Configuration

[glennm mediaone net]

Here's one issue about GUI mail clients in general: they're incredibly
inflexible.

I use mutt.  I have different settings for different traffic: different From:
line, different .sig's, different PGP options, and so on.  Mutt lets me do
this with its configuration: different settings are set with different (text)
options, ie "my_hdr From: Glenn Maynard <glennm@mediaone.net>", and I can hook different settings to different mailboxes with "folder-hook foo
my_hdr From: Glenn ...".

This gives me a lot of flexibility that isn't available in (to my knowledge)
any existing GUI MUA.  I'd like to use one (they fit in better then mutt in
an Eterm), but I can't "scale down" my needs.

However, this configuration scheme doesn't fit in with Balsa/Gnome's model,
and I havn't been able to think up a decent one that would.  Having completely
separate configuration settings for each mailbox won't do; it'd be a huge
amount of work, and it'd be inconvenient.  (Adding other things to help this,
like a "change this option for all mailboxes", is just kludgy and slow.)

Adding individual per-mbox options will work for individuals--I could add a
list of From's for different boxes, along with a default; I'd have to do
something similar for .sigs, PGP (which, of course, doesn't exist yet--but
that's for the future), and so on.  This would make changing these settings
difficult (what if you later wanted to have an option to either run a program
to generate a sig, or just read a file, as it does now?  You'd have to deal
with the multiple mailbox stuff, complicating things.)  Also, this doesn't
allow real flexibility: you can't do the unexpected things (what if I wanted
one mailbox to use vim to edit messages, and have the rest use the internal
editor?)

Does anyone have any ideas of a configuration model that would fit in with
Gnome, and give something comparable to mutt's flexibility?

-- 
 - Glenn