[quambene]

I'm still fine with Thunderbird as a MUA (more or less). Using number 1 and 4 as shortcuts to mark an email as "todo" or "urgent". Invitation to appointments (ics file format) can be accepted as well. Integration of contacts is a paint point though.

For email automation I have written a lightweight CLI in Rust [1] which supports MIME and SMTP. I'm currently integrating sendmail's capabilities as well, so that it can be used both as a MUA (message user agent) and MTA (message transfer agent). Cargo's feature flags will hopefully give you a UNIX-like experience (only compile the features you want to use).

In general, I share your sentiment. Email is still the best protocol to contact people outside of your organization. It's a pitty that encrypted email somehow haven't prevailed. The matrix protocol might be better suited for standardized and encrypted communication.

I would argue that every citizen should get a state-issued email address which then can be used for official communication with public authorities (signing and encrypting being a prerequisite). In Germany, you still get so much paper via regular mail. Even the ten-page Covid-19 quarantine order is send by post. It only arrives when quarantine is already over. (Admittedly, you get this order by phone, too, and they are asking for your email address.)

[1] https://github.com/quambene/pigeon-rs

[s5806533]

Thank you for responding, and for providing me with a link to your project. It is good to see that things like this exist in languages other than C. While some people on this thread in fact implied my constraints were unreasonable, I have to say I'm a bit fed up with all the statements on Wikipedia regarding security vulnerabilities of common mail software -- due to buffer overflows.