Hello everyone. So today I'm here to talk about ARC. We'll see that, but more of that
in a minute. So about myself, so my name is Robin. I'm an open source and Frank Zappa
enthusiast. Maybe these things are related, I'm not sure. Actually in a previous career
I was a sound engineer in Brussels and now I went to software. It took some time. And
I took over the maintenance of ARC since 2021. Actually this project was created by Drew
DeVolves. I'm assuming some of you know who that guy is. And there was a question about
how do you pronounce this thing? So who cares? It's not, I mean. So Drew pronounces it with
his American accent, orc. In French we say, and I've asked an Hungarian guy, he said,
we say, I guess you can choose. As long as it's more or less the same. So what is it? It's
actually an email client that's running in your terminal. Like very similar to mutt or
pine, alpine. There's even a melly or melly, I don't know how to pronounce that. It covers a large
span of protocols. I don't think there's a standard protocol that we don't support yet.
One of these features which is kind of unique is that you can have multiple tabs. So when you're
using mutt starting to compose, you actually, the editor takes over the terminal and you are stuck.
You cannot browse your other emails or watch the original email while replying. You can do that
with ARC. Also you can have VIM style commands and key binings. You can compose in VIM and
view your emails in less. There's an account configuration wizard. I'm speeding up because
I'm seeing the timer. One unique feature is the filters. There's an example just after.
You can control it with install scripts. Actually you have a virtual terminal embedded into ARC.
So you can start shells, edit or whatever is running in the terminal. You can run it into
ARC in a frame or in a new tab. It has been designed with email contribution in mind.
So you can actually apply patches from emails directly without using GitHub or anything else.
So it's like the Linux kernel. They use that way. It's a short demo. I don't know if anyone in the
back can see well. So this is a short presentation where you can, so this is just plain text.
You can also have, you can visualize patches and with via filters you can colorize things. So it
looks like a patch. You can also view HTML in plain text via filters as well. And you can see
also images with filters. Soon we'll actually add also a way to visualize real images using the
SIG cells and KT extensions. So if you have a modern terminal you'd be able to
really visualize images without the hyper pixelated way. And yeah, anyway, so here I'm just running
a terminal and you can just run anything you want. There's no problem. Okay, so what are filters?
Filters are just, you define per mime type, so text plane and then you define a command. And you
can use it to do a bunch of various things. So you pipe a message by part into a command, then
into a pager which gets rendered. And these are small examples. So anyway, you can just,
we have a lot of examples in the man pages. And 017 just got released this week. So if you want
to check it out, please do. And please give us some feedback on the mailing list. And that's
what I have. So thank you. Thank you very much. Short question, which probably language is used?
It's written in Golan. Golan. Okay. All right. Any questions?
Do you use server-side search in, for example, Jmap or IMAP, or do you rely on your entire mail
history being synced to the local disk? No, it's all server-side except when you're using a not-much
or mail-deer backend. So server-side. Yeah. Right. Questions? Yes, one, two. Yeah, this inspires
my next question. What about any kind of optimizations for the indexes and searches for local files?
And so we have, if you're having your mail local, you can use not-much to index your
mails and search. And if you're using IMAP or Jmap, usually the servers have the indexes.
So you can, the searches are pretty fast most of the time. And we currently, if you're just
using plain mail-deer, you don't have any index speedup. Maybe we were thinking about
running a not-much, you know, hidden into ERC to speed up the searches, but I don't know.
We were still wondering what to do with that. Yeah. Thanks for your talk. So the last time I
tried to use ERC, my IMAP and STP, I do SSH forwarding. So they are ports and local hosts.
And then the certificate work, and I had to apply patches. I can't use Go. I don't
can't rebase Go patches because I don't know anything about Go. And is that, yeah,
is that something that you want to support? Or is... Are you using Proton mail or anything?
No, it's at my works mail. Okay. And so is it a self-signed certificate or...
An internal domain that I can't access from outside. I need to SSH and then it's a certificate,
but for local hosts at my side. Okay. And maybe you can install the certificates in your CA
certificate store local or something like that. Maybe we could do something in ARC mit.
It feels like this is TLS stuff, which is out of our hands.
Yeah, I don't think so. Okay. Yeah.
If there's a variable you can use a set before you start the application to ignore...
Go looks at a different place for your certificates. So if you only talk to this one host...
Oh, maybe, yeah. Yeah, we could do that or we could say ignore invalid certificates, but I don't know.
I'm more comfortable with installing the certificate in the global bundle so that,
yeah, then you don't have to hack into anything and it will work.
All right. Have a look at NK3rd, the greatest open source. Yeah.
There's a question from the internet from Moritz. Does the account with do autoconfig?
All right. Yeah, so there's a very basic autoconfig based on DNS server entries.
But not all providers actually do provide server entries and Moritz is currently submitting a patch
series to improve that autoconfig stuff. Yeah. Very subtle. Nice. Just one last thing.
There was one guy who actually reported an issue during FOSDEM because the FOSDEM Wi-Fi only gives
you an IPv6 address and we had a bug in IMAP where we actually resolved only the IPv4.
Anyway, it's fixed, pushed, and yeah. FOSDEM works. Yeah. Thank you again. Thank you.