Re: Devin's effort

Tanstaafl:

> I'm trying hard to figure out how you could mean something other than
> 'Check account' (for new messages) when you say 'Log in/out'.

Yeah, sorry, but this is a case where maybe Mulberry is using some terminology 
in the UI that doesn't equate exactly to what is strictly happening 
server-side and where Thunderbird has a different UI interaction model. What 
Mulberry calls "Login" is "enable this account for periodic checking oh and by 
the way since I'm doing this I obviously want the first check done immediately 
so perform an initial login to the server and keep the credentials I enter now 
cached in memory, if they aren't permanently stored somewhere". The reason I 
found this valuable because at times in the past I have needed to work with 
either flaky servers or with occasional lengthy connectivity failures / access 
restrictions on a subset of my accounts, and having the periodic check fail 
regularly and pop up a message was really irritating. It's also useful for 
self-limiting, e.g. temporarily turning off checks for non-work accounts to 
avoid that temptation of checking that new message on some non-urgent account.

> That is precisely what happens in TB when you click on 'Get Messages
> (that is what the button is called) - it logs into the account and
> checks for new messages, then logs out.

Yes, Mulberry also has a button (called "Check") to explicitly poll for 
messages. This is a different feature, as explained above.

> Each account can be configured to do this (or not) when TB starts up,

And once started up, how do get Thunderbird to stop periodic checks 
temporarily on one account? It may be possible now, but I didn't find that 
capability when I last tried Thunderbird several years ago.

> and clicking the 'Get Messages' button checks the current account, and
> it also has a drop-down arrow that lets you check all accounts ('Get all
> new messages'), or one individual account.

Yep, yep. Mulberry also does this but again it's unrelated to the feature I'm 
talking about.

> > Exactly. This is what I meant by "2. *Intelligent* support for
> > massive (Gigabyte plus) mail archives with a large number of
> > folders.": not attempting to sync and index the lot. You said later
> > that this can be turned off. Well, sure, but it's not off by default
> > and having it on by default results in an immediately poor user
> > experience.
>
> For fresh installs, it asks you what you want to do. If you blindly just
> click 'Next' buttons like many people do, you may miss it, but it does ask.

I don't recall being asked all that time ago, but may have forgotten that bit.

> That said, from my experience, most users DO want this to happen, so,
> while I don't, I recognize that I'm not 'most users'. Anyway, as I said,
> it can easily be disabled, so don't see this optional feature as a
> legitimate excuse to trash or discount the entire application.

Sure, though I'm just explaining what I need and why I believe Thunderbird 
falls short. I'm not trashing Thunderbird. But you then go on to say in 
response to another comment of mine:

> > But also, I have a vague recollection that turning it off meant it
> > was no longer easy to browse through the folders.
>
> Not true at all - all turning it off does is result in GLODA not being
> able to index the email bodies, because they must all exist locally for
> that to happen. It does still index the headers though, which is all I
> usually need anyway.

Ka-ching! So Thunderbird *does* attempt to index something from the entire 
mail hierarchy. And I don't want it to do that. Mulberry doesn't need to do 
that. I have a vast mail hierarchy (as do you), much of which is historical. I 
want to keep it *in case* I need to go back to look at something, but in 
practice I rarely do. So when performing a new installation of my mail client 
(which for a while there was a surprisingly frequent thing I needed to do) it 
is painful waiting for Thunderbird to traverse the entire tree even if it is 
to "only" index headers and not the mail bodies. Now, if you can opt out of 
that in Thunderbird then I would become more interested in it.

> > You will no doubt argue that I'm spreading FUD,
>
> Not at all. I don't mind honest genuine questions, or people describing
> genuine past user experiences, as long as they don't do so as if that
> one experience defines the product in total.

Sure, maybe I wasn't making it clear that I am talking about what I need and 
not implying that all users have my requirements. After all, the question of 
yours that I was responding to was:

> So... I'm very curious what you (and the other list participants here)
> consider some of the most appealing features of Mulberry over other IMAP
> clients you/they have used.

So I was hoping my responses would have been clearly meant to be taken in that 
context.


