Use for unreadMail

Or: “Print the internet”

Wherein I expand on the reason I wrote (lib)UnreadMail:

I wanted to reduce my time on electronic devices. A big chunk is devised to checking my mails, or at least that’s the initial intent - I use unreadMail now to automatically check my mail and print it out. I decide then if I need to go online or if it can wait. This setup only works because of proper spam control, otherwise things would be flooded. Here’s the rough outline of what I did:

• Set up Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi. Changed the account password and set locale and timezone in raspi-config.
• Set up a CUPS print server on there and added my printer.
• Deployed the unreadMail binary on the raspi with the .pem certificate of my server, a fetch script and a print script. Fetch calls unreadMail with the appropriate parameters for cert, server, user and pwfile. Print uses Fetch to get all unseen mails, then limits their number and length and sends them to the printer. If something breaks the limit, this is indicated on the printout. If there are no mails to print, this is indicated as well.
• A cronjob calls Print once a day.

I know that this wastes paper. But I also know, that the alternative wastes my time.

congstar

congstar said they would cancel my prepaid phone account because my last credit purchase was more than 15 months ago - unless I purchase credit now. Damn. I still have 10 Euros on there from the last time they forced me. In other words: In the last 15 months I have used about a quarter of the phone credit that an average user flings away in one month. ‘member when it seemed excessive to pay 20 DM in one month for your phone bill? I ‘member…

libUnreadMail

I wrote a small library in golang that implements barely enough IMAP to read unseen mail, that you can find here. It contains an example program that fetches all mails and prints the plain text to stdout.

I found the existing IMAP libraries too confusing to use - but having seen the RFCs concerning IMAP, that’s hardly the implementers’ fault. My stuff implements only the tiniest fraction of what IMAP encompasses. The standard is waaaay to big for my taste.

Hermannsdenkmal, Donoper Teich

• 12 km around the Hermannsdenkmal and Hiddesen (Detmold)
• moderate climb of 330m
• passes the Donoper Teich (small lake), which looks quite dead to be honest (it’s also fed by a stream of suspiciously brown water)
• passes the Hiddeser Bent, one of the few remaining raised bogs - the trail around the bog is a bit muddy
• we had quite a nice view

The last one is the bog.

Brilon