[plug] plug mailing list vs Forum

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Thu Jun 24 22:40:48 WST 2004


Craig Ringer wrote:

| [Eudora]
| > 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.

I did much the same, I'm afraid.  But if you live in a world where
Eudora owns all your mail, it's okay ;-)

| > 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 used the newer versions :-)  Eudora 4.2 was the last one I
used, which behaved much like the older versions only you could do
stuff while it was checking mail.  It also crashed more :-(

I like the multi-window MDI approach which let you easily have
multiple mailboxes, messages and composer windows open at once.  All
of the Outlook clones (and I'm including Evolution, KMail and mutt in
this) make that much harder than necessary.  Having multiple copies of
mutt open achieves much the same effect but isn't as nice.

| > 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 presume that your PLUG mailbox is just One Big Lump Of Messages?  As
I said, mutt's no good with mailboxes that size, whether IMAP or local
mailboxes (see a previous thread).  I work around this by moving
messages into a separate folder once opening them is too slow
(generally around the 2000-3000 message mark).

There are patches which will make mutt acceptably slow (rather than
unacceptably slow) with really huge IMAP mailboxes, but this has the
disadvantage of making mutt not notice when message flags have changed
behind its back.  *sigh*

| > 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.

Ahh, yes, it does that too :-)  It was never slow enough to bother me,
though.  The "freezes" were generally much less than a second.  Mutt
is much the same so I suppose I'm in a state of learned helplessness
where single-threaded mailers are a fact of life :-P

Cameron.




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