[geeks] New Mail Client

[Mike Meredith]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:58:09 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Personally, I find the gtk2 version to be faster and smoother.
> 
> It might be because gtk2 can use accelerated fonts and widgets.

It might be because we have CPU to burn these days ... sylpheed gtk2
under IRIX was definitely sluggish, but seems very fast on my Ultra 40.

> - imap not very fast

I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer my mail folders to be stored
locally, and living without imap seems to clear up quite a few of your
problems. It can get bogged down when doing stuff in my spam folders
though (in the region of 200MB).

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the developers are similarly
old-fashioned.

> - key bindings are inconsistent and appear to be different from most 
>   other GUI  MUAs.  This problem is not unique to Sylpheed of course.

Nice thing about the key bindings is that you can change them on the
fly by pressing the key you want to bind to whilst the menu item is
highlighted. 

> - filtering is non-standard and proprietary to sylpheed, but that's
>   a common problem with all GUI MUAs right now.

And it's pretty powerful although I haven't compared it to a recent
'proper client' it does stuff that the GropeWoes (sorry ... GroupWise)
client can't.

> - it has quite a few features

Indeed. 'Actions' are simple but nice ... essentially you can bind
shell scripts to GUI commands, including some support for the MH
commands (which won't work too well for imap of course).

It can be a bit flaky if you insist on loading up every possible
plugin, but it does tend to crash gracefully ... I've never lost an
email in years of using it.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'