[Users] Fresh Installation of Claws-Mail

[Paul]

On Sat, 2 May 2020 07:44:04 -0400
Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote: 

> I certainly do not want to offend anyone; however, 'dillo' sucks. I
> don't know why the claws-mail team chose it for their HTML
> engine. 

The dillo plugin was one of the original html rendering plugin for Claws
Mail, (along with gtkhtml_viewer), from years and years ago. At the time
these were the only options for an html renderer which was able to block
remote content. Blocking remote content is of high importance! If MUA cannot
block remote content in html mails then they should be avoided.

That was in GTK1 Claws, and Dillo was also GTK1. Then the dillo team decided
to rewrite dillo, abandoning gtk for fltk, and dillo was never the same again.

We dropped it (and gtkhtml_viewer, which became abandonware by upstream) when
Fancy was obviously much better.

When webkit 1 (used by the fancy plugin) was dropped by all distros due to
security problems which the webkit team were not going to fix, (instead they
worked on a new webkit which was gtk3 only), we reinstated the dillo plugin
as something that was better than nothing. Some time after that the litehtml
viewer plugin was developed and made available.

[It is my belief that webkit 1, i.e. the Fancy plugin, with all external
content blocked is not much of a security risk, at least much less of a risk
than an MUA that loads any and all remote content in html mails.]

> I have never
> used the 'LiteHTML' plug-in. I have heard that at best it is mediocre
> but never-the-less, better than 'dillo.'

You should at least try it rather than just accept what you've read, right?

> I do wish that
> someone with more experience than myself would take the time to update
> 'fancy' to use modern and safer alternatives.

This is happening in the gtk3 development version of Claws Mail.

> told by friends to switch to 'Thunderbird' or some other modern  MUA

They should define "modern", because I suspect a pretty loose definition of
"modern".

with regards

Paul