[ale] need some Evolution email magic

Michael B. Trausch mike at trausch.us
Fri Jan 21 17:38:24 EST 2011


On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 13:19 -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On 01/21/2011 12:54 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > Also, one other thing:  Evolution absolutely has its share of bugs.
> > Thunderbird, IME, has even more of them (at least for my own
> personal
> > usage patterns, which involve sometimes sending HTML mail, sometimes
> not
> > sending HTML mail, several email accounts in several different
> places,
> > etc.).  If you want something rock-solid that works and is
> (relatively)
> > free of bugs, I'd recommend something like mutt or Alpine.
> 
> html replies is THE reason I switched to Thunderbird. IMAP is the
> reason I left evolution. I was trying to set it up & use it, and it
> kept crashing, as in multiple times a day. Thunderbird can be setup in
> windows OR linux, so I have it on both sides of my dual-boot systems
> with XP.. And of course with a local Dovecot IMAP local user, I can
> point to that folder from my laptop & see all my emails.( well, except
> the gmail, and those can be setup in thunderbird too.)

I am interested in knowing more about how you use your email.  I know
that in my case, I need to be able to switch between HTML and non-HTML
mail on a per-message basis.  For 99% of my email, I reply with
plain-text, even if the original message was received in HTML.
Sometimes, I will start to compose a reply and see that I need some
relatively complex formatting, and when that is the case, that is when I
will switch to HTML.  Back when I used Thunderbird as my only email
client, it did _not_ support such on-the-fly modification of a composed
message (or if it did technically support it, it did not actually work;
I fail to recall precisely which was the case at the moment).

What stuck the fork in Thunderbird for me was when I was taking college
courses online.  I had two options: a Web forum type thing, or a NNTP
gateway that was provided for it.  Plus the email, which was either the
Outlook Web thing, or IMAP.  So I had the following situation:

 1.  My main (@trausch.us) mail should have been plain-text, always.
 2.  My school mail should have been HTML, always.
 3.  My school NNTP was required to be HTML, and thus had to be HTML,
     always.

After I had set up my school email account, Thunderbird started to get
regularly confused.  I would sometimes hit replies in my @trausch.us
mailbox, and they would be HTML mail replies.  Or the opposite, where I
would reply to a message in my school inbox, and it would be plain text.
And I was not able to derive a pattern for what would trigger this
behavior.  Usually I could just close the reply and restart it and it
would do the right thing the second (or third) time.  In other words,
annoying, but not a showstopper.

However, the NNTP account was a significant problem.  As I recall, at
the time, Thunderbird did *NOT* honor the HTML preference at *all* on
NNTP connections.  Some fruitcake hardcoded the notion that NNTP should
never be HTML.  Now, while I would agree that 99% of the time, HTML
formatting in messages is completely wasteful and useless, the software
that the school was using on their servers did not know how to handle
plain-text messages.  You see, being a Web forum, it would just assume
that everything was HTML.  So it handled the plain text messages very
poorly.  Everything was a single ¶.  And if you embedded HTML tags in
the message, some idiotic component would actually manage to parse half
of them, and the rest of them would either be ignored or rendered.  It
was awful.  (Not to mention that the system would only properly transmit
Unicode characters to everyone else in the classroom if the message was
in HTML format, because the server-side software again had a bug in it
where it would not read the content-type of the message if it was not
HTML).

In order to troubleshoot, I fetched the source code for Mozilla (because
TB, FF, and the suite are all built from the same source tree) and
attempted to figure out how to fix it, but it was a veritable mess.  I
tried Evolution on a whim and it worked for my use case, and I haven't
used TB again since.  I've run into a few problems here and there, and
one of those problems was actually not an Evolution bug, but a bug in
the NNTP gateway system for the school that was easily able to be worked
around in Evolution, so I fixed that.  I don't remember if my fix wound
up landing in Evolution or not, or if someone fixed it differently, but
I seem to recall that some fix for the issue eventually wound up making
its way into Evolution.

The last time I checked up on any of the bugs that I had in Thunderbird,
all the bugs were still open and unfixed.  I hadn't even reported the
bugs because they were already reported when I went to report them.
Some of them are more than five years old and pretty major (IMHO) bugs.

> it has been 10 years since I played with mutt on a UNIX system. Last
> time I used it, it didn't do attachments or view HTLM mail, does it
> now, or what do you do? Never played with Alpine, havta look that one
> up.. 

It's been awhile since I have attempted use of mutt, but last I did it
at least rendered HTML.  Never attempted to send attachments using it,
so I don't know how well it fares there.

Alpine is derived from the old Washington University Pine source code,
though under more favorable licensing terms.  It handles attachments, as
well as the receipt of HTML mail.  It is also easily centrally
configured on a UNIX shell host, which is not bad.

I seem to be in the constant position of saying "If I had more time,
I'd..." for many, many things.  I think that there ought to be a mail
program that is designed along the lines of Pidgin, where most of the
functionality of the mail program is completely decoupled from the user
interface and where there are multiple user interfaces.  For example,
Pidgin is the GTK+ frontend for libpurple, and Finch is the curses
frontend.  They both work really well.  I use neither of them on a
regular basis today because I have started using Empathy, though I plan
on possibly going back to Pidgin in the next release of Ubuntu if some
of the major bugs there (such as the text entry widget not supporting
the standard keyboard shortcuts or any sort of undo) aren't fixed by
that time.  There is nothing that pisses me off more than accidentally
deleting a large chunk of text and being unable to Control+Z to undo and
bring back what I accidentally deleted...

	--- Mike
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