Re: Some feature suggestions

[Mike Bond <mike bond template com>]

Was kind of curious as to the progress of balsa so decided to read the
balsa-list archives.

I would like to say there is only one thing that has kept me from using
balsa to date, that is the lack of filtering capabilities. Jules, you
refer to fetchmail and procmail, even claimed they were "plugins" for
balsa, which is slightly incorrect. They are standalone programs that
have existed for many years, nearly as long as SMTP itself, and
certainly far longer than balsa. For a mail client to meet the needs of
the shell-impaired, which includes the vast majority of computer users
today, a mail client interface really should have integrated into it's
interface the ability to filter mail. This is not to say that the mail
client has to do the filtering itself, it may just pass the filter rules
to something like procmail. Mail filtering can even be useful for those
with IMAP accounts, it usefulness is not  limited to the admittedly
"archaic" POP services out there.

You say you are not interested in "marketshare" or "userbase",
unfortunately other mail clients currently in development, such as
gtkmail, gmail, mahogany, and mutt (non-graphical, not for the
shell-impaired though very nice for a shell based mailreader), are
farther from being "full-featured" and useful to a broad base of users
at this point than balsa, thus balsa gets a certain amount of attention.
As for empath, this is a new one that until now I'd not heard of and
will be looking at as soon as I'm done here.

I would offer my time in doing some of the work on balsa that I would
like to see done but I've allocated my free time for the forseeable
future in another project so all I can offer is merely suggestions and
bugfixes if balsa at least starts to get that one feature that I find to
be a requirement for myself.

-- 
TTFN
MikeB

Application development is a race between software engineers who
try to create fool proof programs and the universe which is trying to
develop superior fools.
	
	So far, the universe is winning.
	Let's not give it any help...