Tim: >> Thus far, Evolution is the least-worst one I've found on Linux.
Chris: > You must of never had to use the Evolution mail group before.. > They're quite rude over there. Basically, they give you the nice " GO > RTFM" for replies, even though you tried Googling your issue. > > " Go to HELP > AND XXXX" and read the help guide." > > I use to really love Evolution until that started happening. True, I've never used their forum. Manual, what manual? Ha! I just pressed F1 for help, it opened my web browser to: https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.28 Giving me: Not Found The requested URL /users/evolution/3.28 was not found on this server. But, in the past, I've seen Gnome manuals for such programs where all they do is give a one-liner on each control. This button downloads your mail, this button prints it. I can figure that out for myself. Narrating the icons and menu is useless. I need a manual that explains how your program does something, so I can figure out how to get it to do what it's supposed to, when it's not. Tell me how the different options for a function work, what they do. Though that problem is endemic with most software. But when I say "least worst" I mean various things like, the following, just to mention a few of the main ones: The program has to run without being a major CPU hog. I want to use a three-pane view (list of folders, list of mail in the current folder, and view the message). The layout needs to be ergonomic. I have to be able to read the contents in each pane without it being a pain, no reading a magazine through a keyhole effects. When I type a reply, I don't want mangled quoted paragraphs because your program is utterly crap at either not re-wrapping text, or does a job like a three-year old has typed it, with line breaks where they don't belong, mixtures of different length lines, quote indicators splattered through the paragraph and an untidy mess left of it. I need to be able to unmangle the quoted text without it being a major fight. Even more important, when I type MY text it has to be unmangled. It should be as good as a word processor at handling line breaks, especially if I edit a paragraph and change something in the middle. I've been doing email for around 30, and still morons write email programs that just can't get the basics right. I want proper flags on my mail. Only, ONLY, bloody ONLY, mark a mail as read if *I* have actually read it. Don't mark old mail as read to hide it from me. I need some damn way to tell which mails I've read and not read. If I'm ignoring a thread, don't mark it read, either do nothing or mark it ignored. If it's that bad I'll delete it. If I want to hide older mail to quickly see the latest, I'll use a filter that only shows me the last few days messages in the list. But when you mark an email as read, when I haven't, it makes it damn hard to find a message someone sent me a while ago but I haven't actually read. Considering how email is often used for business, in software that's supposed to be office software, it's vital to not bugger that up. It's not bloody rocket science! But there is some truly dire programs out there, including the main ones that most people use. I'm reminded of that scene in the Tomorrow Never Dies Bond film where the evil henchmen are having a video conference and one of them tells his boss: as requested the software is full of bugs, so they'll be updating for years. I'm sure that line was thrown in by a writer who was sick of Microsoft's crap. >> Mail in IMAP has various advantages that POP3 doesn't have. >> >> You can look at the headers of all available messages, and only >> fetch the ones your interested in (by name, subject, etc). You can >> filter based on headers (and that's quicker than taking the whole >> message in and filtering). > How do you do that? When I tried IMAP, on this sat dish connection, > here in Claws, Claws slowly loaded the whole inbox and displayed > everything in the inbox. > > And every time I switched folders it took it a min to display > everything in that folder. It's an option (depending on how good your software is client &/or server). When you open a mail folder, you can * Only fetch very brief headers only (e.g. from, to, subject, date), and it'll only fetch the actual message when you select it from your list. * Or, only prefetch more extensive headers (more headers that are useful for filtering) * prefetch the entire message * It's even optional about fetching attachments (brilliant for wading through mail where people have sent you 50 meg attachments). It is designed for being able to minimise network traffic and be more efficient at it. Though, your program also has to be written intelligently (I've already roasted that concept). And the very nature of email (lots of individual messages) does mean that some network environments are more painful than others. For laggy ones, it can be simplest to download everything as a lump, then deal with it a minute later all locally cached. For me, I fetch my mail into my LAN mail server. That's quick. But even for people with high speed broadband optical fibre connections direct to their ISP, they can have a painful experience doing mail over the network, all down to how badly their ISP runs their network and mail server. On my LAN, using IMAP means I can manage my mail on any computer on the LAN, easily. If I was using POP3, that'd be a complete nightmare. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.53.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 14 13:59:45 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. 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