[kwlug-disc] Does anyone want to take over Thunderbird?

[Paul Nijjar]

On Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 05:34:44PM -0500, Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account) wrote:
> 
> > To my surprise both seem to be under active development. They are much
> > less well-known that Thunderbird and Outlook, so I will take the risk
> > of mentioning them.
> 
> I’m curious… now that we’re discussing it… What makes for a great MUA? What does the current crop fail at?
> 

There are lots of people who argue that email is broken, so there
cannot possibly exist a good MUA. (The fact that many of these people
ally themselves with proprietary walled-garden solutions like Slack
and Facebook is completely incidental.) Personally I think that email
is kind of broken as well, but I am glad that there is at least one
federated, open-standards service that is still in production. 

I have decided upon the following: 

- Any client that does not let me throw all my mail into a big pile
  easily is broken. Mutt is semi broken at this because I cannot put
  all my mail into one giant file; instead I can only put in mail for
  a couple of years at a time before mutt gets too slow to process it
  nicely.
- Any client that obfuscates links in email (I'm looking at you, OWA)
  is broken. For that matter, any email that obfuscates links --
  especially when they replace them with tracking links -- is broken
  and borderline evil. 
- Any client that does not allow me to search for mail quickly and
  flexibly is broken (and mutt is not that good at this for me).
- Any client that forces me to use a different text editor to compose
  messages is broken. I am a dinosaur who has learned enough vim that
  I miss it when using other mail programs, so I have decided email
  clients are obligated to adhere to my preferred tools and not the
  other way around.
- Any client that forces bells or chimes or popups when I get new
  messages is broken and borderline evil. I have enough trouble
  staying focused without new message notifications. 
- Any client that does not allow me to quickly and easily select
  arbitrary groups of messages and then perform an operation on that
  set is broken. (I'm looking at you, Outlook and OWA.)
- Any client that does not give me access to my own mail in a way that
  I can export to other mail readers is broken (I am looking at you,
  proprietary webmail). 
- Any client that does not give me the option of whether I want to see
  an attachment/graphic/etc is broken and probably dangerous.
- Any client that does not stay out of sight and out of mind when I am
  trying to do something else is broken, which is one reason I still
  use mutt. 

Nobody handles email encryption well, which is why I still don't do
this even though it is a sensible idea. 

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org