I broke down and installed a "modern", "graphical" email client
Much as I like Gnus in many respects (but not all ... but that's the topic for another time) I don't particularly like to use it as my secondary email client when I'm on the road with a borrowed laptop etc. I tried Evolution once, but it basically sucked rocks. (There will probably still be open bugs in the Debian BTS which I reported then, some obviously hard to repro and/or due to cosmic rays and/or bad karma.) Incidentally, it still pops up and wants to intrude in my affairs from time to time, such as when I accidentally click on something in the Gnome calendar thingy which pops up when you click on the date and time on the lower Gnome menu bar, and then you're left with a spyware process which lingers in your system and waits for a reason to pop up meeting reminders even when you have never ever put any meetings in your Gnomelution calendar. But I digress.
Things are smooth sailing so far; I only have a bunch of minor warts and wishlist items to put here.
* When you create a new account, why the heck isn't there an SSL checkbox in the account wizard? (I think I saw the same thing when I had to touch Outlook [2000?] with a ten-foot pole the other day.) You have to go back after the account is created and open the Account Properties to click SSL, even when you know in advance that you are going to need SSL (or, worse, that you are going to want to use SSL, but you are going to forget to go and change it, and so you will transmit your password in the clear until you go and fix it).
* Similarly, when I set up a second IMAP account, it forces me to use the same outgoing SMTP server as for the primary account. The wizard even explains that I can change it later, but this is how it is going to be for now. Why?
* So here I go into "Account settings" immediately after I specify the second account, and want to change the outgoing SMTP server, and what are my options? "Default server", that's it! I'm not blind so I did notice that there is a place where I can go and configure additional outgoing SMTP servers, so that I can come back and change to the one I want, but this is getting very very tiresome to write about. Why can't I just add a new server there and then if that's obviously the task I am trying to complete?
* In "Account Settings", it's possible to tick the "Attach this signature:" box without specifying which signature file to use. I wonder what happens when I leave it empty? (Guesstimated outcomes, with guesstimated probabilities: Nothing, 80%; spectacular buffer underflow security CVE crash boom bang, 20%? Maybe I'll try it out once I have all the things configured that I want to configure.)
* Oh, and WIBNI one could just type in a short .signature into a text box, rather than select a text file to attach to messages? What if the file disappears? Anyway, isn't it kind of crude to expose the file system etc. in this particular setting, when basically everywhere else, Thunderbird is configured from its own interface? (Also, having people create free-form text files sounds to me like encouraging them to make the .signature bigger than it ought to be. I don't expect there would be a condescending lecture about McQ signatures if your put one which is too big?)
* Why, oh why does Thunderbird repeat the mistake of every earlier IMAP client to default to some particular naming scheme for Trash, Sent, and Drafts? Whatever you default to, it will likely be wrong for the majority of existing IMAP accounts. It would be an improvement if it would look for an existing structure of "Trash" or "Deleted" or "Deleted Items" or "Deleted items", and "Sent" or "Sent Items" or "Sent items" or "SENT" or "Outbox". The consensus for "Drafts" I think is "Drafts" everywhere. (Of course, most accounts probably contain several of the "de facto standard variations", as people have switched between clients with different "de facto standard variations" hard-coded into them. I imagine some twit might have decided to localize these names in some locales, too, although I haven't bumped into that anywhere personally; but then I tend to stay away from localized software, for reasons which might probably seem ironic to some of you out there in the audience.)
* The security defaults make sense for the most part, but return receipts are enabled. This, to me, is rather iffy. On one hand, nobody will ever want to enable return receipts if it's not the default, and they spent all this time implementing this hugely useful and repeatedly requested (not) feature. On the other hand, it's lame, and a security/privacy problem. "But Outlook has it." Maybe the initial set-up wizard could offer a choice of security profiles? "Lame newbie, turn _everything_ off", "Lame newbie who wants to explore what might happen if you turn all the security hazards on", and "Useful default for everyone else" maybe? This could be extended to other profile types, too -- like, you could put "Lame newbie who wants the transition from Cthulhu Outlook to be as smooth as possible" as one choice, for example, and "1337 mutt user who will not use a mouse voluntarily, or send anything in the clear" as another profile. (Gnus is arguably too esoteric, but I would have no problem identifying myself as more like "1337 mutt user" than "lame Outlook victim".)
* Ick, why do the "Composition & Addressing" options default to "Compose messages in HTML format"!? (I guess it makes sense historically, but, erm, no.)
* At least they have the sense to default to "reply below quoted stuff". But it would be more usable if the label wasn't so long, IMHO; here's what it looks like:
Composition
[X] _Compose messages in HTML format
[X] Automatically _quote the original message when replying
Then, [start my reply below the quote [v]]
(greyed out) and _place my signature [below the quote (recommended) [v]]
I thought dialog boxes were supposed to be terse and informative rather than grammatically correct. Those who have a problem will hover over the text to discover if there's a tooltip there ... which will inevitably say something like "click this checkbox to check or uncheck this checkbox" anyway.
