Re: recommended mail clients [was] [PATCH] ati-agp suspend/resume support (try 2)

Lee Revell
2005-12-26T20:55:21Z

On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 20:03 +0000, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
> On Monday 26 December 2005 17:54, Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 15:35 +0000, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
> > > On Monday 26 December 2005 14:38, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> [snip]
> > > >
> > > > I use pine and evolution. Pine is text based and great when I ssh into
> > > > my machine to work. Evolution is slow, but plays well with pine and it
> > > > handles things needed for LKML very well. (the drop down menu "Normal"
> > > > may be changed to "Preformat", which allows of inserting text files
> > > > "as-is").
> > >
> > > Dare I say it, KMail has also been doing the Right Thing for a long time.
> > > It will only line wrap things that you insert by typing; pastes are left
> > > untouched.
> >
> > It seems that of all the popular mail clients only Thunderbird has this
> > problem. AFAICT it's impossible to make it DTRT with inline patches and
> > even if it is the fact that most users get it wrong points to a serious
> > usability/UI issue.
> >
> > Would a patch to add "Don't use Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail" to
> > SubmittingPatches be accepted? Then we can point the Mozilla developers
> > at it (they have shown zero interest in fixing the problem so far) and
> > hopefully this will light a fire under someone.
>
> Fundamentally the issue with Thunderbird is that it line-wraps AFTER you
> compose an email, not during composition. I've never understood how, or why
> this is useful to the end user, except for composing HTML emails (which
> should be banned anyway).
>
> Thunderbird is Yet Another mailer that could have been a good piece of
> software if it hadn't attempted to be a clone of Outlook Express (defaulting
> to Top Posting, HTML composition, line wrapping pastes).
>
> It's the mindset; fixing Thunderbird is probably easy, but convincing the
> Mozilla developers to include such "fixes" is probably much harder.
>

Should be trivial to fix, when the user puts the editor into "Preformat"
mode or inserts a text file you surround it with tags.

Lee