Email on Powermac G4? (OSX 10.4 Tiger)

[gryffinwings]

Hi guys, I have my Apple Powermac G4 Quicksilver setup and I was trying to setup the email program and had no luck with setting it up with my Hotmail/Outlook email account. Is the old Apple Mail program a no go or is there something I am not doing? Also if this is a no go, is there software that would work?

Thanks for any information/advice provided.

 

[nglevin]

With the usual disclaimers around internetting on vintage hardware being unwise.

Stay far far away from Mail.app and Safari.app. The WebKit engine on both web-based products is quite old and filled with known exploits and compromises.

Consider TenFourFox and using webmail with that browser, instead. The blog announcing updates and the latest in web security holes is extremely up to date with what works on TenFourFox and what it does. For the purposes of my Aluminum G4 PowerBook, it gets the job done better than expected.

 

[beachycove]

Would Thunderbird built from Macports do the trick, I wonder?

 

[nglevin]

I am curious about that!

Thunderbird has been a mostly JavaScript-based app for some time. Because of the joys of HTML e-mail, you can't really get around the problems of keeping web browsers secure in a dedicated e-mail client.

I suppose it depends if that version of Thunderbird has all the fixes that Cameron Kaiser has been applying to make TFF seaworthy. Some of them are very Firefox/Gecko engine specific, like the one to protect against the recent Pwn2Own exploit.

EDIT: For completeness' sake, here's the Thunderbird advisory for that same exploit.

 

[Cory5412]

To call back to the original question, of using any period e-mail client at all: My guess is that the answer is no, for a mainstream mail service. Google's requirements for IMAP are high enough that you can only barely use Microsoft Outlook with it, even 2016 and the version provided with 365, and Microsoft prefers ActiveSync/Exchange connectivity for Hotmail, which Apple didn't add until 10.6, presuming that can even connect to the newest incarnations of that protocol, I haven't tried on my system, and my Exchange server at home is still on 2010 for the next few months.

I don't have the tools to test this at the moment, but given what you've posted, I'm guessing that time has officially passed these software versions by, in this sense.

This is the less secure work-around for a Mac OS X system in particular, due to the WebKit issues @nglevin notes -- but one of my goals with VTools (thread, homepage, patreon) is to provide email services that are compatible with vintage Macs.

The gotcha there is that the server software I'll be running the service from has a very low maximum mail database size for the whole server, just around 2GB, 

The other gotcha is that should any problem arise, or if we can't find a configuration that reasonably allows email access without creating an unduly unsafe situation (say: open relay) then that particular aspect is first to be canceled. I'm running AFP, FTP, and HTTP on the machine right now and I haven't had any trouble with it, but email is widely acknowledged as being a different beast 

 

[nglevin]

A small bump, but I can report that, if you turn off saving passwords to the system keychain and the auto-updater, GyazMail 1.5.21 works fine in Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.14.

It's a shareware client that costs $18. The developer has had the wisdom to add sensible defaults, like turning off downloading images in HTML and triggering privacy-violating read receipts that caused a fuss a few months ago. Everything's customizable to a good degree.

I think it's worth it. Michael J. Tsai gave it a nice shout out in the midst of reporting on Catalina woes. I can confirm that it works well on modern IMAP with SSL.