[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 09:55:48PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> > > > The one thing I would rip out of OSX and throw against the wall
> > > > is the mail app.  Its interface and experience is awesome.  But
> > > > it frequently corrupts messages and doesn't properly save
> > > > outgoing mail.  Not good for a mail application.
> > 
> > Ahhh how I love Mutt. ;-)
> > 
> 
> I've been finding Mutt very useful for when I'm ssh'ed into my server
> to create a temporary throwaway address. Doing "mutt -f
> /path/to/mailbox" is so much more convenient than setting up a POP3
> GUI client. I need to learn how to use mutt better though, as I've
> just been fumbling around with it.

Well, mutt's tagline is that it sucks, all MUAs suck, mutt just sucks
less. :-)


> For my usual mailboxes though, I prefer typical GUI desktop clients.
> Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to find one that I like.

Maybe you should write one in D. ;-)

For one thing, having a MIME library in D would be awesome.


> Outlook Express has a bunch of problems (no spellcheck, can't send
> UTF, proprietary storage, etc). Windows Mail won't be an option when I
> move to Linux or upgrade back to XP. Claws mail is just generally
> buggy and never does anything in the background (feels almost like it
> might be purely single-threaded). And I'm not a big fan of Opera and
> don't really want to use a web browser as my desktop mail client.

I'm a big Opera fan, because Opera lets me configure stuff to work the
way I want it to. But I never use it for mail (I don't like using a
browser as an MUA, I think that's just feeping creaturism). And recent
releases of Opera are starting to show signs of instability and
excessive memory consumption, unlike earlier releases, and I'm starting
to wonder if I might want to switch to Firefox...


> I think I might actually try moving to Thunderbird even though I'm
> generally unhappy with Mozilla software/practices, and didn't like it
> last time I tried (for example, it kept trying to
> bold/italic/underline parts of text in my *plaintext* views, and the
> people on the "help" forums just complained that I should shut up and
> like it - which is consistent with what usually happens when I inquire
> about customizing parts of Mozilla's so-called "most customizable
> browser in the world").

... but if it's that unconfigurable, then Opera might just be the lesser
of two evils. I have to admit that I've tried using Firefox as my
primary browser before, and I didn't like it. It's too IE-like for my
tastes.


[...]
> > I find pretty much all GUI mail apps (both webmail and local MUAs)
> > strait-jacketed. Anything that doesn't let you configure mail
> > headers is unusable to me, and HTML by default gets on my nerves so
> > much it's not even funny.
> 
> I never care about mail headers (unless I'm debugging something
> mail-related, which isn't often), but I *ALWAYS* have HTML disabled.
> I'll never use a mail client that doesn't let me turn HTML off. Not
> only do I not want to deal with any tracker-images (or god forbid, JS
> emails), but in my experience "HTML email" just means it's too easy,
> and far too tempting, for other people to make the stuff they send me
> really, really ugly ;) "Just the words, ma'am."
[...]

That's why I liked Markdown. :) Give users _basic_, logical markup that
also just happens to be readable in plaintext that can be sent verbatim
over the wire, and can be optionally written/read in HTML. Email doesn't
need HTML, the only really necessary stuff is a bit of logical markup
for people who find plaintext "too primitive". HTML is overkill.

Not to mention... it's not just the JS or tracker images, but have you
ever been asked to make HTML email newsletters that have to look the
same across the board? Ever looked at the standards for HTML emails?
Haha, fooled you. There is no standard. Every webmail and their
neighbour's open relay have their own conventions for HTML email.
Nothing is compatible.  You can't rely on CSS because many webmails
strip CSS and JS. Google Mail strips embedded style tags. Different
webmails strip different things, and have different ways of formatting
the same thing (often implemented by invasive mangling of the HTML).
The result is that people revert to using table-based formatting and
*shudder* font tags *shudder* 'cos that's the only way you can get
things to even remotely resemble something sane. It's 1995 all over
again, two decades later.


T

-- 
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking.