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Re: Linux Mail Client



On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 07:47:16AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:

>     There is no concept of "personalities".  Click in the account you want to
> use, click new message, it uses that account.  The Bat! offers the choice of
> changing which accout you use after opening the new message.

Personality, account - same difference.

>     Which is one of the many problems with the personalities paradigm.  The
> assumption is that it is your mail, no matter what the name on the account or
> which server it came from, so it is alright that it all gets mixed in
> together.  I believe Eudora and Pegasus both do this (as do every other client

No.  The assumption is that the MUA isn't in the buisness of delivering
mail, it's in the buisness of providing a user interface.  Working out
how to get the mail to other users is punted to the transport agent so
that you're not tied to your MUA's support for whatever routing policy
decisons or protocols you care to implement.

>     I do not see this as the case.  Personally I abhor mixing mail of
> different addresses when there is a funcional difference between those
> addresses in meatspace.  For example, postmaster vs. slamb3 on the corporate
> side of life.  Since those are two different roles I would be filling (not
> that I do now, but I did at one time) I would much rather keep that mail
> completely separate but still be able to check both with the same email
> client.  They are not different in physical or computing environments, only in

Your solution to that appears to be to wrap a huge section of the mail
infrastructure into one program.  Fine, people have gone that way - but
it's not something that integrates well into an environment built up out
of lots of small, clearly delimited programs.  

> what hat I am wearing, what problems I am solving, in what capacity for the
> company I am speaking and the possibility of handing off some of those roles
> to other people and having to provide them the history of those transmissions.
> Now imagine this for different roles across the gamut of different addresses
> and associated roles one might accumulate through their lives.  Off the top of

Of course, you might start thinking that perhaps a shared mail account
isn't the best group collaboration tool and that it may be useful to use
something like a bug tracking system.  Or perhaps there's a need to
share more than just the mail - you also need to share things like the
configuration.  There's more methods for attacking problems like this
than just a shared mail account.

-- 
Mark Brown  mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk   (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
            http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS        http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/

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