hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4264.txt

Episode: 4264
Title: HPR4264: Mintcast, high crimes and misdemeanors.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4264/hpr4264.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:15:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4264 for Thursday 5 December 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Minkast High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet, and is about 31 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Scotty talks about Minkast Episode 450 Crumbling Foundations.
Hello and welcome to another episode Hacker Public Radio.
I am your host, some guy on the internet.
It's been a little while since I had a chance to talk about email, and I've been given
a perfect opportunity to talk about email, and most of you already know I run Thunderbird.
I greatly enjoy running Thunderbird.
In the opportunity I brought us here, there's a podcast called the Minkast, great friends
over there, Joe Moss, Bill Majid, Eric, shout out to the Minkast crew, Episode 450, labeled
Crumbling Foundations.
I have links down in the show notes.
Now in the Linux Innerds portion of the show, if you check the show notes of the Minkast,
again, links in the show notes of HPR, Section 7 within the Innerds, they discuss mailboxes
and devices.
Now, a very interesting thing was said there, and I just had to reply.
And because of their wonderful license, they use a free culture license over their CCBYSA.
I was able to pull a clip and use it here in the show.
So let's go ahead and start off with Majid, or Anne Apologies, if the pronunciation is
not accurate.
The next one on the list is by keeping your mailbox and your devices secure and clean.
Now, this kind of seems a little bit like pissing in the wind, you know, keeping all the
myriad of email addresses, all the different things that they link into you and whatever
and keeping them, you know, I used to try and be the guy with, you know, zero unread emails.
I love giving up now.
Woo, so as you guys can tell, it doesn't sound like he's using Thunderbird just from hearing
a little clip from Majid, right?
And when he mentioned that he doesn't, he no longer attempts to keep the zero unread,
I don't know if there's a large amount of people that like to have a zero inbox.
So I'm not sure if that's what he was referring to, or if he legitimately met zero unread.
Well, regardless of which was said or met, he can have them both using Thunderbird and
his fantastic filtering system.
Now, let me just be clear, I'm not affiliated with Thunderbird, Mozilla, their foundations,
any of that.
I have not been asked to say or do anything on their behalf.
I found a solution in that project and I'm very enthusiastic about sharing the solution.
Let's go ahead and roll through another clip before we actually get to the solutions that
I want to propose here.
Just a few seconds later, Joe mentioned this, I do have rules set up so that subscriptions
are automatically marked as red because they can't make them auto-delete.
Now Joe actually said a little bit more around that and it sounds like Joe either is a Thunderbird
user or he does use a client and has a pretty good handle on the client's capabilities.
Now I'm guessing Thunderbird should be able to accommodate Joe with his auto-deleting
or the subscriptions.
This doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do, it just depends on how he wants
to do it.
But I think it's more than possible.
I would need to actually sit down and have a conversation with him, toss around a few
things.
The first being is he actually using Thunderbird.
Let's move on.
Now the portion of the show where the high crimes and Mr. Meeners occurred was when Bill said
this.
Email is like a constantly running faucet.
It would be impossible to try to keep up with for any period of time.
Exactly.
I agree with that entirely.
Wow.
Oh, wow.
Man, I had to go call my grief counselor, I mean, after hearing that, can't keep up with
it.
Now he was talking about self-hosting email, that would, you know, from what I've heard
because I've never attempted it, but from what I've heard, that statement may be more
accurate for self-hosting, but simply managing email, 2024 with Thunderbird after supernova,
where you're getting this stuff, Bill.
You too, Majid.
You read the all, yeah, he was in there, agreeing wholeheartedly, and let me just tell
you that sweet little angel Moss was nowhere in sight during these high crimes and Mr.
Meeners over here.
I did this.
This, this, this Tom fool read that was going on over there, but enough yak at the yak.
I'm going to go ahead and take you into Thunderbird and let's discuss the solutions.
Now this next part here is going to be for a Thunderbird user because I'm just going
to speak through it, give you enough details that you can understand.
If you're a Thunderbird user now, if you're not, we can have a conversation later on and
bring you up to speed with more detail.
And I'll try to leave some links in the show notes to kind of help point you through some
of what I'm saying as well, but I've talked about this enough in the past and I'm eager
to talk more about it, but let's get into the filters.
Now, you've got your email account.
