[geeks] New Mail Client

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:09:31 +0100
Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:46:09 -0500
> "Kevin R. Marshall" <kevin at mpcf.com> wrote:
> 
> > Sylpheed-Claws rules! (GTK1 version anyway).
> Seconded. I use it for years. It runns fine even on a SGI Indigo2
> with a 150 MHz R4k4. Avoid the GTK2 version. It is buggy and slow. I
> really don't see a reason to use bloatware like Evolution or
> Thunderbird.

You reminded me to try it again, so here I am.

Personally, I find the gtk2 version to be faster and smoother.

It might be because gtk2 can use accelerated fonts and widgets.

Plus, the gtk1 version is butt ugly.  I can't seem to figure out how to
fix that.  I might be missing some legacy package for the gtk1
applications.

It's not just looks either: I found it interfered with usage.

Observations about sylpheed, version (claws) 2.5.4:

- sylpheed is most certainly not a lightweight program.  It is using
  80MB on my system right now.  Smaller than Thunderbird, yes, but
  hardly a light program.  I don't see how you guys ever used it
  on small machines.
- imap not very fast
- imap folder list has to be manually updated to show new folders or
  remove old ones, update is painfully slow.  Thunderbird also fails
  to automatically update the folder list.  If mutt can do it, why
  do the GUI MUAs have so much trouble?
- key bindings are inconsistent and appear to be different from most 
  other GUI  MUAs.  This problem is not unique to Sylpheed of course.
- filtering is non-standard and proprietary to sylpheed, but that's
  a common problem with all GUI MUAs right now.
- the encryption system doesn't work as reliabily as mutt's, and
  mutt is pretty lame itself
- the program frequently hangs, pauses, or stutters while updating the 
  mail folder list.  This is very annoying. Worse, even the @#$%@#%
  editor pauses when the folder list is being updated.  That's
  bloody stupid.  On my system with local imap server, the pauses
  are very small in most cases, but still very annoying.

It's not all bad though:

- sylpheed allows you to reverse a spam mark with the "ham" button, so
  if you make a mistake by flagging messages as spam, you can fix it.
  In other MUAs, a spam mark is much harder to reverse.
- sylpheed is reasonably fast outside of the annoying folder update 
  pauses
- it has a clean looking interface
- it seems to work well with vanilla X, KDE, or Gnome
- it has quite a few features
- drag-and-drop works well with KDE
- it *is* smaller than some other GUI MUA programs
- it has a lot of potential if the more glaring problems could be
  fixed



-- 
shannon           | All of us get lost in the darkness, dreamers turn
to look | at the stars.
                  |         -- Rush