At 06:03 AM 12/6/2001 -0500, David T-G wrote: >% Flamewars aside, if you ever have to use Windows, TheBat! is actually an >% exceptional MUA. (unless one wanted to use Mutt with Cygwin(sp?).) > >So I hear. I'd like to poke at it, because I know some folks who could >probably use a Good Mail Program but are just stuck in the Windows world. >I haven't gotten around to it, though.
I'm I am one of those people who are stuck in Windows world and could use a good mail program. I'm stuck in the Windows world because I must use speech recognition thanks to too many hours on the keyboard nuking my hands/arms. All my mail is stored in IMAP folders (over 230) with about 50 active folders. The rest are archival information. I'm looking at mutt to see if it can potentially be a replacement for Eudora (which sucks horribly but sucks far less than any other mail client I've tried). One of the things I would need to do with mutt is disable all of the keystroke activated commands and replace it with a gateway to my speech recognition environment (NaturallySpeaking). Misrecognitions do horrible things with keystroke driven user interfaces. Imagine how usable mutt would be if you had someone randomly typing words instead of the command you wanted. And yes, I really want us to run on a Windows environment because I want to integrate a mailer into my speech recognition environment, drive browsers, and work with local files no matter where I take my laptop with or without net connection. >% there are a ton of people out there unfamiliar with PGP/MIME. That makes > >Yep. That's true. Care to take up the Cause Of Spreading The Word? the problem with the PGP world is that it's overly complicated and has absolutely horrible human factors problem. I'm working on an antispam system called camram ( http://harvee.billerica.ma.us/~esj/camram.html) and its based on proof of work postage stamps and opportunistic digital signatures. We've created a framework where once you have established communication with someone with e-mail + proof of work postage stamp, you have created an opportunity for exchanging public keys automatically. Once you have exchange those keys you then create an opportunity for automatic signing/encryption. Human factors requires that keys be unprotected (no pass phrase) which is perfectly OK for envelope like protection. It's also important for people like myself because it hurts to type a pass phrase and I haven't gotten around to creating a pass phrase/password management vocabulary for NaturallySpeaking. I'm not really comfortable with plain text passwords and I'm not sure how I can protect them otherwise. One of the important side effects of this technique is that it makes encryption of e-mail ordinary, everyday, and very non scary for the naive computer user. It also creates an opportunity for someone to say "if I want to make this more secure, how can I do it?" which is the clue that they are ready to hear more information and take the right steps. I'm looking for people to write code (since I can't anymore) and help me with prototyping the camram techniques. Realistically, we would end up with plug-ins for Eudora and Outlook and a toolkit for other e-mail clients to use. Ideally, camram would be integrated into an e-mail client but that's a long-term goal. --- eric
