[vox-tech] mutt, email, usb mini storage, dvorak...

[Jonathan McPherson]

Questions for the group:

1. Many of you like and use the Mutt email client. (I typically use it
   myself, but am having some exim problems, so I'm on webmail at the
   moment).  In Mutt, what is the best way to look at one e-mail while
   replying to another?  I often need to do this, and it's a pain to have
   to save the mail as a draft and later resume it.  Another way might be
   to run two instances of Mutt (I use GNU Screen heavily, so this is
   easy to do in a single terminal), but that seems wasteful, not to
   mention short-sighted; what if I want to look at _two_ other emails?
   ... It would be really cool if I could have Mutt's "compose" open the
   editor in a new Screen shell.

2. I am considering buying one of those USB keyring mini storage devices
   (they're getting cheap; 128MB devices run $30 or so) and storing my
   GPG private key on it.  This would let me both sign emails from any
   computer and keep the key off my potentially vulnerable networked PC.
   Do you think that this is a good idea?  The main drawbacks I can see
   is that if I lose the device, I would have to get a new key pair, and
   the fact that my key will be in the RAM of the machine I am using.
   How good is Linux support for these devices?  Is there a brand you
   would recommend?

3. It would also make sense to get a small, self-contained, GPG-capable
   Windows e-mail program loaded on the device, and a similar one for
   Linux.  Then I could securely e-mail from most systems.  Do you have
   any recommendations on e-mail programs for this purpose?  Good IMAP
   and GPG support are the only feature requirements.

   Obviously another, cheaper, way to do this would be leave the machine
   with my GPG key on it open to SSH connections.  The problem with this
   is that I don't necessarily want that port open; some firewalls block
   it while allowing SMTP and IMAP traffic; slow, old dialup connections
   make SSH painful to use; and most Windows machines don't have a SSH
   client pre-installed, though putting PuTTY on the machine is
   relatively quick.

4. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout.  It is a pain, however, to have to
   make certain that I have 'loadkeys dvorak' or 'setxkbmap dvorak' in
   the appropriate startup scripts, and of course typing in my login and
   password must be done in Qwerty.  Do any of you use this layout?  If
   so, how have you modified Linux to make Dvorak more of a 'native'
   layout?  I would like the system to be Dvorak everywhere unless I
   manually switch it back to Qwerty (for instance, if a friend needs to
   type something).  Buying a hardwired Dvorak board is obviously the
   best option, but those are quite expensive and I'm on a grad student
   budget (besides, what about Linux on my laptop?).

Jonathan.