You're probably using email in the browser.
You should stop doing that and go ahead and get yourself a Thunderbird client.
Get logged in, pull down as much your email as possible, close your client, then reopen
it.
Now I personally like to use a primary password.
It used to be called master password, but you know, a while ago they did a lot of
changes between master and main and all of that with GitHub and a few other places,
a few other projects adopted that.
Nonetheless, it's called the primary password.
This is so that you, for more security, rather than constantly reauthenticating through your
client to gain access to your emails, which are stored locally.
You protect that data using the primary password so you don't necessarily reauthenticate
you just, you know, you still have protection though.
Now I'm on a Linux system and between Linux and Windows or Mac system, what I've learned
is hotkeys are different depending on the system you're using.
So if you, if you go to file up on your top menu bar up there and you see the option
that says download and sync now, I really wish they had a hot key for it, but I mean,
you can use your menu shortcuts to get to it pretty quickly in Linux.
It's old F L S that'll get you over to the download and sync messages dialog box.
When you open that up, you're going to see that a couple of checks boxes there for mail
messages, your news group messages and unscent messages.
Then it's going to be a button on the right hand side of that dialog box.
You might have to resize it a little bit.
I noticed on my system I had to do that.
Click that button that says select over there and it's going to bring up a second dialog
box.
And this is where under this profile for each account that you have already authenticated
and downloaded messages for, you're going to see all of the directories, you know, inbox
drafts sent, yada yada, there's going to be those directories with a check box just
to the right of them.
Select every single one of those check boxes for all of your accounts.
Now once you've done that, you want to hit OK, which is going to bring you back to that
first dialog box, which says download and sync messages, then you're going to click
OK with that.
It's going to make sure, especially your trash and your junk mail, which is important
because if something accidentally gets sent to trash, you still want it synced locally
where you can have it backed up.
That's where we're getting around to next.
Once everything is downloaded and synced locally, that doesn't mean it's off of the server
if you're using iMap.
Pop 3, well, you're on your own there.
But with iMap, you'll just have a copy locally.
Then you can back up your Thunderbird directory, you know, depending on whether you're using
a flat pack or whatever, I'm not going to get into that.
But you can back up your Thunderbird directory.
And now you'll have a copy of all your emails locally.
You can dump that, you know, if you just tarball it, you can dump that tarball over on your
NAS or whatever and by the boom, by the bank.
All your emails are now synced locally and you have an offline copy.
So if you do blow something up, you can restore.
Not having to go online and download them all over again.
Once that sync is done, now we're going to hold down Alt, press T and then hit F. That's
going to take us to the tool menu and then to our filters with which are in tools.
From there, the very first filter that I would recommend you creating, this is all vanilla,
I should say.
No third party extensions and anything I'm talking about.
So you don't have to worry about that.
But there's a filter, the very first one, I like to call it the inbox guardian, but you
can refer to it as a bouncer because that's basically what it does.
So the guardian just has a list.
Well, first of all, let's talk about the design of it first.
So you'll understand why we're doing what we're doing.
There's only about a dozen or two dozen domains for which most people want to receive email
from.
I mean, just regular people, not like a business dealing with thousands, hundreds of thousands
of clients or anything.
So for most average people, a dozen, maybe two dozen domains you're going to want to receive
mail from and that's much easier to manage than the hundreds of thousands of domains you
do not want to receive mail from.
So you create a guardian filter and what that filter does is has that list of that one
dozen or two dozen, however many it is for you, the much more manageable number within
it.
And the rules go like this, anything that's not on the list automatically goes to trash.
That alone will clean up your inbox dramatically.
Guys, the future goes on and you subscribe to new things or whatever or a good example.
My bank uses multiple domains.
So some of the marketing material may come from a separate domain.
It's still legitimately my bank doing it, but you get what I'm saying.
So in a situation like that, you may have to add a few other domains to your bouncer,
but that's much, much easier to do than trying to filter all the trash.
You know what I mean?
Now for those of you out there that don't know what I mean by the domain, when you see
an email address, it's going to be useratdomain.com or you know dot net dot org, whatever.
Never mind the user part, only the at domain.
So at Amazon or at wherever, that's what you're going to want to save in the bouncer.
