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

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

> On Dec 1, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Paul Nijjar <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> 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. 
> 

Speaking of Slack, I found an OSS equivalent I would like to try out: http://www.mattermost.org. Self-hosted, OSS… open protocols and various “gateways” to other systems. I haven’t installed it but it might be worth converting away from my self-hosted statusnet (pre-gnu social) mental dbus…

> 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. 

My list is very similar, although I don’t care about “one big file” - mbox format is inherently bad. I was an early adopter of Maildir and still haven’t found something better for my needs. My mailing list account (the one I’m using right now to write all of you) is sitting at 140k individual emails taking up a little over a GB and is still relatively fast to search, although I think it’s the indexing that allows for that.

I disabled ALL email notifications (both telling me about new email as well as delivery and read receipts) about 15 years ago when I still worked for “the man” — it caused some trouble with one manager in particular who loved to see when something was read but it has really helped my productivity. The last distraction for me is IM notifications. I haven’t found a good way to disable them yet maintain a “semi interactive” flow. They’re definitely competing workflows.

The point about auto-loading images is a good one. Mail.app has an option for it (as do many others) and I have it enabled (i.e. auto load images) but I’ve gotten used to right click->mark as spam for the obvious ones so it doesn’t allow the tracker images to load. A way to whitelist email addresses/domains to auto-load would be a really handy feature.

Encryption is always a tricky one. My MTA automatically encrypts when it can, but when accessing email from a laptop, desktop, phone and sometimes remote ssh session I feel that having a private key available on all these systems really starts to defeat the idea of encrypting the mail in the first place. OTR fails for instant messaging for the same reason; I can’t start a conversation on one machine and continue on another because the session keys aren’t carried over. There isn’t a really good way to do it either. I rely on server-to-server encryption for that and call it good enough (although it really isn’t).

I’ve never used much when it comes to filtering or flagging messages (other than spam). being able to quickly search the body of messages for keywords has replaced a lot of the need for that (for me). I’m envious of the “inbox zero” crowd. I am waaaaay too much of an information packrat to be able to stick to such a regime for very long.

-A.