[clue-tech] The MUA Considered Harmful (Or, why I like Sylpheed)

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:13:33 -0700
David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Jed S. Baer wrote:
> > On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:13:03 -0700
> > David L. Anselmi wrote:
> >
> >> That's 'cause your MUA sucks.
> >
> > Sylpheed doesn't. :)
> 
> Hmmm.  That looks like it's an easier switch than Mutt (from Seamonkey)
> and getting off mbox would be nice.  I think I'll try it.
> 
> But I bet it still sucks (all MUAs suck seems to be one of the laws of
> physics ;-)

Well, it has a number of things going for it. One thing it doesn't have
going for it is lack of IMAP support. But there's a fork around
someplace that does. Used to be Sylpheed-Claws, which was the experimental
branch, but I think it wound up being it's own project.

One other thing I'd like to see would be the ability to create a new mail
account as a clone of an existing one.

Other than that, I can't imagine trying to deal with an mbox mailbox any
more. One cool thing I can do because of using a MH mailbox is a nightly
cron job that does things such as:

cd /home/jbaer/Mail/trash
grep -l '^Subject: Mail from the Library' * | xargs rm -f

And I have several such lines in that shell script, so my Trash folder
stays pretty clean, and I don't have to clean out all manner of
notification e-mails that show up periodically.

Yeah, you could write a formail command to auto-clean an mbox file, but
the above is so much easier. (To me anyway)

And I like being able to grep a folder, and open a specific e-mail in a
text editor. Don't need to that often, but it's a nice capability to have.

The auto-find for addressing isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be, but
that's a pretty minor complaint.

I assume other GUI MUAs that do POP will also pull from the local spool,
and Sylpheed does that too, so I can use fetchmail to grab my IMAP stuff,
and still have it wind up in Sylpheed.

jed
-- 
Ok, so we should be thinking of a lovable, cuddly, stuffed penguin
sitting down after having gorged itself on herring. Still with me? 
 -- Linus Torvalds