Re: [Rant] The Endless Search for a Mail Client That Doesn't Suck
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Brian Nelson wrote:
>> I have a few modest requirements that a mail client must meet:
>>
>> 1. I must be able to customize the order folders, and I don't want to
>> give them retardedly ugly names to force a correct alphabetic order.
>> This is very important when you have 70 freaking folders like I do.
>
> From my .muttrc:
>
> # Only problem with this is it doesn't find new mailboxes on the fly
> # unless I restart mutt.
> mailboxes ! `find ~/Maildir/.* -type d -maxdepth 0 -not -name .. -not -name .| xargs echo`
>
> Of course you can expand on this to add whatever ordering you like.
Hmm, that's a good idea...
>> 2. I must be able to read the folders sequentially in the order I
>> specify with minimal pain. Obviously, I read from highest priority
>> to lowest, since I may not have time to read every single folder. I
>> don't want to be interrupted while in the sequence, because old mails
>> in lower priority folders are more important to me than brand new
>> mails in higher priority ones.
>
> I can't conceive of reading mail this way (I'm a modal, random access
> kinda guy, not sequential, and I've never asked mutt to take me to the
> "next" folder), so I can't help you.
You've probably been trained that way from using mutt. I never really
thought it about until I moved away from mutt.
I suppose when I want to read mail sequentially, I could just stop
offlineimap so that I don't receive new mail in the middle of the
sequence.
>> 5. It must have a decent summary view. I want to be able to see all of
>> my folders, the amount of mail in each, and be able to quickly choose
>> one to view the mail.
>
> I used to mess with folder_format to remove some of the useless
> information like owner, group, mode, etc, but I don't bother anymore.
>
> I avoid your problems with folders that fall off the side of the screen
> by rewriting names to avoid the "INBOX" thing. But I rarely use the folder
> browser since I have hotkeys to take me to any of my mailboxes instantly,
> and since I typically have many different instances of mutt open viewing
> different folders and can see all important new mail at a glance.
I used to use mutt pretty similarly. Again, I think it's a case of
adapting yourself to mutt. When I moved from mutt to gnus, it was
refreshing to have a nice summary view. I never realized how much I
missed such a feature. It saves screen real estate and can be grokked
in a glance much quicker.
It probably wouldn't be hard to just hack the mutt source to do what I
want, but I'm lazy and it's easier to complain than to actually fix it.
:)
>> 6. It must have a decent expiry system.
>>
>> 7. It must not be dog slow. I have big folders and I don't want to wait
>> 5 minutes to load them.
>
> Mutt suffers from 7, but it's not a big deal if you keep the number
> of messages in a folder under control. For this I use archivemail, a nice
> external program which can handle flagged and unread mail. I move read mail
> to the archive after three days which keeps mutt under control.
Yeah, I've thought about using archivemail to take care of message
expiry. I don't care about archiving it--deleting it is fine--and I
assume archivemail can handle this.
I've resisted up to this point because I'm already using fetchmail,
postfix, spamassassin, procmail, courier-imap, offlineimap, mutt/gnus,
and emacs just to receive, read, and compose email. Yeah, UNIX
philosophy and all that, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
--
You win again, gravity!
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