Ricardo Palomares Martínez wrote:
El 15/08/13 05:16, Paul B. Gallagher escribió:
Here are a couple of scenarios where it makes sense:
• For most ordinary users who have one ISP and several accounts, the
SMTP settings will be the same, so the best strategy is just to
point a
new account to the existing SMTP server, which is set as default.
How likely is that?
In my experience, most users have only one ISP. So if they have
several accounts, which is the scenario we're discussing, we're
already there.
Please note that having only one ISP, which is the common scenario
indeed, has little or nothing to do with having email accounts with
different email providers.
Sure. But it does mean you have one SMTP server for all accounts, which
/is/ one of the things we're talking about.
Most sensible people nowadays don't use the ISP provided email
accounts, since if they switch ISP, they lose the email accounts.
Yep. Been there, done that. A real PITA.
Instead, people use email accounts from Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook.com and
several other email providers, and while it may happen to have several
GMail accounts, the most sensible reason to have several accounts is
for fallback service, so you would use different email providers. For
instance, I have four different accounts (five a few days ago, before
Lavabit.com were shut down) and none of them share the email provider
with the others.
OK.
Pretty likely, I'd say. Maybe we travel in different circles, but
I know lots of people with their own domains, and lots of people
with two or more throwaway accounts (yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc.).
I don't know a lot of people having their own domain (and, for those
that do have it, some don't use the email accounts in them as
primary email, because it is not so ubiquitiously accessible as GMail
or Yahoo!). So I wouldn't give this scenario more than a 25 % of
total cases.
OK, well as I said we travel in different circles. I have a lot of
contacts with businessmen and -women who have accounts at their
companies (or government agencies as the case may be), and many of them
are independents, freelancers, and professionals whose companies are
basically SOHOs like mine.
If I were designing the interface, I'd offer the user these options:
a) prepopulate with settings from an existing account (user
selectable) and modify them;
b) start from scratch.
I wouldn't go that way. You could ask for the email address (that's
something the user is pretty much expected to know) :-) and, if the
domain happens to be the same than an existing account, then some
fields could be prepopulated, and the SMTP server used by default.
I think most users would already know whether the new account has the
same domain as an existing account, and in that case they /would/ choose
to prepopulate and edit. Do they really need help with that decision?
Overall, the autoconfig feature from Thunderbird should be the way to
go, although it is not perfect.
I'm not familiar with the features of TB, but if it has a library of
common providers so it can prepopulate the settings, that would be a
help. The user would still have the option of changing the presets:
"here's what we think you should do -- is that OK or do you want to
change it?" (please review these and fix any that don't suit you)
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
