Re: Email client programs
Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com> writes:
ES> what's this netscpae 4.x bashing I see repeatedly? IMO it's a fairly
ES> good email client, stable (well, as stable as browser and it's really
ES> only stable when you disable java), has the main MUA features...
Issues with netscape mail at MIT:
-- It has that (in)famous Netscape stability, particularly if you have
Java(script) enabled.
-- Hard to migrate to other mail formats[1].
-- Bad, bad issues (e.g. eats your mailbox in an unrecoverable way) if
you try to incorporate mail and you run over your account quota.
(Less of an issue if you use IMAP, though.)
-- Likes to send HTML mail.
The student group I was part of that did unofficial support generally
felt pity for people trying to use Netscape mail, especially when it
hurt them. The best combination between "blessed" and "pretty" seems
to be exmh; pine's IMAP support seems to be very good, though, and
recent versions of it seem to have some of the features (e.g. mail
filtering) that other reputable MUAs have. However, pine isn't
included in Debian for licensing reasons (you can't redistribute
binaries built from modified source).
[1] The "supported" mail tool here is MH, though, so the really
important thing is "it's hard to turn your mail from whatever format
Netscape uses into an MH folder". For all I know Netscape might very
well use the standard mbox format for its mail, which would actually
work reasonably well for most other purposes.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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