What OS & mail client do -you- use?

Mon Oct 27 08:49:15 PST 2003

To the degree that this is an issue faced by the entire community, and 
to the degree that we are the experts to whom others look for answers, 
perhaps we should be answering this question, instead of quibbling about it.

Having perused the rants and raves on this topic, I'd be interested in 
knowing who uses what, and why.

However, to cut to the chase, it seems like a no-win situation at this 
point in history; it's not clear to me that there is any one client that 
will make everyone happy.

For a long time I used /usr/ucb/mail. I never used the folder option, 
but I modified my .mailrc extensively and maintained it over a ten year 
span or so, with occasional reliance on /usr/bin/mail.

More recently I've been using Netscape's products. Netscape's products 
are available across many platforms and for that reason are attractive 
to me, as a heterogeneous, bleeding edge kind of guy.

It's not possible at this point in time to conduct business with the 
world at large without having access to a Microsoft platform, with which 
to compose and review documents in the traditionally accepted rich text 
format of the late 20th century, which is Microsoft Word ... not, that 
is, unless one insists on only doing business with zealots of a similar 
stripe, that is.

There are alternatives, of course. Rich Text Format, or RTF. HTML, 
although it has been getting stretched out of shape, lately, and is no 
longer merely a hypertext-enabled markup language, is another Open Standard.

Most recruiters and contracting firms will accept any one of these three 
formats - RTF, HTML, or MS Word's proprietary '.doc' format (which, I 
think, was originally based on RTF).

It would be nice to have close integration between the mail and web 
clients, just in case someone sent me a URL. I might have seen an 
implementation of mutt(1) that did this, but that may be the only case 
where a text-based mail client and GUI-based web client were tightly 
integrated that I know of.

I recall, during this period, seeing a lot of inline HTML in the 
messages I was receiving, and having come to the conclusion that, just 
perhaps, command-line mail clients would soon be a thing of the past ... 
useful for diagnosing problems and automating log delivery, but not 
something that people would choose to use, in most circumstances.

I put a lot of thought into this. It was at this time that I started 
thinking about the implications of font availability. And the fact is 
that everyone else in the world is using a 16-bit font except for here 
in the  States. Every one of those special characters - umlauts, tildes, 
accent grave, etc - are based on either extensions to the 8-bit ASCII 
standard, or a 16-bit standard.

One such standard is UniCode. UniCode is supported by FreeBSD and most 
other operating systems, and applications, today.

If one considers inline HTML, and 16-bit character sets, as equally 
obnoxious, visually speaking - as viewed through the filter imposed by 
the use of a baroque mail client that relies upon all messages 
containing only messages composed of American 7-bit ASCII characters - 
then, it seemed to me, the future was obnoxious.

If, on the other hand, one bowed gracefully to the inevitable, and began 
evaluating GUI-based mail clients that handled multilingual 
communications properly, instead of rejecting information as garbage, 
then the future was less problematic.

I'm still concerned about cross-platform availability, portability of 
the data, and compliance of the mail client with existing mail directory 
standards.

I've been looking into Opera recently; I understand it has a mail 
client, as well.

Eudora is also attractive for its support of encryption, however, it is 
not, to the best of my knowledge, an Open Source product any more.

What is your experience?

-- richard

Richard Childers / Senior Engineer
Daemonized Networking Services
https://www.daemonized.com
(415) 759-5571

PS: It's interesting to consider the explosion of spam in the past few 
years in a military context; has it ever been considered by anyone that 
this is actually a subtle attack on the United States' citizens' ability 
to communicate with one another, and a deliberate attempt to sow seeds 
of mistrust ... incidentally, crippling the ability of citizens to 
quickly communicate and organize themselves?

Do you know -anyone- who would buy most of the crap you see being 
supposedly sold?

(Note comments below regarding 'disabling and crippling support'; if a 
hypothetical enemy of the state were actually bringing about this state 
of affairs for their own reasons, they couldn't ask for better 
cooperation from the citizens then they are getting, today.)

-- richard

J C Lawrence wrote:

>On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 06:41:18 -0800 
>richard childers </ kg6hac <fscked at pacbell.net>> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>If you folks are having trouble reading messages that incorporate
>>HTML, why not use a client that recognizes HTML instead of living in
>>the 19th century?
>>    
>>
>
>Have you considered the assertion that HTML for email is just a Bad
>Idea, and that it Shouldn't Be Done?  Have you made any effort to
>consider why some might reasonably and rationally hold those views, and
>on what grounds?  Have you considered that there are cases where plain
>text may be significantly better, or to consider what those cases may
>be?
>
>When you have, this thread will cease being a troll.
>
>Oh, and I do use a client that handles HTML just fine.  I've also
>deliberately disabled or crippled those supports for the standard
>privacy and security reasons.
>
>  
>