[Gllug] Thunderbird, procmail and new mail

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 13:20, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 12:57:38PM +0000, Mike wrote:
> > Mutt is not a particularly good IMAP client, IMHO. It doesn't cache
> > headers (unless new versions have started doing this), so it's really
> > slow.
> 
> It can be slow switching between folders, though that depends to a great
> extent on your particular set-up.

It's slow for me. I did spot a patch to cache headers though, at
http://dwyn.net/mutt/, so I may give that a try.

>   It isn't slow to work within folders,
> though, since it caches the changes you make and only updates
> periodically or when you force it.

Caching changes is a good performance booster, but I'd argue a
sigificant design flaw with IMAP. What happens with several users
simultaneously accessing a shared IMAP folder?

>   In general, I've found Mutt to have
> much more reliable IMAP support than GUI clients.

The state of IMAP support in clients in general isn't great, I'll grant.
It's taken until Mozilla 1.6 to get support for the STATUS command, and
it's absence in previous versions causes IMAP state flags to behave in
an unpredictable manner. I think IDLE support has only just made it in
as well.

<rant>
Support for messages sent from server to client with ALERT sucks. Cyrus
sends quota warnings this way. If a user has 50 mailboxes, and a mail
gets delivered that goes over the quota warn threshold, next time
Mozilla checks the mailboxes for new mail, it does a separate IMAP
operation to check each mailbox. This results in 50 *modal* dialog boxes
that the user is forced to dismiss - a truly appalling design decision,
IMHO. I'm not aware of any client that does a good, subtle, graphical
quota display. 

Trash folders are another pain. IMAP uses a delete/expunge model, but
all the GUI clients insist on a trash folder. Why Trash can't just be a
vFolder that displays all mail with \Deleted set, I don't know. When I
get a user at 95% quota, they go off and find a load of mail they don't
want any more, hit delete, and then Mozilla dutifully *copies* it all
into Trash, promptly hits the hard quota, and then generates a modal
dialog for every single fscking message that fails to copy. Did they not
have brains when they wrote this?? I end up having to kill the app,
change the delete method to mark/delete, and then help the users delete
their mail. None of them like working with the mark/delete type setup,
because they're all used to a Trash folder, and frankly I don't see why
it wouldn't be possible to make the Trash folder work better with IMAP.

Support for encrypted authentication methods is also pretty patchy -
Mutt does this well, at least, as it supports CRAM-MD5 and GSSAPI
natively, and can link against SASL for a bunch of others.

At home, I hover between Evolution and Mozilla/TB, but I use Mutt on
boxes I ssh into. Evolution is probably the best at the moment, but I've
never tested it's quota handling, as I don't quota my home mailbox, and
it suffers from lots of UI things I hate. I never send HTML mail, but I
can't turn off the stupid formatting bar. I'd love a client with one
tick box, that said "I will *never* under any circumstances send HTML,
so remove all UI elements relating to it". I'd also like another one
that said "If I receive multipart mail, display only the plaintext, and
if I receive mail that contains only text/html, silently bounce it, and
don't bother me."

Oh, and why do none of the GUI clients allow you to remove the local
folders completely from the UI? If you're running IMAP, you want mail on
the server, not on your hard disk...
</rant>

Mike.



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