So the bouncer knows if it's coming from this domain, it is a legitimate domain that you
have checked out and they are allowed to pass through to the inbox, everything else trash.
You can also set a little option on there as well, mark them as red before they get sent
to the trash.
And what's important, make sure you select the move a message to trash versus delete,
because I'm going to get into those options a little bit later on.
Remember when Joe mentioned he'd like to have the subscriptions automatically deleted.
Yeah, we'll get into that later on, but right now we're using move to trash because yeah.
Now when you set this filter up at the top, it's going to say apply filter when you want
to always have manually run.
You want to check the box for getting new mail and then in the option filter before junk
classification.
And I also have periodically every 10 minutes selected as well.
When you're configuring a list that you want to compare against, you want to use match
all of the following, because in Thunderbird, there'll be three radio boxes that you can
check up.
There's going to be match all of the following match any of the following and match all
messages.
We're going to use the first one, match all of the following, then you create your list.
So an example, first of all, all of the options that I'm using are from.
That's what we're targeting, who wears it coming from, then it's going to be the next selection,
which is does not contain or it says doesn't contain, but yes, you get the point.
So it's from doesn't contain and then the last portion, it'll be the domain that you
want to specify as being allowed to enter the inbox.
So an example, from doesn't contain Amazon.com or excuse me, at Amazon.com.
Now what that's going to do is anybody trying to send you scam messages pretending to be
from the Amazon domain.
Their message is automatically now going to get filtered to the trash, because they're
not sending it from the legitimate Amazon domain, even though the email has been decorated
to appear as though it is a legitimate message from the Amazon company.
It doesn't come from the domain, therefore the bouncer doesn't let it in the inbox.
It goes straight to trash.
So once you got your bouncer set up, in my case, remember, I call it the inbox guardian,
but it's a bouncer.
Most people recognize that the word bouncer would have next categories or excuse me, tags.
What these tags do, they're like ushers, right?
These are filters that I'm talking about, by the way, I have a tag filter and I want you
to think about it like a usher.
If you've ever been to a concert or a church or some large event, ushers are the people
that sort of help you navigate the event, help you find your seating, help you find what
the restrooms are, yada yada.
So I want you to think about the tag usher.
A good example of an important tag filter that you can set up, TLTP codes, any show they
were talking about, how, you know, when you're using two-factor authentication, one of
the places you can have that arrive to is email, because I'd prefer to have it in email
versus SMS Joe and you set up a tag filter.
So it's just a regular filter and you just name it whatever you want, but I'm just going
to give you an example here, right?
You can call it, you know, tag important that way when you read it, you know exactly
what it's doing.
It's tagging messages as important.
Apply filter when always run manually, because you want to be able to do it manually whenever
you need to and getting new message, I mean, excuse me, getting new mail filter before
junk classification.
For these type, I do not use the periodically every 10 minutes.
I don't check that box, but down in the radio button section, I have match any of the following
and then from there, you can fill in the things that you want to be able to basically
reject.
So when the TOTP code comes in, they always have like the, for instance, once as your security
code, blah, blah, blah, you can just copy that part that says your security code and put
that into this filter.
So it'll be subject contains your security code.
Now this will only apply to things that were allowed to enter and exist within the inbox.
So if the bouncer let it in and it contains this as its subject, it will then be tagged
as important.
So now that you've got the understanding with the tag style filters, same thing for invoices
and whatever else you want to tag, news, letters and subscriptions, blah, blah, blah.
So those, I want you to think about those like ushers.
Another round of usher style filters will be your category filters.
What they do, they're like helping you find your seat or whatever, right?
So a category filter would be, let's say work.
You have your work domain, you don't want those messages just sitting in the inbox, you
want to filter them to the work directory.
So you have a filter set up for mind is just cat hyphen work, because you know that cat
is category, especially if you've done anything with ethernet, cat six, blah, blah, blah.
Most of you have set up a category style filter before, but this is for remember we got
new people in the audience as well.
So cat hyphen work is the name that I have on mine.
I have the manually run check along with getting new mail.
Remember filter before junk classification.
And on this one, I also have the periodically every 10 minutes selected as well down in
the radio box section.
We have to match any of the following, which is the middle radio button.
And then you could do the from contains the email address in this case or or you could
do the domain in there because if it's from work, you could just put the domain of work,
but you know, whatever.
