Re: [Evolution] MTA/MDA/Mail clients

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 11:18 -0500, pkm wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am in the process of switching from mutt to evolution, and despite the
> host of minor annoyances, I'm finding it quite enjoyable. My thanks to
> the dev team for making such a great product!

thanks.

> I do have one comment regarding the whole mail sending/retrieval
> strategy. I don't understand why evolution (and many other mail clients)
> try to take on the role of the MTA. fetchmail and many sendmail clones
> have been around for quite some time, and work well when configured
> properly.

try telling an end-user to configure one of these nasties properly tho. They'll take one look at you and say "You're joking, right?"

seriously tho, no one but network administrators should have to know anything about setting up an MDA or MTA - I'm a developer and I don't even want to know. I can write code to send mail via SMTP a lot faster than I could figure out how to configure sendmail for example

>  I am a little dissappointed that I can not have fetchmail run
> when I press the 'Send/Receive' button, or have any control over the
> options passed to sendmail.

1. this is Free Software so you can make it do whatever you want

2. you can still use fetchmail w/ Evolution, just don't expect Send&Receive to fork/exec fetchmail. I think fork/exec'ing fetchmail would be a pretty nasty way for a MUA to do things anyway.

> In addition, while skimming through the mailing lists, I've noticed a
> number of emails from people who are interested in piping email to a
> program, or redirecting it somewhere, filtering it in some way (perhaps
> using spamassassin or another spam agent). The solutions to these
> questions frequently seem to be something along the lines of, "We're
> getting that feature into 1.5" or something like it. Programming in
> static support for spam filtering (or any filtering, for that matter)
> seems a little redundant when this can all be accomplish via procmail.

who says it still can't be accomplished via procmail? if you use fetchmail to pull your mail down from the server, you can surely setup procmail to do your filtering too. Sure, Evolution won't be a GUI frontend for procmail - but again, that's pretty nasty to do that anyway. It is far simpler/better/faster to do it in the application itself.

> I am interested in hearing people's thoughts on these matters. I
> certainly would like to reiterate: "Keep up the good work!"

(btw, if you search freshmeat there *are* actually gui front-ends that try to tie all these command-line utilities together but imho they are pretty piss poor compared to say Evolution, Mozilla Mail, KMail, Balsa, etc)

one of the problems with fork/execing these tools is that you have no way of giving the user feedback as to what percentage of the way done it is, failure handling, etc.

Jeff

> -Peter
> _______________________________________________
> evolution maillist  -  evolution lists ximian com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com