Re: desperately seeking email

[Jules Bean <jmlb2 hermes cam ac uk>]

On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, ryan wrote:

> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm desperately seeking an X11 email answer to my problems -- the only
> reason I keep a Win95 partition is to handle my business/work email. I have
> 7-10 POP accounts and I need a reliable mail system ... right now what I
> want to do is use fetchmail to grab them all, and then use a good X11-based
> MUA so each will transparently appear to everyone else as totally separate
> entities (i.e., reply-to, etc). 

That sounds like a sensible approach.  I don't know what the answer for
you is right now, though :-(

> 
> I have heard that Balsa will do this. The only other I have found that will
> is XFmail, which I'm not fond of the user interface... the other I am
> trying to get it to work on is Kmail, but I personally use WindowMaker
> w/GNOME so ... I just like the whole GTK side of things.

Balsa will do this, sometime.  It doesn't yet, I'm afraid.  It certainly
won't do the multiple personality thing (yet), and it's not 100% stable
either - it is only version 0.4.9..

> 
> However, I'm a bit concerned about a couple of things and this message is
> to test those waters sorta. The Balsa page doesn't seem updated since last
> year, I'm wondering about the FAQ and RPM's for RH, etc. Also, my initial
> attempts at compiling Balsa failed miserably -- it couldn't find certain
> functions from error.h, even after I tweaked the code a bit, and for
> whatever reason we (we being the central ohio linux user's group) could not
> get it compiled (I could go in more detail, but I'm wondering if this list
> is alive or not). 

It's a bit broken, I'm afraid.  

> 
> So, basically, here's my point: is anyone out there? I don't want to seem
> unappreciative for your free efforts -- I am just desperate for a good
> email client and (from what is *sounds* like) Balsa is where I need to be.
> But I am sort of scared off by the ghost town aspects ... 
> 

The core balsa team I haven't heard from in about 3 weeks - I'm guessing
they're all of having fun.  I'm hoping to do some balsa work myself in a
month or so, but I'm rather busy just now.

> Also as a footnote, I should add that while I do most of my work as a
> network administrator I also do a lot of lightweight programming on the
> side, web stuff, Perl, PHP3, etc -- C++ still eludes me... but I would be
> *more* than happy to contribute in other ways, and after 3 or 4 cups of
> coffee, I really go to town -- FAQs that need written, web pages that need
> updated, WHATEVER -- I will give my life to someone who could hook me up
> with a good X11 email client!

Balsa is going to be superb, there's no doubt.  And we will need
enthusiastic people like you to work on websites, FAQs, etc.

For now, though, you're going to need another solution to your problems.
Dare I suggest communicator 4.5?  I haven't tried it myself, but that's
supposed to be a pretty good GUI mailer.

The strongest free mailers at the moment aren't graphical - gnus is
super-powerful, mutt is easy to use (once you've learnt the keystrokes).

I'd probably recommend mutt, even though it's text mode - it does
threading, POP3, and I'm pretty sure it does the multi-personality thing.


(I use PINE, and balsa, but I need IMAP..)

Jules

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|  Jelibean aka  | jules@jellybean.co.uk         |  6 Evelyn Rd        |
|  Jules aka     |                               |  Richmond, Surrey   |
|  Julian Bean   | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk        |  TW9 2TF *UK*       |
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