Re: Real name policy? [was: kmail has messed up the email accounts]

On Tue, 2020-06-02 at 15:18 +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 June 2020 12:43:00 UTC test wrote:
> > ...
> > 
> > That doesn't mean the users shouldn't be allowed to say something about
> > the
> > software.  It doesn't mean that programmers will change the
> > software.  It's
> > all something that just happens, and it's possible that progress can be
> > made when users provide useful input and programmers aren't ignoring
> > them.
> 
> as someone who has in the past been blunt about the painful complexity
> and 
> fragility of akonadi, i feel your pain. i've got control+alt+space bound
> to 
> "toggle offline/online" because i have to do this several times per day
> to get 
> the akonadi backend to go out and check for new e-mail. 

Doesn't F5 work for you?  I even found an option to sync a folder when
opening/entering it, and I'm finding that very useful.

However, I'm wondering about the IMAP idle feature.  IIUC, it's supposed to
tell a MUA when new messages have arrived --- or when there is a change,
like when filtering messages with imapfilter --- and that sometimes works
and most of the time not, at least not for new messages arriving.  How is
that?  Is it possibly a conntrack problem in that the connection times out,
or something else?

> by the way, i would pay actual money to someone who could make the EWS
> driver 
> able to make changes to my ms-exchange calendar. it's read-only, and
> this 
> means i have to run ms-outlook in another VM just to manage my calendar.
> but, 
> i digress.

Perhaps evolution can do that?  At least it might beat having to run a VM
just for that.

> > To give you an example: Kmail is broken in that it doesn't work
> > anymore.
> > I'm sure none of the programmers have made it intentionally so, and it
> > doesn't matter what their design choices and reasons were.  Kmail is
> > still
> > broken.
> 
> kmail does work, and it's my main MUA, and it gets better all the time. 

Well, yes, it works when it does.  It used to work until it quit and I
don't know how to fix it.  Trying to fix it by running akonadictl fsck was
what ultimately broke it ...

It also got a lot better over time, yes.

> i 
> think the authors and maintainers prefer to know how useful i find it,
> even 
> while i'm reporting occasional defects. the words "kmail is broken"
> spoken out 
> of context are both unhelpful, alienating, and misleading.

Hm, did that seem out of context?

> > Now I'm bluntly saying that using identities like kmail does --- and
> > other
> > MUAs do --- is bullshit because it appears that doing so makes things
> > so
> > complicated that they easily break and because it's not good for the
> > users
> > because it's confusing and because users don't have multiple
> > personalities
> > or identies, with some exceptions.
> 
> my day job has a security officer role. four of us share a pgp key and
> the 
> ability to send and receive e-mail as security@$domain. this means my
> mail 
> account has one sending server, one receiving server, and two identities.
> if i 
> didn't have kmail i'd have to use multiple e-mail accounts. so your
> word, 
> "bullshit", may not mean what you think it means.

I shouldn't have been so undifferitiated about it.

> > I imagine that there were good ideas and reasons for inventing
> > identities,
> > and that's ok.  I appreciate the effort and the work that has gone into
> > it.
> > I wouldn't mind it if it was working because I would set it up only
> > once
> > and I can live with the confusion the way it's made is causing.  It
> > even
> > gets less confusing when you set it multiple times, until it's finally
> > entirely broken.
> 
> all power tools can kill -- use at your own risk -- no warranties
> expressed or 
> implied. it's software you don't have to pay money for, that you get
> source 
> code to. if you find problems, report them. if the documentation could
> be 
> clearer, contribute text.

There is a difference between power tools killing because they are
defective and power tools killing because they were used in ways they were
not designed for.

I'm undecided if I should try to fork kmail and remove everything akonadi
from it or do nothing.  I suspect that kmail depends so much on akonadi
that it can't reasonably be removed.  And if I managed to fork it, how
could I keep up with upstream when new features are added or improvements
are being made.

> also note, everything about kmail and akonadi gets better if you switch
> from 
> the default database (mysql) to the other one (postgresql).

Apparently not everyone agrees to that.  I could try it, though.  Can't I
just use a "normal" (in this case remote) sql server for kmail?  It might
be helpful if I could use phpmyadmin and the mysql client to look at its
database.  The way it is now, it's all hidden and inaccessible.  Perhaps I
could help with finding and fixing bugs.