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Thunderbird vs. Gmail

I spent about five hours today setting up Thunderbird to get messages from my gmail account. Most of that time was spent creating filters. I don't mind Thunderbird so far, but I have some small issues with it:

  • Viewing labeled messages is a pain. As far as I can tell, there's no way to see all the messages I've marked with a particular label if they're in different folders. I'd like to use marking for reminding myself what emails I need to reply to, but it doesn't help if I can't see them all at once. It seems dumb to set up a folder to store messages I need to reply to. At the very least, a colored marker next to a folder than contains a marked message would be helpful.
  • Only five labels? Come on.
  • If I have a subdirectory, the parent directory doesn't show how many unread messages there are in the subdirectories.
  • When I delete one message, I don't want to open the next message.
  • I keep getting duplicate messages from gmail. I think it's related to changing my POP settings in gmail. Hopefully it will only re-download messages once.
  • At first I thought Thunderbird ate some messages in a folder. The view was set to All, but I tried resetting it again. Turns out the view was really on "unread" instead. No message loss, simply a rendering/updating bug.
  • More rendering bugs with drop down menus. A couple times, a newly added folder wouldn't get displayed on a drop down menu. It would show up as a blank space instead, and wouldn't expand to show any subfolders.

I should probably look to see if anyone has reported these bugs yet, but I need to start my technical writing homework.

The reason I'm switching to Thunderbird is so I can send patches to the USB mailing list and Greg K-H. It's still a pain to use Thunderbird for creating messages with patches in them, but at least I can sign emails with my gpg key. Gmail still doesn't have that capability.

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Come over to the dark side!

I still use MH, just like I have since 1983. Trust me when I say that GUI bugs are a thing of the future with MH. And if you don't like how it behaves, you can just ignore it and drive around in your mail folders. Friend of Bart

Go MH!

Jamey's convinced to me to

Jamey's convinced to me to try Mutt, it's just a matter of finding time to learn it.

Mutt is no good

The thing about MH is that there's literally 0 learning curve. You already know how to type UNIX commands, so you're done.

Here's how you use MH:

  1. Install MH.
  2. Say "man inc" and read about how to configure it to talk to your POP or IMAP server. It's really easy.
  3. Say "inc". Your mail will be retrieved from your POP server.
  4. Say "show" to show the current message, "next" to show the next message, "prev" to show the previous message. You can say "scan" to get a summary of messages and "show 123" to show message 123.

All UNIX command line. You can shell script it. No magic syntax to learn.

I have enough magic modal CLI languages in my head already—MH rules. Friend of Bart

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