On 2020.08.20 20:02, Victor Ivanov wrote:
On 20/08/2020 18:16, Jack wrote:
>> From what I read, there is much enthusiasm for Claws/Evolution.
>>
>> Sadly, this direct comparison, seems out of date and does not
include
>> TB-78, but it is the most comprehensive comparison I have found. A
>> direct comparison, that is up to date, would be very cool, imho:
>>
>> https://appmus.com/vs/mozilla-thunderbird-vs-evolution
>>
>> and
>>
>>
https://www.techradar.com/best/best-email-clients#best-free-email-clients
> This list is pretty unimpressive. Most of their "free" offers
aren't.
> Their description of Gmail doesn't even mention free use, that I can
> see. Then they include Slack - and the main negative is "no
email." In
> addition, especially for gmail, it's not really an email "client,"
it's
> an email service with web interface. I certainly don't call that an
> email client. Am I just too old?
I completely agree. Unfortunately, I think it's a sad state of affairs
wrt mail clients these days.
I tried many of the open-source ones such as TB, Evolution, Claws
Mail,
Geary, and KMail. While there is a lot of personal preferences when it
comes to choice, it seems neither of these can get a few simple things
I'm personally looking for into a single package:
Per my suggtion elsewhere in the thread, have you tried Balsa?
- stand-alone configuration:
being able to rsync "~/.client" or "~/.config/client" across
multiple
machines or through a decent export/import functionality is rather
critical when working from different machines. Not a fan of KDE's
Akonadi, though I appreciate what it tries to do as a whole.
- decent PGP support:
In particular, being able to (re) encrypt existing and unencrypted
emails either on-demand, en-masse via filter, or automatically upon
receipt of a new one. All the above clients fail this point for
different reasons.
- No Gnome 3-like BS interface [luckily most satisfy this]:
Gnome 3's "simplicity" is not only ugly but also utterly
dysfunctional. When I see an application utilising Gnome 3
conventions
for UI design it leaves my drive faster than the speed of light (it
seems things can indeed travel faster in such cases)
- Conversation view [none have that]
It may seem silly and it's certainly a personal preference, but
GMail's conversation view is incredibly useful to me. None of the
above are capable of combining sent and received mail in correct
order
with the option to either scroll through to the end or collapse
individual emails. Yes, threaded mail is similar and is better than
nothing but it's not the same. Though TB's threading often breaks
and
requires a folder rebuild to get it right.
Can you elaborate on how threading and conversations are different?
The only breakage in threading I seem to find is when someone's email
client seems to omit any reference type headers, so that reply starts a
new thread/conversation, and that affects both TB and Balsa. Balsa
uses a modified JWZ threading, modified so you don't get an older
message indented under a newer one (based on simply having the same
subject, but otherwise unrelated.) I actually traded a few emails with
JWZ himself on that topic.
In terms of combining sent and received messages, unless you are going
to have some way of showing conversations across folders (which don't
exist in gmail) the only way I can think of is to copy your sent
messages into the folder the replies are in, and I do sometimes do
this. I try to set all my mailing lists to send me copies of my own
messages, but doing a bcc to yourself would have the same effect.
So I keep reverting to TB whose main drawback for me so far has been
the
PGP support. I hope TB 78 resolves this, but I'm not fond at all of
the
approach they have taken to ditch external tools (i.e. GnuPG) in
favour
of a built-in separate key management tool.
If anyone has been able to successfully achieve the PGP point,
preferably with TB/Enigmail or KMail, I would be very grateful for
some
input.
- V
