Re: Devin's effort

--On Sunday, 19 April, 2015 08:43:58 -0400 Tanstaafl
<[email protected]> wrote:

>...
>> And Mulberry remains more modern and far more
>> feature-complete than Claws and Sylpheed.
>...
 
> For that reason I'm not sure why you would choose to move back
> to something that looks like is on critical life-support, and
> not long for this world? Of course you are free to do whatever
> you like, but personally, I don't change mail clients (or
> other fundamental software I use on a day to day basis)
> lightly...
> 
> Or maybe I'm mis-reading those emails 
>...

Because I wrote one of the notes that may have caused you to
conclude "on critical life-support", let me provide a little, I
hope hyperbole-free, calibration.

A number of years ago, a colleague in the IETF subcommunity
concerned with email protocols and standards made an interesting
observation about IMAP-capable email clients.  He say "All IMAP
clients suck; Mulberry sucks less".  Perhaps sadly, for those of
us who depend heavily on IMAP Disconnected mode, that statement
appears to still be true: if anyone knows of an MUA that handles
Disconnected mode well and has good support for other MIME and
email features, I, at least, would like to know about it.  FWIW,
the last time I looked at Thunderbird, it didn't even try.

Now, what I think I said is that Mulberry is exhibiting an
increasing number of signs of age and that I'm worried about the
future as those accumulate.  For example, with 4.0.8 on recent
Windows platforms, temporary files (such as those associated
with opening some attachments) are not stored where Mulberry
expects to find them, so one must either explicitly save them
and then open them from the saved location or must play tricks
with the Windows file system so Mulberry's expectations work
out.  If there is a way around that with Preferences, I can't
find it.   As another example that probably affects all
platforms, Mulberry has never been "taught" about the latest
extensions to X.509 certificates, so almost every attempt to
store a new S/MIME certificate results in warnings about invalid
certificates.

How significant each of those issues, and others like them, are
depends on personal taste and tolerance.  I rank them as minor
annoyances, certainly nowhere near putting the MUA "on life
support".   I am concerned about the future: I see little hope
of getting support for some of the newer IMAP extensions or
non-ASCII addresses (and the alias structure they require) into
Mulberry, the X.509 stuff will become more of a concern if usage
of the extensions increases, and it is always possible that
Windows 12 (or 20) will introduce some mismatch with Mulberry's
assumptions that are less easily worked around.   The
observations that Mulberry has never handled disconnected mode
well (even though it handles it as well or better than almost
anything else), that its interfaces to PGP and S/MIME support
leave a lot to be desired, etc., don't help either.  

So I think it is appropriate for all of us to be thinking about
the issues and making plans, especially for platforms that are,
in practice, lower priority than others.  But "life support"?
No, not nearly.

   john