Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 03:01:17PM -0400, jason AT flattfamily.com wrote:
> Howdy all.
> 
> Because I use Kontact (Kmail) for e-mail and because I upgraded gcc/g++ to
> the latest devel version (3.4.1) and because Qt uses c++ and broke when I
> upgraded gcc/g++ and because my computer doesn't like to compile for long
> periods and randomly freezes when it does (I don't know why), I have been
> checking my e-mail using http://www.mail2web.com/.
> 
> I find checking my e-mail that way to be slow and cumbersome.  I also don't
> have little niceties like spell checkers (I'm a really lousy speller, as
> I'm sure you'll see in this message) and auto signatures using that web
> mail service.  I have in the past threatened to move away from an e-mail
> client that was so suseptible to changes in other apps, but I have yet to
> find anything that seemed to be less suseptible w/o going to a CLI client.
> 
> So, the idea that I've come up with is to standardize on the mail data
> format (maildir, mbox, whatever), and to have two or three e-mail clients
> installed that will all read and write the same data files (even if they're
> not allowed to do it simultaneously).  Most (maybe all) of the e-mail
> clients I've looked at have claimed standards compliance, compatibility,
> using common date formats, etc., etc., etc., yet none of the ones I have
> tried have given what (I believe) they claim.
> 
> My question is does anyone know of any helpful documentation which compares
> and contrasts e-mail data formats and the e-mail clients that use them so
> that I may achieve the Nirvana of e-mail reading?  Or does anyone have any
> first hand experience they would care to share?
 
I think the best way is to use an imap server, most mail clients are
capable of imap. dovecot is a nice small server which worked fine when i
tried it (except that it doesn't work together with mutt due to bugs in
both programs).
Other than that i've successfully used evolution and mutt at the same
time with both mbox and maildir mailboxes.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org