I have been thinking these days on writing something suckless for managing my mail. I don't know if any of you is happy with any mail client, but I do not feel comfortable with any of them.
mutt is quite nice but is 'big' and there are so many open bugs like closing the connections when receiving a window-resize event. which is quite anoying.. sylpheed have some socket-locking problems, evolution is awesomely bloated and is not very nice when resizing the window. This is why I am thinking on writing a set of small tools for managing the mail in a minimalistic way. What I have in mind is something more simple that can be done without many LOCs and splitting the problem in multiple programs will achieve a better. - pop3 client - imap client - smtp client - mbox/mdir client with support for mime - frontend shell or so using inotify() on Linux is quite simple to get notifications of new files in certain directories, so it will be possible to get the events of new mails using maildir or mbox in this way. Extracting the headers of a mail is something really simple with any basic shell tools. Im currently out of time for coding such stuff, but I think that maybe there's more people interesting on finding an almost decent solution for reading the mail without those complications. The frontend for the mail should be able to follow mail threads, sort by date or grep by contents. following these concepts shouldnt be hard to create an usable frontend for the web or a phone/pda...squirrelmail is also to blame...and writing a simple cgi using these tools will be quite simple and useful. I hope this brainstorming helps somebody to start coding them. What do you think? are you happy with your MUA? --pancake
