Re: Mulberry-discuss Digest, Vol 86, Issue 5

I run both TB and mulberry, frequently simultaneously.  Here's my take on 
the two:

Disconnected mode is my biggest headache and has been for years.  I travel 
a lot for work and often to places with really bad internet service. 
Sometimes so bad it makes 128k VSAT with 1500msec latency and 5-10 people 
trying to use the same link seem good.  It isn't just mail clients, but all 
modern client-server (the damn kids insist on calling it "cloud-based") 
applications are written by children sitting on gigabit corporate LANs or 
working from home with FIOS or, if they're slumming, 4G.  Lots of things 
just break when latencies stretch out and even more things are uselessly 
slow.

Connected mode with any IMAP client where the IMAP connection process isn't 
*completely* disconnected from the UI and working entirely in the 
background, is problematic and annoying, aside from being user-unfriendly 
it really should be considered an affluenza microagression against the vast 
majority of the less affluent world.

Thunderbird does some very tricky things with background sync, but they're 
ultimately too clever and as a user with large mailboxes, I still suffer 
through extended lock-outs while working.  Further, T-bird still has some 
problematic memory leaks and memory consumption.  Currently on my system 
Firefox is using 622MB, Tbird 423 MB, and Mulberry...  17.5 MB.  Yes, 
that's correct: Mulberry is using 4% as much memory as Tbird.  System 
uptime is about 12 hours.  Both programs have been running since restart.

Not surprisingly, Mulberry is fast.  One of the biggest annoyances of Tbird 
is that it will start some unknown background operation (not unknowable, 
the Activity Manager is helpful) and it stops keeping up with my typing.  I 
find myself typing a sentence and waiting for Tbird to render it.  Mulberry 
has no trouble keeping up with typing.

My biggest annoyance with Tbird is idiotic modal dialog boxes it throws 
every time something doesn't go as expected.  I do not care, at all, that 
there was a problem saving the draft.  Again.  I told you last time I 
didn't care.  You tried again, and I still don't care.  Stop bothering me. 
There's a discussion about moving these alerts to a status window, which 
would be a huge improvement.  I've got a folder full of screen grabs of the 
most annoying ones.  I feel like a crank complaining about them, but they 
are a massive ongoing annoyance and it is just really, really bad UI.  Do 
not interrupt my work to tell me that there's something you couldn't do and 
that I can't do anything about [OK].  Evar.  Mulberry is far, far better 
about this sort of thing.

However, Mulberry still needs time to sync folders and on a slow 
connection, this means sitting on one's ass waiting as that brilliant idea 
you were about to set down for posterity slowly dissolves into the brain 
sludge of 80's sitcom theme music.  A frequent use case for me, just to 
make this more personal, is getting to a network connection in some random 
airport where I have 15 minutes to spare to pee, get a drink, and swap 
mail.  Frequently there's an inbound message waiting for me that would be 
so good to respond to before I get on the next 5 hours flight, but... I 
have to wait for the complete sync and I probably don't have time for the 
next complete sync because while that's happening, I'm not using my mail 
and they're calling my flight already and it is two terminals over.

Disconnected mode on Mulberry is awesome (and it does, in fact, work just 
as well in Tbird these days).  However, neither supports "periodic 
background resync" - that is if you set disconnected mode it is all on you 
to remember to reconnect so that message you think you sent goes out or 
those accolades you expected for your witty rejoinder seem absent and you 
get that sinking feeling nobody cares all of a sudden, like you posted a 
great cat picture on Facebook and nobody "liked" it.  And a deep melancholy 
descends until you remember, Oh yeah-disconnected mode means manual sync.

I have been contemplating a solution for disconnected mode using 
OfflineIMAP - I have hesitated because I still run windows as my laptop OS 
(a few programs require it) and I don't have a fast enough computer to 
comfortably run windows in a VM for those annoying programs yet.  This 
means that running a local IMAP server is less familiar to me than it would 
be on in a *nix environment (though hmailserver looks like an option). 
However, OfflineIMAP can sync over IMAP to a Maildir folder and this is why 
Tbird 38's pending support for Maildir is exciting (well, that and no 
longer having to retransfer a 5G mailbox because something farted).  No 
need, then, for the local IMAP server layer between the MUA and the local 
mail cache, but still fully divorced MUA from a background-synced local 
mail copy.

Doing this would banish t-bird's dialog boxes about network woes because it 
would never have to worry about the network again, something that clearly 
gives it fits.  It would also significantly mitigate T-bird's sync slowness 
and make it far easier to use.  However, it would still be using half a 
gigabyte of RAM to accomplish a task that can clearly be done in less than 
1/20th of the memory.  And for that, and for a generally cleaner, less 
cluttered interface, I'll stick with Mulberry as long as I can.

It is a bit of annoyance that Mulberry does a very rudimentary job of 
rendering HTML mail, something I've reluctantly stopped bouncing at the 
server as I was making myself a bit of a mail recluse.  Perhaps it would be 
possible to adapt Claws' claws-mail-fancy-plugin, which renders mail using 
webkit.   And getting a version into a repository for easy install on 64bit 
Linux would keep me on Mulberry through the next update cycle.