On 2008-02-21, 01:48 GMT, Jens Petersen wrote: > though I am not really trying to start painful flame-war > here... Sorry, I don’t know how to say it nicely, so I will be just blunt — there is no way how can I believe this sentence. I don’t mean it badly — a good flamewar from time to time makes things more clear, but it is the flame if I ever saw one. > For a long time (actually as long as I can remember;) I wondered why > Evolution was our default Mail application (MUA). I was a long time > user of Emacs MUAs, so I feel my background is fairly neutral - but I > have never been able to use Evolution for long. These days I use > Thunderbird since alas I gradually found Emacs too slow for imap. I am > not married to Thunderbird but it mostly does what I want it and it is > pretty stable at least. Aside from the obvious one (“It is the standard Gnome MUA”), you mean? OK, I think to make a little sense of this argument, let’s get to the common ground — “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” (http://www.mutt.org) What’s true about all mail clients (and yes, mutt sucks too, but that’s for different flamewar) is especially true for GUI MUAs. I have in the past seven years used (aside from mutt and little bit of pain) kmail, Thunderbird, Evolution, and in the last week I needed to dip a little bit into claws-mail and sylpheed (I prefer the latter, BTW). That IMHO means I have covered most of what’s interesting in the world of Linux GUI MUAs (yes, I am missing chandler and balsa; oh well). My conclusion? All of them suck. A lot. And I mean it (Matthew, you are great!). I have no idea, why we still don’t have at least one MUA which would suck only as much as mutt does in non-GUI world, but we don’t. Now, a little bit of reasons why I think Thunderbird is no better than others. First of all, I certainly cannot confirm that Thunderbird wouldn’t crash on me. It did and many times. Second, in my past many attempts to use Netscape Messenger/Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird I have actually incurred couple of times a dataloss (which never happened with other MUA), which makes me a little bit worried — true, it hasn’t happened lately, so may be Thunderbird is better IMAP client now, than it used to be, but it certainly makes me worried. Second, you mean you have tens of thousands of messages in IMAP folders and you don’t care that your MUA hasn’t heard about regexps? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19442 the bug was filed 1999 and there is still not attempt from TB folks to solve it) Third, another reason why Thunderbird seems to me a pitiful IMAP client is that somehow it never heard about separate Trash folder not being part of IMAP world (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243075 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359281). Fourth, Reply-to-list feature — https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45715 Thunderbird is one of the reasons Red Hat internal mail lists are such mess as they are, because everybody Reply-to-all. Fifth, automatic messages archiving — https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93094 You shouldn’t have ten thousands of messages in your working folder ever in the first place, because old messages should be archived! Sixth, its vfolders are just pityfull — I suspect TB doesn’t index the messages, so whenever you open vfolder it has to search through all messages again and again. I am not writing down these issue to say, that Evolution or any other GUI MUA is better (actually, kmail doesn't fail on most of these, but then vfolders in Evolution rock, and kmail is also POP3 client learning IMAP — special dIMAP account anyone?), just that there are good reasons why Thunderbird is not that much better than others, and there is no reason to incurr non-negligible switching costs on our users (remember, most of them probably use default MUA, just because it is default). The second reason, why I put down this list is to show how old some of these bugs are. OK, maybe regexps are questionable feature in MUA (I would strongly disagree, but who am I), but not being able to fix Reply-to-list for seven years, and “Hide deleted IMAP messages” for four years, shows questionable level of support for the application which is in the core of everything. Happy flaming! Matej -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
