Re: Prefs and window positions

["Karl O . Pinc" <kop meme com>]

On 2001.07.11 03:06 M . Thielker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  procmail will do it - for local mailboxes. So will some other tools. But
> that's, again, not the point.
> It is an easy thing to do in Balsa and I don't see why I should have
> another program checking my pop3 mailboxes and sort the mails into local
> folders.
> 
> Many of you probably come from a long history of using unix, where mail
> is
> delivered to a local mailbox file by the MTA running on the local system
> and then this file ist simply read by the mail reader.
> 
> Well, welcome to the desktop world. You average user doesn't have an MTA
> running. She may have sendmail installed, but wouldn't know how to
> configure it. It's not used anyway, she has a pop3 mailbox on her
> provider's system which also accepts SMTP connections. She connectcs her
> standalone desktop to the internet using ppp. Now imagine such a person,
> would she have or want procmail? No! She'd want an email reader that will
> poll the pop3 server(s), sort the mail into inboxes, allow her to read it
> and that's it.
> 
> MTA's where useful on multi-user systems, and they are useful on systems
> having a direct internet connection. They're useless on a desktop system.
> Normally, when a user logs into her desktop and connectes to the
> internet,
> the email program will be opened to get new mail. The user then
> disconnects, reads her mail, composes the replies and then connects to
> the
> net again to send them.
> 
> Balsa does not support that yet, because it always tries to send mail
> immediately. There should be an option to hold all outgoing mail in the
> outbox until a Send/Receive button is clicked. Then Balsa should check
> all
> pop3 mailboxes, to make sure that SMTP after POP3 solutions will work as
> expected and send everything in the outbox.
> 
> After that, the user disconnects from the internet and goes away,
> sometimes
> leaving the email program open in the tasklist or in window-shade mode.
> 
> This is known user behavior, so we have to provide the means to use the
> program that way.
> 
> Here's another one: Leased line connection (as I have). I have Balsa in
> .xsession, it always starts up. Here, it should regularly check email and
> alert me when new mail has arrived. There is no alerting feature
> currently,
> it would have to be a persistent visual alert (a dialog box) as well as a
> sound, because I may be afk for extended periods of time and I need to
> see
> at a glance when new mail has arrived while I was gone, because I have so
> many things to do, I forget to check.
> 
> There's a major design flaw in some parts of Balsa, especially the
> background pop3 checking. Checking pop3 mailboxes will happily lock
> libmutt
> and if a user like me or Karl happens to do anything with the UI at that
> moment, Balsa will hang. This happens to me about 3 times a day, I had to
> adopt a policy of closing, then reopening Balsa to make sure my local
> folders are flushed to disk so I don't get all the moved mails back into
> my
> inbox.
> 
> It's a drag, and it may be the next thing I look into. SOme more
> checkboxes
> for prefs, I'm sure!

FYI, I'm not using balsa's pop and still hung.  I'm using fetchmail and
procmail to filter into mailboxes.  BTW, the issue isn't whether balsa or
procmail does mail filtering, the issue is the interface, what the user
sees.  "If the user can't find it, it isn't there."

Regards,

Karl <kop@meme.com>