Re: The ideal mail client?

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Alan Cox:
>> Evolution really can't cope with large amounts of mail. Thats one big
>> reason I moved to claws. The fact everything else was suddenely faster
>> was a big boon.

Fernando Cassia:
> I remember my first or second e-mail to this list when I complained
> about Evolution being the default for Fedora and upset the quite vocal
> Evolution fan base...
> 
> ;-)
> 
> Thunderbird should be a much better default. I couldn't care less if
> Evolution is part of the Gnome software collection.

I've tried many different mail clients across several different
operating systems, most suck in some way, many suck in many ways.  As
things stand, I rate Thunderbird as even worse than Evolution, but
Evolution as the least worst one currently available to me.

Some of the things I look for are:

Must handle IMAP in a sane way.

How quotes are handled in replies, in particular multi-generational
quotes.  They should be prefixed with ">" symbols NEATLY, no straggled
spaces, no mixes of spaces and no-spaces, no mangling of line wrapping,
including not wrapping text into the middle of quote prefixes.  I should
be able to see a block of one person's text as a neat block, and not
have to count > symbols to tell one person's text apart from another
(when they're neatly stacked ">>>>" you can just look how far the text
is from the left margin, to see if two paragraphs are the same person,
or a quote then a response).  And straggled > symbols, combined with bad
wrapping, is a cut and paste nightmare when you need to copy bits of
messages.  In computing terms, this sort of thing (quote prefixing and
line wrapping) is old hat, but so many clients are so utterly crap at
managing this.

Text must be WYSIWYG.  No changing of the content after I stop typing
and hit send.  Text wrapping should happen as I type, and I should be
able to cancel it at will (i.e. highlight a block and make it manually
hard formatted).  Thunderbird really sucked at that.  It treats
everything as (bad) HTML, even received plain text messages.  Which
leads to quoting annoyances, where > becomes |, or some of them do, and
you have cluttered abominations of them in combinations.

Threading must be done properly.  And a three-pane GUI is a must for
stepping through lots of mail fast, and without getting windows all over
the place (which are slow to open, and you're never quite sure which
message will be opened "next" with their next button), and having to
shuffle windows around like cards on a tiny table is a major pain.

The program must be fast.  Evolution has some horrible things, here.
Like not being able to do two things at once.  e.g. Move a batch of
selected messages from one spot to another, then try to read another
message, and I wait forever for the first task to finish before it loads
the message I want to read.

The program must use a neat GUI.  I find Thunderbird a waste of screen
real estate, and that's a problem with a laptop that only has a 800
pixel height screen.  Other clients shove gazillions of GUI gadgets all
over the place, not only wasting screen space, but they're in a
disorganised array, and stick out like a sore thumb for not being
anything like my window manager theme (e.g. Windows 3 looking GTK stuff
in a Gnome environment - it's not only ugly, but some GUIs have the most
horrible renditions of drop-down boxes, and checkmarks that make it hard
to tell what's checked or unchecked).  Thunderbird seems to be quite CPU
intensive with its GUI.  And text based clients are often horrible at
dealing with long messages, or long lists of messages.

It needs good filtering (mail sorting into folders I want,
hiding/showing of folder content on certain criteria - e.g. recent mail
showing by default, the rest hidden until I need it).  Evolution sucks
at this, it's too damn slow (at least when sorting mail with a local
IMAP server).  I gave up on filtering, and once every month, or so, I
use the filter to show messages to "fedora-list," and drag the lot into
my fedora list archive folder.

It must handle HTML decently.  I need to be able to read HTML mail sent
to me, and I need to be able to read badly authored HTML.  I really hate
being sent 6px height light grey text on lighter grey background.
Evolution's quite bad at this, I've found Thunderbird to be even worse.
HTML authoring's also important, there's times when you need to give a
neat table of things to people, and a HTML table is the *only* way to do
it.

It must handle attachments well, including ones sent with the wrong MIME
type.  I don't mind manually saving then doing something, but some of
them make even that a pain to do.  I've used clients which would VERY
usefully let you delete attachments, so when someone sends you a 10 meg
file on a mail that you need to keep, you can keep the mail in your mail
system, without wasting 10 megs of space, as well.  You could also
delete the HTML sections of multi-part mails.  That was another very
pleasant feature.

It must handle GPG/PGP well.  It must be integrated, and not need
special extra configuration for itself that gets out of step with my
general GPG configuration.  It should be configurable that it doesn't
try to confirm a message unless I click on something (e.g. the signature
icon in the message display).  Auto check all signed mail, auto-check if
I've already got the key, auto get the key, should all be done in the
manner that I select in my settings.  It's a sodding pain that reading
signed mail is a slow down, even if I've already got the key it's a
slowdown.

Out of all these criteria, and a few others that I can't recall at the
moment, Evolution still manages to be the least worst, overall.


> I still believe in the "best of breed" approach to applications. Just
> because something is developed alongside other app it doesn't mean a
> distro has to automagically adopt it as its default.
> 
> For instance there's little reason not to use VideoLan (VLC) as the
> standard media player in Linux....

I find it even slower to get started than any of the alternatives, and a
bit CPU heavy.  So that's quite a nuisance when you're file managing
(e.g. double click on something in a list of other things, to work out
what's what, and there's an awful lot of waiting involved).  RhythmBox
is also quite heavy, with all that baggage of being a library of all
your files, which is quite painful when my music collection is on the
file server, accessed via NFS.  And Totem is a behemoth that doesn't let
you do much (few codecs included, few remote ones ever found, etc.).

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.



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