From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 12 3: 9: 5 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EBC0137B419 for ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 03:08:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.6/8.11.5) with SMTP id fACB8jB24480; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 06:08:45 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 06:08:45 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Mike Meyer Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Good Mail Programs In-Reply-To: <15343.20416.209466.373774@guru.mired.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sun, 11 Nov 2001, Mike Meyer wrote: > Robert Watson types: > > There are no good e-mail programs. Every last one of them has serious > > problems. > > That's a religious statement. I claim VM has no serious problems, so > long as you're willing to convert to the emacs religion so you can use > it. Actually, it's derived from evidence that I failed to provide. :-) I suspect the problem is that I'm not sure what I want out of a mail client. For example: (1) I want it to be text-based so I can use it efficiently over a network connection, and easily using only a keyboard. (2) I want it to have integrated support for multi-media, easy access to attachments, and tight integration with the system file manager. I a clean mouse-driven GUI that can be used to sort mail into folders using a more visual paradigm. Likewise... (1) I want the power and flexibility of the UNIX-like mh and procmail tools, allowing integration with arbitrary tools, including the command-line PGP, shell scripts, arbitrary content handling, and automated mail handling at delivery-time, not when I read the e-mail. (2) I want my mail to be stored on a central mail server, transparent to the operating system and mail client I use, capable of supporting multiple client instances without locking conflicts or inconsistency, and with support for cached and disconnected operation. I want my mail client to be stateless and to be changeable like a lightbulb, not like an apartment. (1) I want my mail client to be flexible and confirable, adapting to my complex mail needs: the ability to auto-sort mailing lists, even when messages must be redundantly delivered to multiple folders; I want the ability to have individual "sending" profiles automatically when responding to mail in different folders, or pulled from different souces; I want the ability to have arbitrary highlighting of message contents, interest-based sorting, and other highly customized feature-sets. (2) I want my client to do the right thing out of the box, and to support simultaneously the "configuration file" format, and complete access to that format using easy-to-use text-driven or gui-driven interfaces. I do not believe in m4 configuration, I do not believe in configuration files that are hard to understand, counter-intuitive, and a seemingly endless exploration of inconsistent variable names, arbitrary hacks, and poor design. Oh, and.. (1) I want my mail client to be native to the operating system, operating smoothly, quickly, and in a manner supported by the vendor. (2) I want my mail client to be secure. It seems that I might fundamentally just want something that cannot exist, rather than wanting something that has been made but simply has not been found. The closest I've come to happiness so far is the Cyrus mail server, bundled with a combination of mail clients serving different needs. Pine for general mail reading, ckimail to quickly review folder contents for the command line, Netscape for threaded mail reading and HTML access, all over IMAP (preferably kerberized, but over SSL where that's not available). None of these clients is ideal: Netscape is slow, operates poorly using the keyboard, and (in my experience) doesn't support my mail sorting and organizing needs. Pine is buggy, has progressively more poor support for large mailboxes (60,000+ messages, shared mailboxes, nested mailboxes, ACLs), is known for being buggy, especially regarding C strings, and has poor integration with vital tools including PGP. ckimail is, well, ckimail. On the other hand, my intermittent explorations of the alternatives have also been disappointing. The much-lauded mutt has a configuration file from hell (or did, 12 months ago when I last tried it). With pine, a singly command line twiddle transparently causes it to use IMAP for all folder references: with mutt, I had to find dozens of configuration lines, read extensive man pages, and still I was finding it saving messages into local folders for various reasons. Mozilla consumed 500+mb of memory and swap attempting to read my mailing lists archives, and killed my X server. Emacs, as you point out, requires you to learn a new religion (and life-style), not to mention elisp. Oh, and just for breadth, Outlook wants you to pull down your mailing list index before it lets you select the use of SSL transport for IMAP. And many of the remaining tools fail on all the same counts: poor interface, high level of unreliability, religious belief they are the sole client in the universe and resulting irreversible transformations on mailbox data, inability to scale to multiple client access to to inability to handle locking, poor keyboard use, inability to configure without intimate knowledge of at least one additional programming language, and failure to to grasp even the most basic rules of consistent user interface design. Clearly, I cannot be satisfied by any real-world software, and I should be relegated to the pit of dispair, or possibly the list of people who write their own operating system, not necessarily because they can invent the better mousetrap, but because the only way they can find a system that meets their every need is to customize it to the point where it annoys everyone else. :-) I firmly believe no mail client can satisfy me, but I am eagerly awaiting the day that I am proven wrong, so that I can suddenly become an organized person with small mailboxes, who can find the message that they're looking for, and feel safe recommending the software to a friend. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message