Introduction

With the widely discussed issues of Mozilla now scanning and using your personal data, I decided to get rid of the two programs I used from this company: firefox and thunderbird.

Firefox –> ungoogled-chromium and netsurf

For the browser I have a lot of choices in the OpenBSD ports tree. There are chrome based programs like chrome, chromium, iridium and ungoogled-chromium. And I also found netsurf which I quite like. It is very fast. Of course it has its shortcomings with complex websites such as youtube.

I like ungoogled-chromium a lot as it is much quicker and more responsive than firefox and uses much less RAM.

Let’s hope for the best with regards to privacy…

Thunderbird –> Claws-Mail

I thought that getting rid of thunderbird would be a quite hard one. I only knew mutt/neomutt as an alternative. I used it for a few months half a decade ago. I did not like it so much, because you have to configure everything for yourself. You need a lot of small programs working together and in my experience that was quite fragile.

A short websearch lead me to Claws-Mail which seemed to be exactly what I wanted: A thunderbird clone without Mozilla in the background. And it is pretty much superb. I’m sorry that I haven’t heard of it before. I would have used it for years already.

Claws-Mail on OpenBSD

In order to get Claws-Mail working on OpenBSD the way I used thunderbird I did the following:

pkg_add claws-mail aspell-de aspell-fr

Claws-Mail and mailbox.org

I use an email client only for mails, addressbooks and calendar. As a user of mailbox.org I had to the the following things to get mailbox.org to work. In contrast to thunderbird you have to configure the servers yourself, but it takes only a few minutes.

imap

imap.mailbox.org:993
Enable tls.
The credentials for the server are just your mail address and password from mailbox.org.

smtp

smtp.mailbox.org:465
Enable tls.
The credentials for the server are just your mail address and password from mailbox.org.

Address book

For the address book I exported my address book in the mailbox.org web interface to a .vcf file. In Claws-Mail you can easily import this very file and get all your addresses.

Calendar

For the calendar I exported my mailbox.org calendar from the webinterface by copying its link and pasteing this link to the WebCal subscriptions of the vCalendar plugin of Claws-Mail.

This vCalendar plugin can be added via Configuration | Extensions/Plugins. In the Plugins dialog you choose Activate.. and select the vCalendar plugin.

Please keep in mind that the webcal format for the imported calendar is read only.

For me this is not a problem, because I tend to make new entries only via my mobile devices.

If this is not enough for you you need a mail client that supports webdav. I can recommend evolution from the gnome project in this case.

pkg_add evolution gnome-keyring

Adding gnome-keyring is important, because otherwise you have to enter your passwords again and again.

Conclusion

The shift to Claws-Mail was superb. The software does the same for me as thunderbird and is much quicker and more responsive.

I am thrilled.