mh doom

[xela]

xela@dr-wily:~$ inc
If you are seeing this message, you are using POP to connect to MIT's
legacy mail ("Cyrus") infrastructure.

Please note that MIT is planning to retire the Cyrus IMAP/POP servers
in December 2013.  You will be contacted individually prior to your
scheduled migration.  After your migration, you will no longer be able
to use "inc" to check your e-mail, and will have to migrate to a
different e-mail client such as Pine.

For more information, please see http://debathena.mit.edu/inc
(You will only receive this message once.)

Heavy sigh.

Comments

[coraline]

yup. i switched over last year when they made the policy clear, but it really did feel like they'd ripped it out of my cold (not so dead) hands :}

[alierak.livejournal.com]

There's probably a fairly simple workaround if you've got something like fetchmail. If I remember right inc can read from a local mail spool too, so you just need something that speaks IMAP to download the mail with.

[siderea]

If I remember right inc can read from a local mail spool too

Yes, this is what I do. Instead of using the default inc behavior, I use procmail to sort my mail into what I think of as subspools, and then inc those: inc -file $subspool. Note, however, that when you use the -file option, inc no longer defaults to clearing the spool the way it does usually, so to force that behavior, you add -truncate.

I know our host despises procmail, but I am assuming that if MIT is allowing pine, there is some way to get mail delivered to procmail, and from procmail, it's a simple thing to dump it into a local spool of your choice.

Of course, none of this helps if MIT deletes nmh. Ah, I see they're not planning to.

...I should go ask if my hosting company has a referral bonus.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Yer wot? (translation to merkin: Huh?)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that smile, Sam. :)

That's not even a transAtlantic issue: to a first approximation, that post will only make sense to people who've been using MIT's email system continuously for the last 20 years. (There are maybe 10⁴ other people it would make sense to, but little chance a lot of them read my LJ.) The short form is that when I went to read my email this morning, I got a notice from MIT that, as of December, I will no longer be able to read my email with the tools I've been using for the last 20 years. A very rich and nerdy set of tools, that I'm still using not least because IMO they are vastly better than anything tha'ts come along in the mean time.

[siderea]

Is, too, a TransAtlantic issue!

Only place I could find to run nmh for me with adequate disk space for my mail archives is run by a bunch of blokes in The Original Cambridge. :/

I love nmh so much, I'm paying £115/yr for it.

[jered]

Are they switching entirely to Exchange? Because, you know, "real businesses use Microsoft products"?

Ugh. You'd think that Zimbra or even (*spit*) gmail would be a more sensible option for MIT. But IS&T hasn't really mattered for about a decade, has it?

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

That's my understanding. But bear in mind that for most of the past five years or so, I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and going La, la, la — I can't here you! whenever discussions of where MIT is going on this front come up.

[coraline]

yeah -- they've already switched over most employees to the exchange servers...

[cfox.livejournal.com]

I suggest either a first-class exchange client (such as Mail.app) or forwarding your mail elsewhere.

[angerona.livejournal.com]

Do you know of any good webmail IMAP clients? Or I suppose I can wait until my account gets converted to the new webmail outlook interface (while the old webmail continues sucking big time).

[siderea]

D: