Basis for package recommendations in OpenBSD 7.3
Web Browsers
In OpenBSD, the major browsers can be categorized by security updates and pledged, privilege separation. Historically, only firefox-esr makes it through the 6/12month support cycles without dependency issues. Iridium, Chromium and Ungoogled-Chromium are reported to provide better privilege separation. Chromium provides both security updates and privilege separation at the expense of Google's tracking. Iridium uses the same Chromium codebase and attempts to patch out Google tracking. Iridium updated during the 7.2 ports freeze and may generate "out of date" browser warnings . Iridium goes through a time consuming validation process testing for Google data harvesting. Ungoogled-Chromium uses Iridium patches, applies them to the latest release but does not test for browser data being sent back to Google. Firefox-esr recommended due to more frequent security updates in OpenBSD.
A quick note on
www/firefox-esr. The default install has hidden messages about missing gvfs and xdg settings. This was addressed by adding packages
devel/py3-xdg and
x11/gnome/gvfs. To import your bookmarks.html, place the file in ~/Downloads and start firefox-esr from the command line in that folder.
Email Clients
Email clients fall into 4 categories. In the first category, inline html, OpenBSD has
mail/evolution and
mail/mozilla-thunderbird. Evolution pulls many Gnome3 dependencies. Html emails are generally frowned upon as click prompts can be disguised to run scripts or take you to a spoofed website. It is reported that this is how the GRU gained access to the DNC's email server. Evolution and Thunderbird have an option to display emails as text.
The second category has text based email clients with GUI's.
mail/sylpheed and
mail/claws-mail are available. Claws-mail, forked from Sylpheed, provides plugins but 7.3stable has no html plugins. Previously claws-mail html plugins were discontinued in OpenBSD due to security problems. I previously recommended Sylpheed in this category but the present version uses the gtk2 toolkit. Gtk2 is not receiving any more updates - even security updates. Sylpheed 3.9 is in beta; beta and currently is still based on gtk2.
mail/claws-mail is currently recommended for those who prefer a graphical client.
A third category uses *.html to access IMAP emails.
mail/roundcube,
mail/geary and
mail/trojita fall into this category. The later 2 utilize webkit.
The last group are keyboard driven, text clients like
mail/mutt, mutts' feature enhanced fork:
mail/neomutt and
mail/alpine. If you have to frequently work through large numbers of emails, setting up and learning the keystokes for mutt/neomutt is worthwhile. I'd have chosen Mutt but the manually edited configuration script can be a massive chore. A mutt/neomutt configuration helper,
mail/mutt-wizard, was added in 7.2 and provides an "up and running" neomutt/isync configuration for someone without alot of time or unix/linux experience but has some redundancy. Once a Mutt user gets their configuration tuned, they tend to stay with it.
Alpine has a SETUP interface that mutt lacks and it should be easy to configure for Gmail and other IMAP providers.
The following link has XOAUTH setup instructions for Gmail/Outlook365/Yahoo/Yandex
https://alpineapp.email/alpine/alpin...c/xoauth2.html
It utilizes mbox email formating rather than #MH which should not matter unless you archive emails.
Mail Storage formats
The pkg-readmes have an alpine entry to set up pop3, imap4 and smtp. The pkg-readme, imap4 entry for Spectrum did not work for me. I had better results by entering Setup(S) -> Config(C) and entering the following syntax for "Inbox Path"
Code:
{imap.example.com:993/ssl/user=user@example.com}Inbox
The options for Inbox Path are described in detail here:
https://ratfactor.com/slackware/alpi...fig-notes.html
Staying in the Config interface, I added the SMTP Server (starttls):
Code:
{imap.example.com:567/tls/user=user@example.com}
or for ssl
Code:
{imap.example.com:465/ssl/user=user@example.com}
To have your sent emails stored on the imap server, rather than locally, set the default-fcc using the same syntax to the Sent Mail folder.
For spectrum, the folder was displayed as Sent Mail but the page source showed the folder to be SentMail.
Code:
fcc-name-rule={imap.example.com:993/ssl/user=user@example.com}SentMail
Another quirk for my Email provider; I also needed to add a "From: header" as described in the following link.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...not-send-email
This should get Alpine email up and running. To fine tune Alpine, this website is helpful:
https://opensource.com/article/21/5/alpine-linux-email
If you have questions on configuring
mail/alpine, please start a new thread.
Office
The most popular office suite is
editors/libreoffice. It is an active, widely utilized suite that has good compatibility with MSOffice. It is large and resource heavy but is well implemented in OpenBSD. Lighter office utilities are
editors/abiword,
math/gnumeric and
editors/calligra. Calligra is Qt5 based. Libreoffice is recommended unless your system is i386 based or ram limited. If Libreoffice runs slowly, consider Abiword and Gnumeric.