way I've been using email for years is with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client with the Send Later add-on. That client with that add-on is the free way to have scheduled email, which is something I use a lot. Send Later allows one-time and repeating scheduled emails (weekly, monthly, biannual, annual, whatever). Brilliant software.

HOWEVER... my Thunderbird setup was best described as Frankenstein's Monster that's been beaten repeatedly. Years ago, I had to stop at Thunderbird version 52.9.1 and stay there because of other add-ons I used that were unsupported or just outright broke with any newer version of the software. Yeah, it worked, but it wasn't exactly an ideal setup.

For example, this crap:

What you're seeing there is an emoji bug with Thunderbird 52 in Linux. It is a known problem with that version software that will NEVER BE FIXED. Why? It was fixed with version 60 and beyond, so nobody bothered fixing 52. That means if running 52, you're screwed. And I had to keep running 52 just to continue using the add-ons I liked that broke in 60 and beyond. The only "fix" for 52 is to disable the Noto Color emoji font:

...but then that can break other programs that use that font. This is the kind of crap you deal with when running old software. I didn't have the emoji problem in Thunderbird back when I was running Windows 10, but instead had other stuff that would sometimes break. In either OS, I just couldn't win.

Send Later was the only reason I kept using Thunderbird, but I finally found a way to get scheduled email without Thunderbird + Send Later. Three ways, actually.

First way: KDE's KMail using the Send Later Agent plugin, which does work. However, I didn't like the client all that much.

Second and third way: Sylpheed as my mail client, and a combination of mutt, at and cron jobs to do scheduled emails as a background process.

If I want to schedule an email and bcc myself on it (I prefer that over using a "Sent" folder), that's done like this in Terminal:

at 3pm tomorrow (enter)

echo "Message body here" | mutt -s "Subject here" -b somedude@example.com (enter, CTRL+D, enter)

...and that's it. The mail will go out at 3pm the next day. I can get more fancy with it by specifying a very specific date+time if I want to, such as 12am Jan 1 2025 or whatever.

Cron jobs are used if I need a specific email to repeat itself. If there's a reminder I need every week, it would be something like this in crontab:

0 12 * * 2 echo "Take out trash" | mutt -s "Take out trash" my-email-address@domain.tld

That job would send an email to me every Tuesday at noon. The way cron jobs work is that the first 5 characters are * * * * *, which from right-to-left are weekday, month, day, hour, minute. Sun-Sat is 0-7, so Tuesday is 2. Month and day don't need to be set, so those stay as asterisks. 12 is hour 12, 0 is the 0 minute, and that means 12:00pm.

Both the subject line and body of message is just "Take out trash", because that's all I need to see.

Yes, I go through all this crap just to have reliable scheduled emails.

Sylpheed is a GUI mail client that's just "barely-GUI", which is just fine. Very lightweight, very quick. Mutt is only used to send scheduled emails. And I had to learn at and make cron jobs that actually work...

...but it works, and I was finally able to dump old Thunderbird 52 that never worked correctly in Windows nor Linux with the add-ons I was using.

Why Sylpheed?

Other than it being very light, it has baked in regex filtering that works exactly as it's supposed to. Thunderbird TO THIS DAY does not have any native regular expression filtering ability, which is all sorts of stupid. Believe me, if you know regex, then you understand how valuable that is to sort emails on arrival.

Another thing Sylpheed has baked in is the ability minimize AND HIDE to tray.

On minimize, a little mail icon just sits there next to the clock, and changes whenever a new email is in the inbox. That seemingly very simple thing is for some reason IMPOSSIBLE on nearly all other mail clients. Thunderbird, depending on version, can be made to do this with add-ons. I had that working a certain way in Windows and a different way in Linux. Both were annoying to set up, but in Sylpheed it's dirt simple. No add-ons necessary because it just has it with a couple of checkboxes and it works. The tray icon is there with no space wasted in the taskbar. Brilliant.

Yeah, this is all some seriously nerdy crap, but that's what I had to do just to get my email working how I like.

But again, if it ever gets to a point where I can't schedule emails, that's when I go to the department store and buy a day planner and sticky note tabs.

Published 2024 Oct 1