[Users] possibly switching to claws

[John Long]

Hi,

TL;DR best of the worst GUI email clients. But see more detail within
your email.

On Tue, 15 Oct 2019 22:02:28 -0700
Josh L <Josh at jlaz.com> wrote:

> Cross-platform

I think I tried it on Windows and it was ok. There were some annoying
differences, if I can recall.


> Usenet

I think a dedicated client, specifically slrn, is a lot better. slrn is
optimized for news and it does a really great job.

> Stability/It seems like it's been around for awhile.

Seems to me there have been a lot of annoying and incompatible changes
over the years. I used to like Claws a lot and used it for over ten
years. Now I like it a lot less. It is still probably the best of the
worst (as far as GUI clients go.) Mutt is great if you have a very
small number of email accounts and want a console client. Claws
would be more pleasant without constant thrashing of needless
changes to the UI and UI behavior. Email hasn't changed that much. I'm
against gratuitous changes but the iPhone age has convinced most people
that you have to keep throwing features out there or your product will
be considered dead. This has led to many evil consequences...

The main Claws maintainer is an arrogant pain in the ass. He does not
care at all about anybody's opinion and sometimes things which seem to
other people as real bugs are considered by him the way he wants Claws
to work. He is the one working on it so it's his choice unless you want
to fork a copy for yourself.

I work on software where compatability over decades and real stability
matter. True, today we have idiot managers pushing mindless features
out there for the false reason I mentioned but historically we
understood our users want things to work the same way 20 or 30 years
from now as they do today and as they did 30 years ago. We concentrate
on bug fixes and refining performance rather than new features. This is
my perspective. I know it does not align with Linux so I am clarifying
it so you know where my comments are coming from.

> Calendar

A dedicated calendar would probably be better. But I haven't found one
for desktop that I can stand so I use an Android calendar on a phone.

> Is there a way to gauge if it will continue to be supported for
> many years to come?  That part is kind of important, as
> migrating to it from my present reader is going to take some
> doing, and I'd rather not do it again.

It's possible only to speculate. Claws has been around for a long time
but I don't know if there are many maintainers. It's open source so on
some level there is no danger of it going away. Get a copy of the
source and it will live forever. If the main guy or guys involved get
sick of doing it, whatever, they can always quit since they're not
geting paid for this. That's the downside of open sore software.

> Another thing I'd like to get a sense of is backup and nuances,
> and anything to watch out for (such as scenarios that can result
> in corrupt files or folders).

This is certainly a big advantage of Claws. It uses a completely
standard email format that has been around forever and is shared by some
(but not all) *NIX email clients. I recently had the nightmare of
getting off of Evolution which I hated from day 1 but was the
"standard" on Fedora workstation edition. It exports all the mail (if
you try hard enough) in json or some other bizarre format which makes it
very difficult to import in another client.

I have never seen any corruption in Claws email store. I've been using
it and Mutt for about 15 years.

The multithreading in Evolution is much better than what Claws has. The
Claws UI is horribly slow and gets clumsy when you have many email
accounts. I use it because it's a little easier than dealing with Mutt
when you have 10 or 20 email accounts but if things keep going the way
they have been recently with Claws I may bite the bullet and go to
Mutt. By the way, Mutt has also had some annoying imcompatible changes
recently. It seems like it will be some time until people get their
heads out of their asses and get back to basics.

/jl

> 
> Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.
> 
> jl
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