Re: [HC Evolution] Introductions

["W.Lichtenberger" <w_l gmx net>]

Hello,

At 21:07 09.03.00 -0500, John C Borkowski III <john jcb3 com> wrote:
> While everyone is introducing themselves....

Right. I'll do the same...
My name is Wolf Lichtenberger and i'm a CS major in Darmstadt FH
university, Germany. I've been off and on with Linux since the Slackware
distro with kernel 0.8something, and generally can install & use Linux.
Configuration's another thing, though 8^(
I'm no great programmer yet, so i'll rather say a few things from the user
perspective. Some of them have to do with my personal preferences in User
Interface functions, but i believe they could also be of general use.
Also, some of these come from my using Eudora lite (Win) and Mutt (Linux)
as mail clients.

So here goes: <Rant mode on ;)>

* a two pane view instead of three panes

        The panes i mean (& i believe a widely used config.) are 
                1) mail folder list
                2) mail articles list in currently selected folder in 1)
                3) contents of currently selected article in 2)
        A recent post by Dan Winship <danw helixcode com> mentioned the libs
bonobo and gtkHtml as parts of the project; i presume to render "active"
contents among others. Since many regard such a security risk, i'd rather
*not* have a third pane visible all the time, or even the mail client doing
things according to the currently selected articles content. Some flags in
the articles list should be practical, though: attachments, priority,
active content (through analysis, not execution),...

* keyboard navigation

        Yeah, right. My mouse is always too far away to reach out and start aiming
at some 3x2 pixel target ;-). No, really, if a program offers a practical
keyboard navigation, it's got a big plus with me.

* an optionally threaded mail list

        OK, that's a pet peeve o' mine, ever since i had that YARN, a text mode
mail and news reader on OS/2 with threaded display. I just want to see any
articles contributing to an EMail conversation together, in a dependency
tree. 
It's just been too often that i lost track or repeated myself in some
longer EMail exchange, because there's an inbox and a sent box (or similar)
and i'm tired to look for related mails every time anew.
Since there are mail clients that _can_ do this (mutt too, i believe), it's
high on my "wish list".

* messages kept in mbx files, meta info(index, status,...) in extra files

        That's one about standards, which i hear shall be important with
Evolutions evolution ;-). Basically, this is from personal experience: when
i started using EMail in Linux, i dicovered that Eudora lite (& Outlook
express, i hear) uses the same mbx format files as Mutt, so i could fetch
and read mail in Linux, too (only Eudora had to rebuild its .toc index
files then).
Since i have (in several backups from earlier years) saved EMails in about
half a dozen incompatible formats (i.e. quite "lost"), so there's on my
"wish list" as well:
Please choose a Mail/article file format with wide acceptance and/or a
foreseeable long usage time span.

<Rant mode off>

Hope that didn't scare someone off...

regards, 
-- Wolf Lichtenberger