[plug] plug mailing list vs Forum

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 20:42, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 19:50, johnmorcos wrote:
> > I was wondering what everyone thought about us having a forum instead
> > of a mailing list.

> A good mail client might be a nice start.

I should probably offer a few suggestions. I don't know what platform
you use for your mail so I'll cover a few. Some popular and easy to use
apps include:
	
	Eudora (MacOS, Windows) 
		Some users find stability issues - especially with IMAP 		- and it has
dodgy MIME support.

	Mozilla Mail (MacOS X, Windows, *NIX)
		Pretty good. Maybe a bit heavyweight and the UI isn't
		amazing, but does the job well.

	Mozilla Thunderbird (MacOS X, Windows, *NIX):
		I haven't used it, but it seems to be growing in
		popularity.

	Outlook/Outlook Express (Windows)
		Only the very latest versions avoid severe security
		problems, and given the track record they may not be
		particularly safe bets either. Standards compliance
		is awful. On the other hand, many people do like the
		UI, and a lot of the stupidest bits can be turned off.
		Otherwise known as "LookOut!" due to its propensity for
		spraying mass-mailing worms everywhere.

	Pegasus Mail (Windows, others?)
		I have no personal experience with this one. It seems
		popular with universities. Apparently it's lightweight
		and fairly well behaved.
	
	Mutt (*Nix, others?)
		A powerful mail client that's popular with serious mail
		users. It's terminal based, so if you get lots of
		attached graphics etc it can be painful. It also has
		issues (in my experience) with large IMAP mailboxes.
		In many ways it's ideal, though.

	Evolution Mail (Linux mostly)
		An outlook-ish mail client for linux. Heavyweight,
		can be buggy, and the UI is a bit too outlook-ish for
		comfort sometimes. Very nice in many ways though, 
		with nice calendar features, ok IMAP support, great
		searching, and other pleasant things. 2.0 should improve
		IMAP considerably and generally polish things up.

	KMail (Wherever there's KDE, mostly *NIX)
		The KDE mail client. I'm not a fan personally, but many
		seem to quite like it.

I'm sure I've missed many people's preferences, but what the hell. This
is only a quick run-down anyway.

BTW, I do agree with James' suggestion about an NNTP gateway. I lack the
time or knowledge to implement one, however, so all I'll say is "I think
it could be nice." There may well be other reasons why one is not used
that I'm not aware of - I know that many lists avoid gmane.org because
of various issues, and I don't know how many are common to NNTP gateways
in general.

--
Craig Ringer