* Well, luckily (or not?), there are no tooltips for the account preferences dialog. No help either, as far as I can tell. Oh, right, there's the Help menu item in the main window which opens up the support web site. I guess that's good enough, although it's not context-sensitive at all.
* When selecting folders to subscribe to, why on Earth is the hierarchy collapsed by default? I also could not immediately come up with a keyboard shortcut for expanding a collapsed folder, but it just turned out to be too obvious -- the left/right arrow keys _without_ any control or alt modifiers do this. Also, incidentally, shift-arrow down the list and press space to toggle all (alas, not subscribe all, but since basically everything is unsubscribed except the inbox, that's close enough for the first-time user. I expect I will swear over this later, though. "Subscribe all" button, pretty please?) Shift-selecting a bunch of collapsed folders and pressing right arrow will expand -- the last one only. ... And, gag!, when I go back and revisit that dialog, it's all collapsed _again_!
* Gnus has a useful "browse foreign server" which allows you to look in folders etc. on a server without changing their subscription status. I occasionally want to look in, or file a message into, a folder which I don't want to be subscribed to -- definitely a wishlist item for me. There's the option to uncheck "View only subscribed folders" for a particular server but ... it's somehow just not the same thing. Does the Quick File extension allow me to file into folders which are not currently subscribed, by the way?
* Gnus allows me to list the folders in any order I find convenient, including "priority" and "any damn order I put them in". So far, I have only been able to list folders alphabetically. Haven't tried too hard, though.
Phew, finally I'm at the point where I can actually try to read some email.
* When I click on a message, I most likely will want to move it to the spam folder, not preview it! I couldn't even find a place where I could modify the details of message selecting and viewing, let alone key bindings etc. I imagine it's all possible via some super secret undocumented about:discordianism settings pane.
* I can't help but continue to think that it's awkward that "mark message read" is a toogle. Shouldn't the menu entry's text at least reflect this, so that it changes to "unread" when you're operating on a message which is marked as read?
* Right-clicking on a message entry in the inbox brings up a context menu ... but it doesn't contain "view message source", which is more or less the only thing I would like to see there.
* Inexplicably, "View message source" brings up the "You are about to view stuff over a secure connection" dialog box. I already checked "Don't show this to me ever again, WOULD YOU MIND" so I don't recall the exact text, but you know the one, it's what you get the first time you view an https URL in Firebird too. Can't say whether this was specific to my using an SSL-protected connection or not, but what business does this have popping up for "view message source"? I already viewed the rendered message, ferchrissake, so it's moot at this point to throw up this (oh so necessary) warning (oh, is it a "notification"? It looks like a warning).
* I can open several folders in separate windows, but I can't move a message between folders by dragging from one window to another. Why is that?
* I really really like the Fastmail.fm web interface in that it will show a preview of the first few lines (or first line, or none at all, for unread messages or all messages, respectively) -- this helps immensely in weeding out the non-spam messages from my spam-infested folder. (I know, I should use more aggressive filters, but I have professional reasons for actually wanting to see what's coming into my account before discarding it. Anyway, I'm having high hopes for the bayesian filter in T'bird.)
* Hey, nice, the junk filtering is working fabulously already! 211 spam messages and no ham (so how does it know when something is ham?) and it's already marking my incoming messages as junk. ... Update: In fact it doesn't necessarily know when something is ham, but it goes over old messages (when I open the folder they're in?) and marks them too, so I get to tell it which ones are false positives, so it should be learning pretty quickly.
* I had written this here: "What's more, it doesn't display the little notification alert about a new message when the new message is marked as junk. That's more polished than I expected." But, alas, in fact it does beep at me about incoming junk mail. I guess I had the inbox focused when the previous ones came in, and that's why it didn't beep.
* The hierarchy of the Junk Mail Controls dialog box is weird. I don't want to have messages automatically put into the junk folder because, like I said, I like to see what's getting all the way into my inbox, and besides, I want to scan for false positives. But I have to select this option to get to say which folder the messages should be moved to when I do request them to be moved. Then in a completely separate setting, I can only say whether I want messages manually marked as junk to be moved into "the" junk folder when I mark them. So which junk folder is this now? The default one which I just tried to override, or the one I have specified above, although I have now unchecked that part of the "handling" options? ... Turns out it's the latter, although the processing takes long enough that I had already written a rant about "none of the above" here. But it works as expected, even when I select messages in the inbox which are already marked as junk and mark them again.
* So maybe there should be a clearer indication about what is happening. All I see is a progress bar which apparently shows the per-message progress, so it zips like crazy from 0 to 100 over and over, with no indication (that I can see) what sort of progress it is actually trying to report to me. Right now, it's not even doing that. The two junk messages I pressed j on are still in my inbox, they just changed from unread to read (undesired side effect!) and there is no progress bar of any sort.
