From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 12 4:40:14 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 90EF337B416 for ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 04:40:05 -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 fACCbbB25020; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 07:37:37 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 07:37:36 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Brad Knowles Cc: Mike Meyer , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Good Mail Programs In-Reply-To: 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 Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Brad Knowles wrote: > > (2) I want my mail client to be secure. > > Mutt was originally written by Mike Elkins, the guy who also > wrote the PGP/MIME RFC. It is still the "Premier PGP/MIME MUA". I > really don't think that you get much better security than this. I've never found the fact that gpg had a remotely exploitable buffer overflow, nor its various signature verification bugs, very reassuring. Perhaps things have improved since I last used it :-). > > The closest I've come to happiness so far is the Cyrus mail > > server, bundled with a combination of mail clients serving different > > needs. > > Cyrus is a good small-scale IMAP server. It is easier to > install than UW, is designed for maximum compatibility for users both > local and remote to the server, and has a lot of other nice features. > However, it does not scale well. If you care about scalability, you > want to go with a "black box" mail server solution, and UW fits this > scenario much better. I think you have this backwards; as someone who uses Cyrus, I can say that (a) it's not intended to be compatible with other mail server software, (b) it's not intended for local users, and (c) it scales quite well. I have around 9 gigabytes of mail stored on my cyrus server, with many mailboxes in the 100,000 message range, and have no problems--its use of seperate databases for index meta-data scales nicely, and its inode-intensive message model seems to work well for me also. Likewise, having used UW, I can say it is intended to be compatible, it is intended to support local users, and it scales extremely poorly. > I'm not familiar with ckimail, so I can't speak for which side > of the fence it should be one (or if you need to retain a third > program). ckimail is an IMAP tool to show new messages in mailboxes: it's a nice light-weight alternative to actually loading your MUA. It's vaguely reminiscent of the index tool from mh. > IMO, mutt is one of those packages that tends to suck less. > But, it won't walk the dog, empty the sink, clean the toilet, empty the > cat litter box, or run in GUI mode. If you need something that can do > all that and also run as a text-mode MUA, then I suggest that you need > to write it yourself. Yeah, no doubt :-). My real gripes with mutt as an alternative to pine were that (a) it had a very inconsistent user interface, and (b) its configuration system sucks, especially to make simple changes ("My mail is in IMAP today"). If those have been resolved, I should give it yet another try sometime. 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