[Users] Suitability of using Claws instead of KMail ?

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 10:53:14 +1000, Peter
<peter777 at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 April 2017 8:20:57 PM AEST Steve Litt wrote:
> > You could use the IMAP for gmail. That's what I did in order to do a
> > "hello world" proof of concept of moving mail from Kmail2 to Claws.
> > But sending all this stuff out the Internet might be so slow that
> > it would be quicker to build your own Dovecot.  
> 
> Is the Dovecot idea just to help/assist in the migration from KMail
> to Claws, or is it a better long term solution ?  

In my opinion, Dovecot plus an email client is very much a better long
term solution than an email client at all. Kmail was once wonderful:
Look what happened to it.

> I'd be a bit
> concerned to use this (old) desktop, for anything that would create a
> big load. It's 9 yrs old and needed replacing yrs ago. I'm noticing
> it is getting slower and slower. Yes I could have a box just for
> Dovecot, but we have power restrictions, so autumn/ winter, couldn't
> add any more power usage. 

On my machine, Dovecot doesn't even show up on a top command. If I were
handling email for hundreds of people it would be different,but I'm
handling it only for myself.


> > How private are these emails? If you don't care about Google's
> > ability to mess with them and give them to others, you could just
> > try copying all 62,000 messages to a gmail account you create
> > (hopefully with full SSL). It will probably take hours to days.  
> 
> We do have a few GMail/Google emails, but 99% of these emails are
> private, 

So if you want to keep these emails in house, you need to keep the
whole conversion in house.

> > The minute the KDE folks strayed from mbox and maildir, I knew it
> > was going to be the kind of trouble you mention, and I bailed ASAP.
> > The betrayal I felt when Kmail became Kmail2 (with akonadai) was so
> > complete that I vowed never to let an email client take possession
> > of my messages again. So now I keep my messages on my Dovecot IMAP
> > server, and use my email client just to look at them, search them,
> > and to send replies. I even do my filtering with procmail rather
> > than Claws. The result is if Claws had an influx of 200 programmers
> > all wanting to prove their worth by making simple email into a
> > lifetime achievement by throwing standards in the garbage and doing
> > it their own way, I could be up and running with another IMAP aware
> > email client tomorrow.  
> 
> When I first installed Claws, I set the GMail a/c to IMAP. Was very
> interesting the way it can do that. I'd assume that a Dovecot IMAP
> server would go well on a small NAS device (low power), then it an be
> accessed over a lan.

I doubt it would go on a NAS device. It needs a complete operating
system, as far as I know. I put Dovecot on my Daily Driver Desktop, the
same computer as I use to interact with Claws-Mail and cruise the web.
There are a lot of things that slow this computer down (mainly web
browsing and Virtual Machine hosting), but believe me, I don't know
Dovecot's running except that I get my email.

SteveT