[...]
> > But then in later messages you say again that addons from
> > "trustworthy" sources are fine and dandy. Well, I'm sure they are,
> > but it's additional cognitive load and time to spend sifting through
> > the trustworthy from the untrustworthy.
>
> Look, of *course* it will take a little time to learn your way around a
> new program and/or customize it to your liking, but you are making it
> out to be much more complicated and/or time consuming than it is.

Actually, I accept your opinion here. I am making it out to be a bigger deal 
than it is. I am reacting as much to my own ability to waste time configuring 
and tweaking as anything intrinsic to Thunderbird and addons.

[...]

> How much time, I wonder, did you spend learning your way around Mulberry
> way back when you first started using it?

Indeed, a fair point. So arguably there is a large sunk cost there causing my 
resistance. Though I'm still not convinced from your clarifications above that 
Thunderbird + Addons can eliminate some of my personal key annoyances with it.

On the other hand, some of what we are discussing here are differences in 
ease-of-use and discoverability of *some* features. Both are fully-featured 
clients, but what is enabled by default in one requires some learning and 
configuration effort in the other. So some of what I depend upon in Mulberry 
didn't involve spending a lot of time with it and perhaps if I'd never started 
with it, Thunderbird's workflow would be more natural to me.

> > Quanah Gibson-Mount:
> >
> >> b) The "New messages" hotlink, that lets me just track which
> >> folders across all of my accounts have unread mail, so I don't have
> >> to expand my many-levels-deep folders across numerous accounts just
> >> to track what folders I have unread mail in.
>
> > Aaah, yeah. I am so used to relying on that that I forgot to call it
> > out as an essential feature. I recall in TB I needed to muck around
> > with subscribing to specific folders or somesuch. Though maybe
> > Mulberry is effectively the same behind the scenes, and just presents
> > a simpler UI for this.
>
> TB has had 'Smart Folders' since version 2 - so, a long time. There is
> an 'Unread' Smart Folder, that gives you a quick/easy view of all
> folders in all accounts containing unread messages.
>
> Sounds like the same thing to me.

Can you easily configure which subset of folders Thunderbird checks and then 
displays in the "Unread" smart folder? Because you said that Thunderbird gives 
you a view of *all* folders in *all* accounts and no I wouldn't want to see 
them all (some folders are far less important). Maybe another addon?

> Changing an email client *is* painful, especially for power users, no
> question about that. Some people here had asked some questions, and I
> responded as honestly as I could, and apparently some here took offense
> thinking I'm evangelizing TB or something.

Haha. Actually I think you are kind of evangelizing TB. But I for one am 
enjoying the discussion. Because I, too, have been questioning my dogged 
persistence in using Mulberry for all these years (I bought a license at 
version 3 in the payware years). And this discussion has clarified for me what 
I really like about Mulberry and what I haven't yet found in another client.

> > That said, I'm not suggesting that Thunderbird is a terrible IMAP
> > client. I still be believe that Thunderbird is a lot closer to what I
> > want than other IMAP clients. Many don't seem to work *at all*
> > without syncing the entire store. I'm looking at you, Evolution (does
> > that still exist?) and (IIRC) Apple Mail. And don't get me started on
> > how horrible the default iOS mail client is.
>
> Actually, I like the iOS mail client far better than the Mac OS mail
> client (gross - I hate it when I have to help my Mom with anything email
> related)...

I haven't yet found a way to collapse the fully expanded list of folders, and 
when it crashes I have to manually scroll again to where I want to start 
because it doesn't follows Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines and store 
enough of its state to resume where it left off when it terminated / crashed. 
And I haven't discovered a way to search for a folder name instead of message 
content. So it's fairly fundamentally broken for me.

> Thanks for taking the time to engage in an honest discourse...

Likewise. I still think there are differences between Mulberry and Thunderbird 
where they are both apparently doing similar things, but there are subtleties 
in the details. If push came to shove, and I had to abandon Mulberry then 
Thunderbird would certainly be high on my list of clients to try again.

Cheers,

    Bernie