Re: Jumping ship

On Wednesday 30 November 2011 21:27:39 Patrick Connolly wrote:
> Somewhere about Wed, 30-Nov-2011 at 08:44PM +1300 (give or take), cr wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> |> Be that as it may, at some point Debian Stable will (presumably)
> |> include Kmail2 at which point all my mailfiles will get converted
> |> to some cryptic format that nothing else can read.  So I should
> |> switch to something else first.
> |> 
> |> Question is, what?    Which current mailreaders use Maildir?
> |> I tried Balsa but it felt a bit clunky and I couldn't persuade it to
> |> send messages so I reverted to Kmail for now.
> |> Evolution I think uses Mbox.  Apparently so does Thunderbird.  I'm
> 
> I don't think Thunderbird uses vanilla Mbox -- maybe it's raspberry.
> At least I can't read its mail with mutt after Thunderbird has done its
> fiddling.

That was just the impression I got after a Google -  admittedly it's hard to 
find out for sure what format many readers use, just by Googling.   They seem 
quite reticent about it.

> |> not so keen on ginormous files even if they are in ASCII.  All it
> |> takes is one corrupt read or write or delete and there goes all
> |> your messages.
> 
> I've never had that problem in 15 years with mutt (and before that,
> elm).  It's such a simple file format, it's easy to fix up (even if a
> few messages are lost).  Messages are separated in a simple way that
> even I can spot.

Well, a few weeks ago Kmail crashed.   Restarted it, showed 7500 new 
messages(!) and crashed with a segfault - due to partition full.   (Easily 
fixed that).   The emails were all automated 'Message undeliverable' bounces of  
a phishing spam message "Your account suspended" from "Suntrust 
([email protected])".   Yeah some spambot forged my name in the 'from' field. 
Webmail showed (eventually) another 18,800 in my ISP's server, which I 
downloaded and deleted in batches of ~800 as they were coming in (quickest way 
to get rid of them).   I wouldn't have felt so confident about simultaneously 
writing to and deleting stuff from a Mbox file (that had just survived a 
segfault).   I assume the worst that can happen with Maildir is a few 
individual files (messages) might get damaged - I'm no expert but I'd rely on 
ext3 getting its file operations right more than kmail (or any other program) 
not getting its file address pointers scrambled under heavy loading.

But I do agree Mbox's format is a good thing, though.
 
> |> Claws-mail apparently uses a text-based file-based relative of
> |> Maildir called MH.  I might have to try that.  (From Wikipedia on
> |> MH: "MH follows the Unix philosophy of write programs that do one
> |> thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write
> |> programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal
> |> interface (Doug McIlroy)."  My thoughts exactly.)
> 
> That's why I use mutt to read and write.  I use procmail to filter.
> Bit old fashioned but I like it like that.  I have to use Outlook at
> work and I find it tedious by comparison.

Wow.   I bet you use emacs for editing too.  (Or vi, he adds hurriedly, 
covering his bets).   {grin}

Let's say that, had I been introduced to email in the early days when GUI 
programs were slow and heavy (on the hardware then), I would probably be quite 
happy using a text-based mailreader.    I did use mc for file management for 
quite a while until Nautilus got fast enough to be more convenient. 

But I've got used to a GUI mailreader (first one I used at home was Pegasus 
Mail before I found Linux) so I'm not looking to lose the GUI - I just want a 
fairly uncomplicated one.

Outlook - I don't like the way it fiddles with the format of messages, whether 
displaying them or storing them.

> |> Any others?  I don't need or want a calendar, or an appointments
> |> book, or an organiser, I just want a mailreader/writer.  Kmail 1.13
> |> is fine.  (Can you hear me, KDE?  Thought not).

cr

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