[plug] GUI vs text mail readers

[Christian]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 10:30:16AM +0800, billk at iinet.net.au wrote:
> At risk of prolonging the thread, this mail list is the only one I am
> subscribed to that enforces plain ASCII mail.  So what clients handle html
> mail better than Netscape Messenger, having features such as imap, inbuilt
> filters,  integrated viewer (doesnt spawn an outside program), and can link
> URL's to Netscape which still has no real compeditor for full featured
> browsing?

Mutt will display any attached HTML in whatever browser you wish.  What
could be better than that?

Netscape's IMAP is quite broken (I once spent several hours deleting
close to 3,000 unwanted messages and Netscape told me they were gone
only to find them all back again the next time I loaded Netscape.  I
switched to mutt that same week.)  As for IMAP, mutt supports it but not
fantastically.  I'm not sure of any mail clients which really do fully
exploit IMAPs features.

What would be really nice would be an client-side IMAP daemon that
creates pipes accessible in locations such as /var/spool/mail/username
and $HOME/Mail/ and then connects to an IMAP server to handle these
requests.  That way any mail client could support IMAP instantly.  It's
a nice idea, not even sure if it's implementable though.  I downloaded
the fetchmail source code to consider the possibility of hacking that as
the basis for such a program but then realised I would never have time
to do it.  If anyone's bored and looking for something to hack, feel
free to do so. :-)