Re: Mulberry and Windows 11

--On Sunday, April 02, 2023 5:31 PM -0700 Joan Korenman <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> I'm replying simply to say that you're not the only Mulberry user left,
> and to ask that if you find a solution to the W11 problem, you let the
> forum know.  I should mention that I have Thunderbird as well on my
> computer, but it hasn't managed to replace Mulberry.

I, too, run Mulberry (my own build) on Windows 10 x64 side by side with 
Thunderbird. Mulberry is much more reliable at spotting new folders. I 
often create folders from Mulberry or on the server and Thunderbird fails 
to detect them until I go into its Subscribe dialog and force it to see 
them. Thunderbird is fast at detecting new mail. Mulberry is more fragile 
and will crash at least once a day. (I'm pretty sure it's a threading 
issue, doing things GUI things on the worker thread, but I haven't tried to 
chase it down.) Thunderbird handles formatted mail much better and almost 
all commercial mail (even Reddit notifications) is unreadable on Mulberry. 
I use Thunderbird in dark mode theme and sometimes the foreground color is 
wrong and I get black on black so that's a pain.

I considered writing my own clone of Mulberry but there are no good open 
source C++ libraries for IMAP and SMTP that build easily on Windows. (The 
ones I've found look like they'd build easily on *nix.) I also found it 
hard to build the SSL stuff, but it looks like OpenSSL has gotten slightly 
easier to build on Windows. I just built the latest version as a prereq for 
the new Boost.MySQL library.

More recently, I noticed that Python has a built-in IMAP library with a 
fork that looks well-maintained, so I was considering building a client in 
Python. C++ would give me a single binary for easier distribution, but 
Python is far more rich in available libraries, like the IMAP one.

Yet another approach I'd considered was building a pure Linux client, using 
the Windows WSL system to run it. Or I could simply run it remotely on a 
Raspberry Pi. I use the VcXsrv X server on Windows to run X apps on my Pi 
and my CentOS servers. This would be a good excuse to learn how to build 
Linux apps with Visual Studio.