blog: 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.