And what I like to do with my filters as far as the perform these actions on this kind
of thing, I have a status check.
So set junk status to and then I have it not junk.
So that's the first thing I want to make sure that the work stuff does not ever get set
as junk.
Then it moves it from the inbox over to the work category.
So the work of director, excuse me.
So those are your category filters, right?
So you're tagging your category filters.
Those are your ushers.
They helping all of the new messages that were allowed to get into the inbox now get out
of the inbox into their assigned seats, which is in their directories.
Once they're in their directories and everybody's where they need to be or most of them anyway,
they'll be a few stragglers because remember, you don't want to have a thousand categories
in your email address, right?
I tried that before having everything like meticulously categorized and it was just a pain.
You know, you get categories and subcategories and everything.
Just it was just a pain.
I generalize as much as I can and everything outside of that.
Those things are allowed to just stay in the inbox.
In the reason why is because these next three filters, they're called the inbox cleaner.
Now, even though I say it as the one object, the inbox cleaner, it is composed of three separate
filters.
So there's inbox cleaner, zero, one and two.
And here's how it functions zero.
Only checks to see if the message is over a day old.
That's all it does.
If it's over a day old, the status is checked and applied.
So it says it's not junk, but market is red.
So that way when the new stuff comes in, that's allowed to enter the inbox due to the
guardian allowing it to pass, it'll stand out.
Anything old that's a day old, it's marked as red and sitting in the inbox because it
doesn't have an usher sending it to a seat somewhere, right?
And a good example of that.
I like to know when an item on my steam wish list, so steam steam powered is where if
you play PC games, many people go to purchase their computer games from, any who items on
my wish list, when they go on sale, like now during the steam winter sale, I like being
notified about that.
I don't want to keep those messages forever, but I like being notified.
And I also don't want to create a separate category for that.
It's nice just being able to look in my inbox and go, oh, yeah, that's on sale, I might
actually go purchase it, right?
So I like having those things in the inbox.
But the first cleaner zero with that would do is says, okay, that's more than a day old.
It's now marked as red automatically.
And I'll just call this the default settings for when filter is applied.
And that is the manual run, getting new mail with the filter before junk classification
and the periodically every 10 minutes.
Select the default filter apply settings.
And then from there in the radio box section, I have match all of the following.
And only thing we're matching is agent days, which is greater than one, right?
More than one day old, marked as red.
If it's still in the inbox, remember all of these filters and Thunderbird only automatically
apply to the inbox.
We can manually apply them to other directories, but let's move on.
Inbox cleaner one, remember, we just did zero.
So now we're on one.
What this does is if the message is still in the inbox and it is older than five days,
make sure that it's marked as red, make sure that it's status is not junk.
But apply the tag rubbish to it.
All right, so within five days, you haven't done anything with it.
And it's just sitting in the inbox.
It is now classified as rubbish.
So an usher came along, give it the tag, here you go, you're now rubbish.
There's some other checks in there as well.
I also have, so it's got the default filter apply rules under the radio box section.
I have match all of the following, which is the agent days greater than five.
And then I also have tags does not contain important invoice, you know, yada.
So these are things that if they come into the inbox and they're still there,
like a TOTP code or something, I do not want them being marked as rubbish.
So you get what I mean?
So this is just a way of making sure that it has to have no tag pre-applied to it.
And it's just sitting in the inbox for five days.
The final portion of the inbox cleaner, which is, you know, in my case, it's called inbox cleaner two.
If the message is older than seven days, and has the tag rubbish, right?
This is like a little safety thing here.
If it's older than seven days and has rubbish, tag placed on it,
then move it over to the trash.
And I also have the underactions perform, set status not junk, because it doesn't mean it's junk
just because I'm not doing anything with it.
Again, I want my notifications from steam.
So it's not junk, mark as red, and move it to the trash.
Because if I haven't done anything in seven days, then I'm not going to do anything with it.
So the inbox cleaner, those three filters,
filter zero, you know, inbox cleaner zero, inbox cleaner one, and inbox cleaner two,
work to keep the inbox empty.
Guardian lets you come in, the ushers give you your tag, and escort you to your seat.
Anybody else?
Well, you got seven days to sit around before you're asked to leave.
There are other filters as well that I run manual ones,
but I'm not going to get into those just yet.
