Re: Don't make balsa a like a windows program (was: libfetchmail)

[Lyndon Drake <lyndon kcbbs gen nz>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 1999 at 11:17:02AM +0100, Edward Betts wrote:
> On balsa-list, Mikael Hermansson <mikeh@bahnhof.se> wrote:
> > IMHO! I dont understand this discussions about POP3/IMAP/SMTP.
> > That all the people on the list is talking about :-)
> > 
> > First of all we need to have a good gnomebased mail "reader"
> > that have all features as pine/mutt, search functions and other
> > important stuff. In the moment balsa bug as hell and is unusabel as
> > reader...
> > 
> > Fetchmail/Sendmail is doing the other things greats as daemons :-)
> > 
> > When we have a good working mailer then we should start talking about 
> > implement POP3/SMTP/IMAP as libs or maybe use gnome-mailer codebase.
> 
> I agree completely. The receiving of the mail is not for some GUI client to
> handle it is for the mail server and possibly a fetchmail daemon. Yes we could
> intergrate the configuration of fetchmail into balsa, but there must be an
> option to just leave everything as it is. For sorting of mail procmail is the
> best tool in my IMHO, it should be left as the method for sorting mail. Again,
> possibly with the ablility with a gnome front-end linked to balsa, and it
> should be replacable without upsetting balsa. 
> 

However, there is a very good reason for including IMAP support, even if
POP3 and SMTP is left out: IMAP doesn't just let you download your mail
from a remote server, it lets you read your mail while it remains on the
server (remote folders, in other words).  If my mail reader supports
multiple IMAP accounts and the local mail on the system, then I can read
all my accounts (three machines for me, and I'm sure some people have
more) in one place (i.e. Balsa), while retaining the ability to read the
mail from other machines (so I can read my work mail at work or at home,
without actually downloading a copy of the mail from work to home).

Lyndon