[plug] plug mailing list vs Forum

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 21:56, Cameron Patrick wrote:

> | > [I] just find that with the archive abilities of a forum [I]
> | ... or a decent mail client ...
> 
> That only works once you've been subscribed for a while. 

I'll partly agree with that. Personally, I solve that issue by
downloading the .mbox format archives for the list and importing them,
but most people won't do that. 

I actually have to run them through a Python script to massage them into
well-formed messages before importing them, as sadly many mail clients
and some mail servers generate badly broken messages (NULLs, illegal
characters in headers, etc). This is probably one of the reasons most
people don't bother, but then again most people's mail systems won't
care about most of the problems I need to correct.

> James Devenish wrote:
> 
> | > I was wondering what everyone thought about us having a forum instead
> | > of a mailing list.
> | 
> | If by "forum" you mean NNTP newsgroup then yes, I would encourage some
> | form of NNTP<->SMTP gateway action.
> 
> Hmm.  I admit that I've never really been a fan of Usenet (or more to
> the point, haven't really tried it), but some people obviously like
> it.

*raises hand*

Overall I prefer mailing lists for anything where I care about most of
the content (like PLUG) but in cases where SnR is not as good or where
most content isn't of interest, I prefer NNTP. As this evaluation will
vary person to person, having both would be really nice.

Also, AFAIK NNTP != Usenet, though Usenet uses NNTP. I could also be
dead wrong here.

> | Perhaps people should subscribe /either/ to the plug at plug list or
> | plug-announce at plug list -- announcements would go to both lists so
> | you'd subscribe to whichever one you were most comfortable with??
> 
> I like that idea.

Me too. An -announce list could be handy for things like workshop and
other meeting notices, among other things.

[snip]

> Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
> | > A good mail client might be a nice start.
> | I should probably offer a few suggestions.
> [...] 	
> | 	Eudora (MacOS, Windows) 
> | 		Some users find stability issues - especially with IMAP - and it has
> | dodgy MIME support.
> 
> Its interpretation of MIME is almost but not quite as bad as
> Outlook's.  Its quirks in this derpartment seem to be exacerbated over
> IMAP; I don't recall having major MIME problems when we were just
> using it for POP3.

I do :-(

I had to write some Perl scripts to convert our Eudora mailboxes into
something that Mozilla, Mutt, etc could understand in order to migrate
users. The main reason for that wasn't that the mailbox format was
different (though it is) but rather the fact that Eudora rips
attachments out ... and doesn't remove the MIME multipart headers. So
you never get a closing boundary on the MIME part. Ick.

There are also a number of workarounds in Cyrus for particularly
horrible bits of Eudora brokenness.

The newer versions seem to be somewhat better behaved in terms of MIME
handing etc, but even less stable even for POP3. With IMAP... well, I
gave up and offered the user the option of sticking to POP3 or moving
mail client. She's now using Mozilla Mail (which she was already
familiar with) and may move to Thunderbird if my testing reveals it to
work OK on our systems.

> | 	Mozilla Thunderbird (MacOS X, Windows, *NIX):
> | 		I haven't used it, but it seems to be growing in
> | 		popularity.
> 
> Remarkably similar to Mozilla Mail, but without requiring a browser.
> Has some of the same interface issues, e.g. has an... interesting...
> way of interpreting MIME mailing list digests and its "view all
> headers" functionality is bluntly unusable.

Darn. I was hoping they'd fixed that. That means it probably still has
the long-headers-jitter bug and the attachments box bug. I'll be finding
out soon enough...

> | 	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.
> 
> They use this (or at least used to, once upon a time) at Carine SHS.
> Looks and acts a bit like Eudora, which IMHO has one of the nicest
> interfaces for mail clients that I've seen.

Lots of people say that, but I've never been a fan personally. Pre-4.0 
were nice in a minimal way, but I really don't like the newer versions at
all. I've never liked the address book and filters interfaces, and the new
preview pane is IMHO rather clumsy. I guess it all comes down to taste.

> | 	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.
> 
> I use this one.  It has issues with large mailboxes, period.  IMAP
> support is okay; the main problem is that it doesn't do any kind of
> caching though so don't bother using its IMAP over anything short of
> Ethernet. 

I can't use it for my PLUG mailbox even over Ethernet - it's not even
nice locally. I don't know why, because the Cyrus server can serve
headers _much_ faster than mutt seems to be able to read them.

> [snip] I find its colour-coding ability very handy, as is the way it
> uses your choice of external editor rather than forcing you to use
> whatever is built-in.

To be able to embed vim in any text editing pane in any app would be a
dream come true.


> | 	Evolution Mail (Linux mostly)

> Indeed.  It "feels" sluggish even on a fast machine, and generally
> doesn't impress me.

I don't find it sluggish even on my PIII/800 laptop, which is interesting.
My main complaint is its ability to use 50MB of RAM, not counting object
code (which can be shared), and its habit of gobbling another couple of meg
every time a new mailbox is opened for the first time. I suspect this is
mostly a problem with the way it implements IMAP.

> One you didn't mention is Sylpheed.  It's small, light-weight, has
> powerful filtering and can be a decent IMAP client.

!!!!

They must've improved it a lot since I last looked at it. It was single
threaded and written in some odd way so that the interface stopped
responding whenever it was talking to the IMAP server. I found it
totally unusable.

--
Craig Ringer