... Actually, I can't repro this any longer. The junk messages stay in my inbox and I have to drag them over to the spam folder manually. (For the record, the "Junk" folder name was already reserved by me for other stuff; the spam goes into Junk.spam and there are several other subfolders too.) Perhaps the "Automagically move messages to junk folder" was still checked in Thunderbird's little mind while I was mucking with that dialog, or something.
* Why is the message composition window so small? It's wider than 80 characters, but it feels kind of small, and I would definitely like it to be taller. The size and location of the new message window seems to be hard-coded or something (but at least flexible enough that a second new window only partially overlaps with the one I opened before).
* No custom X-headers, boo.
* Signature is in the composition window where you can edit or trim it -- good.
* Impressive: Options > Security > Encrypt this message, right there in the regular newbie interface. Granted, you need to set up keys etc. in order to actually use it, but I like the gesture. (Maybe it could be in a less weird place, though.)
* Options > Quote message is really weird too. Apparently, I can quote an arbitrary message by selecting it in the folder and then switching to the composition window and selecting this menu item. I guess occasionally that's useful. It's still really weird. Which message? When I'm writing a new message, not responding to anything in particular? Just some message which happened to be selected when I chose "New Message", it seems. At least it would obviously belong in the Edit menu; maybe it would feel less weird already then.
* I've always wondered why most clients make forwarding type a global or per-server preference. I would like to be able to select when I forward a message how exactly I want to do it (attach MIME message/rfc822, inline text/plain, inline plain old text, quoted, or what, maybe uuencode?), or at least given the opportunity to override the default.
* Ouch, looks like it EHLOs as [172.16.0.4] (sic; that's the dynamic, private IP address I have on my internal network right now) when sending out a message. Not very un-spammy, is it? I would consider it to be a de facto standard to take the computer name from "My Computer" on Windows, and the obvious uname -n on *nix.
* Furthermore, the Message-Id is generated based on my From: address, which also looks kind of spammy to me. Oh, maybe I'm overreacting.
... And there's that User-Agent: thingy, and that format=flowed thingy, and that charset=ISO-8859-15 but Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit thingy, and that MIME-Version: 1.0 being in completely a different place than the Content-Xxx headers, but ... I guess I'm getting too old. At least it has proper References: and In-Reply-To: when responding to a message (unlike, I discovered to my surprise, and that was a surprise in itself, because I should be pretty jaded by now ... unlike, I was saying, Microsoft Outlook, which completely hasn't ever heard about these headers, which have only existed since probably before the original RFC822 in 1982. Instead, Microsoft had to invent their own Thread-Index: and Thread-Topic: [identical to Subject: for all practical purposes]. Aargh, don't make me write about Outlook).
Disclaimer: If you are anybody who is somebody, you are probably not at all like me when it comes to email. Heck, I would probably still be using VM, despite all its quirks, if it could cope with IMAP in a useful way.
Disclaimer too: Hanging my head in shame, I confess that this was the Windows version I installed, on something like Windows XP SP2. Quite frankly, I would have expected the Linux version to crash or act erratically at least once during these initial tests. Oh well.
Update / reference: I posted a teaser to the Mozillazine T'bird forums: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2248547#2248547
Update: I installed the Swedish spelling checker dictionary from http://dictionaries.mozdev.org/installation.html -- they don't seem to have Finnish, although e.g. Hungarian is available (technically, I would believe they are roughly as challenging to support with standard run of the mill 1970s spelling checking technologies, i.e. Hungarian must suck too).
Anyway, it seems they have simply allowed unlimited synthetic compounds, meaning your average misspelling is just as likely to go unnoticed as most correctly spelled words. So "gambla" and "rambla" are not flagged (we speculate that they are synthesized from the proper words "gam" and "ram", and the onomatopoetic "bla"), nor is "tiodostonhallinta" (my old favorite "tiedostonhallinta" is flagged, but that's because "tie" -- informal for "tio" [ten] -- is not in the dictionary; this is Finnish for "file management", but it also oh so conveniently can be synthesized from 'ten' + 'dose' + 'hall' + 'occupy' [which in turn is formed from 'in' and 'take']). Oh well, it might still be marginally better than no spell checker (which is all we expect from a spell checker anyway, so). Pardon the digression, it just happens that I find this hilarious.
More test cases: "teråratack" - unflagged (thanks to Lena for that one) - syntesized from "ter" (what's that??) + "åra" + "tack"; "gårilla" - unflagged - synthesized from "går" + "illa"; "applikationsprotokollis" - flagged; "moapplikationsprotokoll" - flagged; "apapplikationsprotokoll" - flagged; "applikationsprotokollte" - flagged. Hey, maybe it's better than I thought.
by
era
2006-06-19 01:23
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20060619-0123
simpy
Watch era
