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Re: Poll: personal convenience vs. global improvement of docs



On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:51:15PM -0400, John J. Foster wrote:
> On Wed, 24 May 2006, Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> ---Major snippage of very good stuff---
> 
> I, for one, totally agree with everything you said. When I first finished 
> reading it (yes, I read it more than once),

Thanks, it's nice to know that at least someone appreciates all my
ranting.  ;-)

> I could have sworn that it was written around the end of January of
> last year and posted to mutt-dev. 

Yeah, I tend to repeat myself a lot, because some isues don't ever
change, and because the sets of ears listening change over time.

> So I went back and read 2 long threads from that time

Well, my impression these last several years is that mutt is not
attracting significant numbers of new users (compared to other popular
mailers), precisely because it does not have a lot of nice features
that other clients have (even certain text-only ones).  After 8 years,
it's still a PITA to configure, and still has a lot of annoying quirks
and inconsistencies it's had since day one.  For $#@! sake, it still
doesn't even get counting new mail right, for all of the different
formats and protocols that it supports.  It's handling of all the
different mail formats is inconsistent in a variety of ways.  Storage
formats should NEVER dictate user interface; they're just storage
formats...  A mail folder contains exactly the same information, from
the user's perspective, regardless of the format the mail is stored
in, and the user's interface absolutely should be consistent
regardless of what format is chosen.  It's handling of new mail is
among the worst of any mail client in existence, for example making it
virtually impossible to change out of a folder which is getting
bombarded with new mail in some formats.  That's pathetic, especially
after EIGHT YEARS to get it right.

Mutt does a lot of really cool stuff, and it absolutely does make me
more productive than any other mailer I've used.  But IMO it's
starting to look like the ham radio of mailers -- it's kind of cool,
but it's mostly used by a bunch of old guys (in Internet age, which is
kind of like dog years) who just don't want to let go of the past... 

I do really wish some young college student fed up with present-day
mailers would step up and fork mutt, determined to take it into the
next decade and beyond, as Michael Elkins once did...  I'd love to
contribute to that project, rather than bitch about this one.  I've
often been tempted to do it myself, but I'm neither that young nor
determined any longer, and as I said already, I'm not the leader that
project needs.  But I think probably they'd have little motivation;
they could just work on one of the other cool mailers that is actually
making great strides.

Sigh.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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