[Users] Fresh Installation of Claws-Mail

[Jerry]

On Sat, 2 May 2020 12:16:51 -0000, Paul stated:
>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.]

Thanks for the history lesson, Paul. I was not aware of the provenance
of the various HTML plug-ins used in claws-mail.

>> 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 totally agree, which is why I intend to give it a tryout when it is
available on FreeBSD.

>> 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.

Great news. I assume that there is no ETA yet on this product.

>> 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".

I would assume that they define 'modern' in terms of "their" MUA.

>with regards
>
>Paul

Paul, if I might ask, did/does claws-mail offer a mechanism to block
remote content selectively? I use MS Outlook extensively at work,
primarily because it is an MS Windows based environment. MS Outlook
gives me the ability to selectively block content by sender address or
sender domain. By default, it blocks all remote content. Does
claws-mail have such a feature? If not, it would be a great addition to
the program.

-- 
Jerry


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