Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 06:08:45 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Good Mail Programs Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1011112054740.16646F-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <15343.20416.209466.373774@guru.mired.org>
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On Sun, 11 Nov 2001, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> 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
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