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[yak@collab] Re: Email as Habitat

To: yak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: blinc <blincoln@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 22:38:15 -0700
Message-id: <200307182235.43682.blincoln@grassrootreview.org>
On Friday 18 July 2003 07:27 pm, Eric Armstrong wrote:    (01)

> With the Mac being Next-like these days, I wonder what
> exists over in that world?    (02)

As an experiment and as an attempt to redirect some of our software spending 
into the non-MS world, I moved to using OSX as my client / dev machine in 
March of this year.  I have not been a fan of Mac's since they came out in 
the mid 80s for the whole "we can charge you whatever we want" schtick, but 
OSX is finally an OS I can be a little excited about. (see PS)    (03)

As far as email clients go, I am extremely picky and haven't found anything I 
like.    (04)

There's the built-in Mail.app, but I can't recommend the version that is 
currently on OSX.2 (jaguar).  The coming release X.3 is supposed to have some 
improvements, but ... its not available yet.    (05)

I went through a very extensive evaluation of mail clients this spring because 
email is such a huge part of my experience of the world.  I ended up using 
KMail, running X11 without the KDE desktop, just the mail client.  Getting 
that up and running on OSX was a breeze, but there are reasons that using X11 
on OSX is kinda clunky.    (06)

There are some things I just cannot accept in a mail client and KMail doesn't 
have any of the show-stoppers (things like I am so used to having 'send' put 
things in a queue that waits until I say "go", I have no interest in using a 
client that doesn't have this feature, add to headers (like CC:) on outgoing 
mail, automatically set the right From field based on the header of the 
message being replied to, etc).  But, I can't say that there is anything in 
KMail that makes it anything worth getting excited about.    (07)

It does not run easily on windows, because windows  can't run X11 very well.    (08)

But, as far as revolutionary or even evolutionary options, I would say..  
nope.  I've looked at Mail.app, Mulberry, Eudora, MailSmith, Evolution, 
powermail, pronto, and mozilla.  Maybe there were a couple of others I didn't 
even write down...     (09)

If anyone has any different experience or suggestions, please let me know.  I 
would clearly pay 1000$ for an email-oriented data management tool that 
provided the features I really want.    (010)

blinc    (011)

PS: reasons I like OSX: unix that runs photoshop, indesign, acrobat, & decent 
OCR software.  On a dual 1gigahertz g4, I have apache, mysql, postgres, php, 
perl, java, x11 all running from boot and never notice it.  As I write this, 
I am both listening to a CD and ripping it, while running an rsync to a 
firewire drive.  I leave all that (not cd stuff) running when I occasionally 
go off and play Shadowbane (3d massively multiplayer hack&slash fantasy 
game).    (012)

I have lots of reasons I dislike it too.  oh my.  OSX is a 1.x OS.  It is 
missing a lot of software.  With a couple of noteable exceptions, all 
software on OSX is not quite as good as the comparable offerings on windows.    (013)

But when I sit back down at a windows machine, I have that sinking feeling 
that only windows can give.  No symbolic links? backslashes for path 
delimiters? d: ? no real 'mounting' of drives.  CRLF issues.    (014)

But, running OSX feels a bit like when I was running OS/2 in 93-95.    (015)

-- 
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http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=200307182235.43682.blincoln@grassrootreview.org    (017)
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