Those few that I just talked about,
I believe that anyone running Thunderbird should be able to not only achieve inbox zero,
but maintain it.
You'll just have to put an effort into beginning to, you know, get your balancer set up properly,
which means you're going to have to go through and figure out everything that you want to keep,
everything that's allowed to go into the the balancer, and then go from there.
After you've invested that little bit of time,
getting your, your guardian set up, applying your tags if you want to do that and your categories,
the categories are important because you really don't want them just cluttering your inbox.
The reason why this is so great in the show when they were talking about keeping your inbox clean
as a security measure, there are attacks that occur when, say, for instance,
your password has been compromised due to, or unless your credentials have been compromised due to a data breach,
some company somewhere was supposed to do the right thing when storing your credentials in the database,
but they didn't.
And guess what, they were breached.
Well, they haven't quite gotten around to notifying you about that yet,
but the attackers, I don't know, open web selling those credentials to whoever will have them.
One of the things attackers will do when they're about to take over your account,
they will flood you with a ton of other crap email messages so that you will miss the message about your account being swapped.
You know what I mean?
So normally whenever you go into an account and you try to change like the email address or the phone number tied to the account,
or you change the password or something like that, they will send a message to the email registered on that account,
saying, hey, just notification, you just changed your contact information, right?
The way we typically contact you about security things, you just changed that.
Well, if you don't see that message because it's getting buried between just tons of other crap that's flooding you out of nowhere,
well, that just buys them a little bit more time after they've stored your account.
Most people probably wouldn't want to be bothered with it,
especially if you're checking the email in the browser, it may take you a few days to notice.
Holy cow, your account was just hijacked.
Now when you go to try and get that corrected, it becomes a little bit harder because, you know,
the company is going to say, hey, apparently you changed just days ago.
Now and all of a sudden, you don't like it and you have to explain
well, it wasn't me, et cetera, et cetera, keeping a clean inbox and having categories along with tags,
things that will just stand out whenever there's a change, you'll know.
And if you were to be bombarded with trash from wherever, it's just going to go to the trash anyways.
And it'll be marked as red before it goes to the trash.
So it's not like it's going to be a huge number beside the trash can, you know,
just sort of stare at you like, hey, all of a sudden you have 300 new messages you'd never done
anything, but no, no, they might be 300 messages in there, but I wouldn't care.
Now with Joe and the subscriptions that he wants to auto-delete,
most of that can be taken care of with the category filter.
So I do not recommend unsubscribing from anything.
Or, or, or, but yet not, not even a category filter, just take them out off the guardian list,
right? The bouncer. Just tell the bouncer, hey, that, that subscription that I signed up for over there,
I don't want to see them for a while, right? Take their name off the list.
Guess what? They just go straight to trash now.
Think about it. If it goes straight to trash and you are not notified of any of it anymore,
right? You don't have to go down there and keep going, mark as red or anything like that anymore.
By the way, if you didn't know this, if you click on the directory within Thunderbird,
hold down shift and tap the C key, the C isn't Charlie, it will mark that entire directory
in all message within it as red. So learn, learn your hotkeys. They're pretty good.
But for Joe in this situation, yeah, just take them, take them off the guardian and guess what?
Now they go on the trash automatically. You're not bothered by it. Then in the future,
there's something worth happening. Oh, man, you know what? I used to be a subscriber. Let me,
let me check the trash real quick. Oh, yep, they're still in there. You can go ahead and grab
that email address. Tell the bouncer, hey, you know what? This guy's cool again. Let him in.
Never miss a beat. You didn't have to go back to the web as signed up for it again or nothing
like that. So you're good. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Big thanks to Linux Mint.
Mintcast crew, well, they're actually not the Linux Mintcast crew. They cover the Linux Mint
distribution, but they're called the Mintcast podcast. Shout out to the Mintcast crew.
Thank you guys for the wonderful show that you've been doing. Thank you, Moss,
for not violating any sort of international treaties like Majid and Bill with their
high grimes and Mr. Miners over here. Thank you, Joe as well. All you guys are great, Eric.
Where's Eric? Eric was on a, well, you know what? Eric's fantastic. We love Eric,
but he wasn't on the show this time for this episode. We got to get more of Eric.
I'm some guy on the internet, and I'm out of here.
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