Comments on: Linux e-mail clients rant

By: Super Jamie

Super Jamie — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:15:43 +0000

Pretty much :P What’s that saying again? “Embrace and extend”…

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:08:50 +0000

‘Gmail’s “special IMAP” standard’ ??
That’s not a standard, unless it’s a standard in the way M$ use standards. i.e. ignore existing standards, create something different and call it a ’standard’

By: Super Jamie

Super Jamie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:36:46 +0000

I’d never heard of Claws Mail till this post, so I installed it and had a look. Quoting works correctly in the version I’m using (3.3.1-1 in Ubuntu 8.04 repos), and it looked like it had options to specify where Drafts and Sent went, however it moves deleted items to trash, not “mark as deleted”, as Gmail’s “special IMAP” standard specifies.

Free Software is indeed about being able to do what you like with transparent software, however this often means writing the functionality in yourself, especially on a smaller project with few developers. Try the developer mailing-list or forum? Claws looks like it has a quite good plugin implementation, perhaps writing something in won’t be so difficult after all?

By: isilanes

isilanes — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:56:55 +0000

Maybe so, but for that you have to label a folder to ” of type ‘Sent’ “. I once tried, then could not convert the folder back to “regular” type. It would be nice to take advantage of the feature of being able to automatically move sent messages to any folder, not just a default “Sent folder”.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:42:17 +0000

Your feature request is interesting…
In Claws Mail in the Sent folder the default From column is switched to the To column automatically.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:36:06 +0000

It’s OK, I took it lightly, I wasn’t offended at all.
Your feature request seems interesting to me.

By: isilanes

isilanes — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:27:44 +0000

Paul: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhetorical

Sorry if I hurt someone’s feelings. Claws-mail deserves a more constructive criticism than mine. However, I repeat and support the claim: not being able to set e.g. your Inbox folder to show the “From:” field in the message list (but not the “To:”, which is yourself), while having the Sent folder show the “To:” (but not the “From:”, which is yourself) is a big mistake, IMHO.

Why should I like being forced to have ALL folders show the same field set? And if there is some setting to fix it, I never found it.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:47:27 +0000

How shitty is that?
Ummm… not very shitty.

By: isilanes

isilanes — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:57:24 +0000

Seems I can always count with your input, Super Jamie. Thanks a lot!

I think that in the XXI century it is not too much to ask if I want a MUA (and e-mail provider) that:

1) Handles the features IMAP promises in a painless way, with a speed limited only by bandwidth, not crappy software algorithm (Kmail doesn’t).

2) Handles all UTF characters out-of-the-box, without any hassle (Evolution doesn’t).

3) Is configurable in every single way. For example, I’m using Claws-mail now, and I don’t seem to be able to configure what fields (To, From, Subject…) are shown in the e-mail lists in a per-folder fashion. ALL folders must have the same fields showing. How shitty is that? Why is the per-folder setting so simple in Kmail, whereas Claws has other features not present in Kmail? Can’t they all COPY and SUM the features among them? Isn’t FLOSS about it?

4) Looks good while doing the above.

By: Super Jamie

Super Jamie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:07:24 +0000

By the way, I can’t stand Evolution either. It’s like Outlook, except with more horrible interface bloat and less features.