Configuration

Adapted from the Jaromail manual source. Copyleft © 2010–2023 Denis Roio. GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later; full permission notice.

The place where Jaro Mail is initialized, its folder contains all configuration files.

From now own, we will call this place the MAILDIR.

Configurations are in readable plain text files that can be edited using any editor. Inside them there are comments to explain the settings: all comment lines start by '#' and will be ignored by JaroMail.

The most important files to start configuring are:

• Accounts/default.txt : main account configuration (there can be more than one file in the Accounts/ folder)
• Aliases.txt : more email addresses one may receive on the configured accounts
• Filters.txt : Full set of mailinglist sorting rules
• Applications.txt : mime type associations to programs used to open attachments
• Mutt.txt : mutt specific custom configurations

Accounts

Inside the Mail directory is found the folder Accounts with brief instructions and default templates to fill with Imap and Smtp account configurations to fetch mail. A default template will be found in fresh installations: Accounts/default.txt. The configuration can be edited with one's favourite text editor, the format of the file is pretty self-explanatory.

It is possible to have more than one account (simply as a new file in the Accounts/ directory) and refer to it using the -a commandline option. For instance when we configure Accounts/gamer.txt as an alternative mailbox then we can connect it using jaro peek -a gamer

Config files in Accounts can also contain my_hdr that will configure custom header lines (for instance GPG-ID or X-Organisation) that will be added to the mails sent. For more information about the vast amount of configurations supported please refer to the Mutt documentation^[1].

Organization

One of the main goals for Jaro Mail is to organize the e-mail workflow so that one's attention is dedicated to important communications, rather than being constantly distracted by various degrees of spam and the need to weed it out of the mailbox. This ambitious task is pursued by realizing an integrated approach consisting of flexible whitelisting and the distinction between mails from known people and the rest.

Folders

First lets start with a categorization of the standard maildirs and a brief description for each. This information is very important to understand how Jaro Mail works: these maildirs are standard in Jaro Mail, here they are listed in order of priority

Folder	What goes in there
known	Mails whose sender is known (Whitelist)
priv	Unknown sender, we are among explicit recipients
unsorted	Unknown sender, we are not among recipients
zz.blacklist	Mails whose sender is not desired (Blacklist)
zz.spam	Mails that are tagged as spam (server-side)
zz.bounces	Mail bounces like mailman and similar

The advantage using such a folder organization is that every time we open up the mail reader we will be presented with something we are likely to be most interested in (known people replying our mails) and progressively, as we will have the time to scroll through, mails from "new people" or mass mailings of sort.

This setup is handy especially considering it produces sieve filters that can be uploaded to mail servers and processed server-side. Imagine having your email on a fixed computer, but occasionally checking it from a mobile phone: server-side filtering will save you time by presenting a clean INBOX of whitelisted contacts for the mobile phone use.

Please note this organization does not includes spam, which is supposedly weeded out on the server via spamlists: White/Blacklisting has more to do with our own selection of content sources than with the generic protection from random pieces of information.

At last, anything that is matched by filters configured in Filters.txt will be saved into the named maildir, whose name can be freely choosen.

Whitelist

The way whitelisting works if quite crucial to this setup and, at the same time, is fairly simple since it does not include any automatic detection, learning filters, Markov chains or Bayesian A/I. We believe the user should be in full control of prioritizing communication channels and at the same time constantly able to tweak the setup in an easy way.

To whitelist an address is sufficient to send it an e-mail: at the moment the message is sent Jaro Mail will remember the destination address and prioritize all messages coming back from it. This we call implicit whitelisting.

To explicitly whitelist an address from inside the mail reader index press [ a ] while selecting an email, this will add in the whitelist the sender address (From: header). If you want to add all addresses reached by the mail (From: To: and Cc: fields) use the same letter capitalized pressing shift [ A ].

All addresses selected this way will have the privilege of ending up in your known/ folder, plus their name and e-mail will be completed automatically when composing a new email, pressing the Tab key while indicating them among the recipients.

Blacklist

To blacklist an address instead one can use the [ z ] key while an e-mail is selected on the index: the sender indicated in the From: field will be downgraded to the very bottom of your priorities, closes to spam than the rest, the most infamous zz.blacklist/ folder.

Organization In Brief

Below a recapitulation of keys related to the white and blacklisting functionality, to be used in the e-mail index or when an e-mail is open inside the mail user agent:

List	Key	Function	Fields
White	a	Add the sender address	From:
White	A (shift)	Add all addresses	From: To: Cc:
Black	z	Blacklist the sender	From:
Black	Z (shift)	Blacklist all addresses	From: To: Cc:

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1. The Mutt configuration manual is found on http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual or simply typing 'man mutt' in a console terminal. ↩︎