[Gllug] Getting technical about email

[Russell Howe]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 10:49:16PM +0000, Rich Walker wrote:
> The imap3 will, as everyone says, mean you can read your mail from Emacs[1]
> on any computer anywhere in the world, without having to store multiple copies

Good job you said Emacs and not Evolution - last time I tried Evolution,
it seemed to insist on caching every message retrieved via IMAP locally,
with no way to adjust the cache parameters.

This wouldn't have been /too/ bad, if it didn't:

a) Put the cache somewhere under $HOME, which was mounted via NFS from
the goddamn mail server and which was the same filesystem which
contained the maildirs being served over IMAP (so yes, this did
automatically mean email took up double the space and used >3x the
network bandwidth).
b) Have default settings which I could find no method of tuning which
were essentially "cache messages forever, with no limit to the size of
the cache and no removing of old messages".

I tried pointing Evolution directly at the Maildir, and it went and
created allsorts of weird and wonderful subdirectories in the maildir,
which got courier most confused.

Every time I try Evolution, it's no better. It's almost as bad as
Nautilus's 'remote server' support (specifically, SMB, SFTP and FTP).
I've never successfully used the feature without Nautilus going tits up
within about 5 minutes. This would be on Debian unstable, fully up to
date at several points over the past year or two.

I would file a bug report, but really don't fancy building a version of
Nautilus (and the bazillion dependencies) with debug information and
then running the whole lot under gdb... I can imagine more pleasant
experiences, and some of them even involve perl.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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