February

Notes from the Help Desk: Tech advice on email clients

Dear Riseup,

Help! I’m really into Riseup and want to support you all in every way I can. My roommates convinced me to go back to Riseup after getting used to Gmail.

Do you have advice for people wanting to get off Gmail? It’s a hard transition. Gmail’s filters and conversation threads are really good for self-organization. Can you suggest any ways to do this through Riseup or through e-mail programs?

Hello dear Riseup User,

If you have your own computer, you can use your Riseup email through an email client. There is information on mail clients in our help documentation at help.riseup.net/en/email-clients. We recommend that you use Thunderbird, and you can read how to set up Thunderbird at help.riseup.net/en/thunderbird. In this environment you can set up folders, view by threads, and automatically filter, just like Gmail.

One thing to decide is whether to use POP or IMAP. If you set up a mail client to use POP, that means all your email is downloaded to your computer and off our servers. This means you have more control over your data. If you use IMAP, then your emails are stored on our server, so your email is synced up if you sometimes check it through webmail or mail clients on other computers.

With Riseup email you can use thread view all the time to track what’s happening in a conversation. You can also use automatic filters so that much of my mail is sorted in the right folder quickly.

You can set up filters in the Riseup user management system. With filters, you can direct mail to go to specific folders based on whether it meets criteria you define. For example, it might be useful to have a filter that moves all mail from a certain mailing list to a specific folder. When you set up your filters through the Riseup user system, your messages are filtered no matter how you check your email. (You also could set up filters through your mail client, but then that filter would only apply to that install of that mail client.)

Here are directions for how to set up mail filters through Riseup’s user system: https://help.riseup.net/en/email-filters#how-do-i-edit-my-email-filters

Spam! Spam! Spam!

Why is there so much spam? It’s so annoying! You may not realize it, but we are furiously working to plug the holes that are letting the spam in. There have been many improvements over the last few months, and some things that didn’t work out so well… we wont bore you with the details.

However, we will tell you what you can do to improve the situation. First of all, check your spam settings, and consider increasing the sensitivity of the filter and changing other options. This is explained in https://help.riseup.net/spam. Secondly, if you receive a spam in your Inbox, you can help our filters learn by simply moving that message into your Spam folder (only if you use IMAP). Similarly, if a message was incorrectly put into your Spam folder, move it into your Inbox and our system will learn that was a mistake. Not all messages that you don’t want are spam, so only move actual spam messages. We used to use a ‘Mistakes’ folder for this, but no longer. If you are an old-time Riseup user with a ‘Mistakes’ folder, you might as well delete it, as we are no longer processing messages there.

Riseup Newsletter Translation Volunteers

Each month a group of dedicated volunteers help translate the Riseup newsletter into a variety of languages. We wanted to take a moment to thank these fine folks spread throughout the globe for helping make Riseup news and information more available to all our users.

We are always looking for more assistance with newsletter translations. We are particularly in need of help for the following languages:

Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, Danish, French, Greek, Italian, Swahili/Kiswahili, Turkish

If you would like to help, please contact gadfly@riseup.