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Re: [orca-list] Accessible email clients; really need an alternative to thunderbird

I wouldn't put too much hope on seamonkey being any better, its another Mozilla based product using XUL like 
Thunderbird and many of the warts are in layers like XUL which is common across Mozilla products.

Michael Whapples
On 18 Nov 2011, at 16:59, Tami Kinney wrote:


Michael,

I am on a similar quest for similar reasons.

I did read that Ubuntu would not be supporting Evolution (or something to that effect) starting with the 
Oneiric release, so...

With the upgrade to Oneiric, Evolution has stopped talking to me. I've been using Thunderbird but have 
decided I just don't need the frustration! /smile/

I'm downloading Seamonkey and mutt just to see what happens. I will keep the list posted as to how those 
work with Orca on Oneiric.

If anyone else has discovered an e-mail client that works well for them, please tell us about it! /smile/

Tami

On 11/18/2011 03:06 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:

Hello,
I know I have written about this before, but I never really found a satisfactory alternative. So as a last 
try I will try and be very specific in what I am looking for.

OK, as many will know I really am not happy with the quality of accessibility in Thunderbird, Mozilla just 
don't seem to be able to deal with the problems and accessibility requirements seem to be a second rate 
citizen (justification: Some of the accessibility issues are so obvious and critical to use, that should a 
non-disabled user be faced with such issues they would never make a release of Mozilla products, an 
example being Orca echoing the text being entered in edit fields, would non-disabled users stand for not 
knowing what they typed, why should we?). There are other quality issues I have with Thunderbird but we'll 
leave those for now.

Now to the positive look on things, what alternatives are there? Evolution normally is the obvious one. 
Yes I have used it back in the past (back in the gnome 2.18 and 2.20 days. While I could use it then, to 
me it always felt like its usability lay somewhere between difficult or clumsy. Some of the specific 
issues were finding attachments, being able to open individual messages in list digest messages as an 
attachment (like I can in Outlook Express on windows or Thunderbird) so I can reply to individual messages 
rather than the digest one and also evolution can feel like its interface is just a bit cluttered as it 
has calender and other features I do not tend to use (see below for what I really would want from an email 
client). If anyone could point me to good documentation on using evolution (particularly as an orca user 
and using evolution from the keyboard, may be my problems with evolution could be overcome as I might be 
able to use it more efficiently.

Another alternative which has been suggested to me is balsa, but I never really got to grips with that.

I know that another alternative might be to look at text based clients. The only ones I really got on with 
were pine and cone. Anyway, I feel text base clients may be off the cards as I feel Orca isn't great with 
text based software. Speakup would be my preferred choice for screen reader with text based software, 
however it just doesn't load on the computers I would install Linux on.

OK, here is what I am looking from the email client:
Accessible with Orca: As I noted speakup doesn't work on my Linux systems so Orca is what I will be using, 
so in my opinion that rules out the text based clients.
Simple interface, focused on what is wanted: I only really want it for mail, things like calenders are 
just a waste of space to me. The main places I use in the email client is the folder/account tree and the 
message list. More than that in the main view is more than I want, I may find search useful but I don't 
mind going to the menu for that.
Multiple account support: It should support more than one account, with different outgoing servers for 
each account.
Ability to access the individual messages in a mail digest: I have most of my list subscriptions set to 
digest (eg. that is how I have the orca list set) but I have it set to mime for the format. This means 
that in Outlook Express on windows and thunderbird on Linux I can access each individual message sent to 
the list by viewing the attachments of the main digest message. This works quite well to keep things tidy. 
May be rules could help here and that I could receive separate messages and use rules to separate them 
into folders, but unless that is done on the server I need to set up those rules on every computer 
(undesirable thought) and I am unsure whether I could set these rules on the server.

I think that covers the main things. Any suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Michael Whapples
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