Re: Which mail user agent do you use?
dman said:
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 12:30:12PM -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
>
> | Gnus has some distinct advantages over mutt. In particular, it
> has | superior imap support, especially offline support, which was
> the | primary reason I switched from mutt.
>
> Mutt has geat off-line support : mbox, maildir, mh, <something else
> I forget>. Mutt kinda has imap support, but it views imap as just
> another folder format, nothing special. I use fetcmail to transfer
> the mail to local storage, and off-line is all I see :-).
lack of good imap support is one reason i don't use mutt
for anything other then emergency use on my systems. all
of my servers are CYRUS and must be logged into to access
mail(unlike a few other servers which you can directly
access the files). navigating IMAP folders was hard(i never
figured it out), could not find a way to do online filtering
(procmail and such does not work with cyrus), and the interface
was confusing(having used pine since 1994 i was used to it i
guess). also the lack of IMAP4/SSL support was a downside
too. all of my mutt experiences are from the mutt .deb in
potato. I haven't used pine much either im not sure if
it can do IMAP4/SSL or not either.
currently i use squirrelmail(www.squirrelmail.org) tied
with apache-ssl for all my personal email. it works quite
well. i use it for remote office email as well. for most local
office email i use netscape 4.77. not perfect but it gets
the job done well enough, i don't have any complaints.
i have a 1meg vpn to work so i could use netscape from
home just fine i just am too lazy to set it up.
im not one to customize a whole lot(some of my friends
have 100+ line bashrcs, mine is 0), i usually do
over a period of years but mutt(as it stands in potato)
was just too awkward to use. i run linux or unix on
every machine i use so its not like im not able to
cope with non-intuitive(default at least) interfaces
i just don't want to for email.
my personal requirements for a email client would be:
- supports IMAP4/SSL
- supports online filtering(e.g. filter as it comes into
the inbox while logged in)
- can navigate complex IMAP4 directory structures(my
work email has about 45 different folders i use on a routine
basis) - also be able to subscribe to IMAP folders outside
my inbox
- cross platform (multiple linuxes, and other unix like
aix, tru64, solaris, freebsd etc)
- relativly standard(dont want to compile 50 different packages
to get it running)
- stable (don't want to have to upgrade every few days/weeks)
- must be packaged or otherwise quick to setup on a new system.
things i don't care about
- address books
- threading(nice, but it doesnt matter to me)
- pop-before-smtp and apop and other authentication methods
- wether it is free or not, or opensource or not
currently SM fits that bill the best for me. runs on anything
that has a SSL capable browser and all of my systems have
netscape. netscape is 2nd, has a bit more functionality but
requires some setup on each machine i want to use it on. SM
also can be run from my handspring visor over a wireless
cdpd connection which is another plus. SM does not support
IMAP4/SSL directly but that can be worked around by running
the webserver on the mail server it also dramatically increases
performance. and having the webserver run in SSL is just as
good as an IMAP4/SSL connection for me.
with all the stuff i see on the screen at one time i don't
think any console based mail program is designed to show
it all in 1 screen unlike X based apps ...
i run all my imap servers so all mail is stored server-side
which is probably different then a lot of people on this
list. so my requirements are probably slightly different.
nate
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