Duncan posted on Sun, 24 Jul 2011 02:30:04 +0000 as excerpted:
> Given all the kmail/akonadi issues we've discussed, it'd be rather
> ironic if I eventually dropped kmail not because of operational issues
> with it, but rather, because it forced semantic-desktop on for all of
> kde! But at present, that very closely approximates what it does.
>
> kmail is looking more and more like another amarok, forcing in all sorts
> of heavy dependencies I'd otherwise be able to avoid. (Hint as to how
> this could well turn out: I dropped amarok for that among other things,
> and ultimately have been glad I did!)
>
> I guess that means I'm pretty close to being forced to look for a decent
> mail client again... <sigh>
Well, I looked around and checked deps and...
* Anything requiring full gnome is out. That means no balsa.
* Evolution's too bloated; I didn't even check if it required full gnome.
* Thunderbird's an option but is out for a couple reasons. (1) Sqlite.
While that's definitely better than mysql for me, if I'm going to do
that, I might as well stick with akonadi... tho it /should/ be a quite a
bit more mature implementation. (2) I've never favored HTML mail and
given Mozilla's part in encouraging that early on and continued gecko
backend... no, just no.
* I took a look at CLI and text-based semi-GUIs and decided it's just too
much of a jump, for the moment.
* Alex, you may find trojita rather interesting. It's qt-based and Jan
Kundrat, yes, the Gentoo user, is the head developer. The screenshots
even display gentoo mailing lists! =:^) While it's IMAP-only, based on
the above, I was sorely tempted to install dovecot or some such locally
and do imap over local-host-loopback. The only thing that stopped me was
that it's still in development and while the reading side is decently
mature, he cautions not to use it for sending mail yet, as it is known to
send mail that's not always quite standards compliant at the moment.
Given that he has some commercial sponsorship tho, and the pace of
development, that'll likely be fixed in a year or so, but meanwhile, it's
useful for IMAP reading but shouldn't be used for posting, so you'd need
an alternative solution for that.
* That leaves the gtk-based sylpheed and the claws project that started
as a developer testing branch of sylpheed, but grew into its own
project. Claws actually looks to be my best alternative at this point,
with lots of plugins in the Gentoo tree as well as claws itself. It uses
MH message directory trees (file per message like maildir but a bit
different), not mbox, which is a plus for me, and doesn't appear to rely
on databases, etc. It should be reasonably robust, yet is designed for
speed. It also handles newsgroups, so I'll have a backup for pan. It's
designed for both keyboard and mouse operation flexibility, with
configurable hotkeys, something any good kde user should well appreciate.
Also of some significance, the installation looks to add only one not-yet-
installed dependency. Given that if I do indeed switch to it I should be
able to drop akonadi and various misc. kde semantic-desktop bits, it's
very likely the number of packages I have installed will drop after I've
completed the transfer and can unmerge kmail and all it brings with it.
Now I sleep on it for a day or two and see how I feel about it then. Of
course, even after installing, I'll have a lot of importing to do, etc,
and until I actually get that done and tested, plus test how it actually
handles mail-pulls and pushes, etc, I'll be able to simply unmerge it and
remain on or go back to akonadified kmail.
...
Well, a week or two ago I put the chances of my still being on now
akonadified kmail a year from then, at only about 50 percent. Obviously
the chances for kmail have significantly deteriorated since then, as I've
preliminarily settled on a successor already and it's now unlikely that
kmail will even finish out this month, here. In fact, I'd like to test
claws and know one way or the other before I install kde 4.7.0, so I can
unmerge kmail and akonadi and set USE=-semantic-desktop before the 4.7.0
build. Chances are at about 98% now that I'll try out claws, tho there's
some chance something will go wrong and I'll decide kmail even with the
heavy dependencies and other problems is still better, so I'd put the
chances of me actually switching at ~90% (~85-95%). But I've been up all
night studying this stuff and am in no state to make the final decision
right now, so yeah, sleep on it for a day or so, and then see.
That'd leave only akregator as an installed "leaf package" from kdepim.
It's unlikely I'll drop it for 4.7.0 but it doesn't have the heavy
dependencies kmail now has, so there's no reason to be in a big hurry for
it. Still, given that I'm not exactly happy with it either, I could well
survey the feed-reader landscape as I've done the mail landscape in the
last few hours, and have it gone for 4.7.1, allowing me to ignore kdepim
updates from then on.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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