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HowToEmailFromLinux

(Perhaps this page should be modified to be a Dartmouth email page...)

When trying to check your email under Linux, you have a number of different choices:

you can stick with real blitzmail clients that offer pretty much all of the features with which you are familiar:

• Traditional Blitzmail-oriented clients
  • Web-based email --- WebBlitz, NetBlitz
  • Java email client --- jBlitz?
  • Text-based email --- TextBlitz

or you can be a bit adventuresome and try a different email client

• IMAP clients
  • GUI --- Evolution, Balsa
  • text-based --- Mutt?

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"Traditional" Blitzmail Clients

The web-based solutions are very platform-independent, and do not require any installation of software beyond a basic webbrowser.

Although the web-based solutions are not officially supported, they are (in my experience) quite robust and have nearly no bugs or downtime.

jBlitz is also unsupported, and some users have reported satisfactory results with it.
We are working on getting to source for jBlitz so that we can develop it further and fix a few known bugs in the code.

TextBlitz is really unsupported, and although it seems to kind of maybe work right now, it has very few features and is kind of a neat hack. Thus, we don't recommend that you rely on it as your primary mail client.

IMAP Clients

Through a recent upgrade to the Blitzmail server code, you can now use the IMAP protocol to connect to your email.

Especially for anyone that has been using POP3 to connect to the Blitz servers, IMAP supports remote folders, SSL encryption, and many other features (some of which are not even available to Official Blitzmail Clients).

Under Linux, many people have reported success in using Evolution, a mail client by Ximian.

In order to setup Evolution, check out the page HowToConfigureEvolutionForDartmouth?, which gives information on the IMAP settings that you'll need to change.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Mutt? as another IMAP mail option.

I don't use Mutt personally, but from what I've heard it is a powerful text-based email client that supports a whole pile of protocols including IMAP.

For those terminal-purists out there, Mutt is probably your cup of tea.

RobinsonTryon - 24 Jan 2003