Linux and fonts and Firefox and human-factors design

Paul Lussier p.lussier at comcast.net
Thu Nov 2 15:01:21 EST 2006


"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/2/06, mike ledoux <mwl+gnhlug at alumni.unh.edu> wrote:
>>>  Better still, explain how one can switch between the two machines
>>> and still access all the same mail, using Eudora on one and
>>> Thunderbird on the other.
>>
>> Reframe the question, use a text based mailer and ssh to your mail
>> from anywhere.  Beware one-true-wayism.
>
>   That works fine as long as you're willing to limit yourself to a
> text based mailer that happens to run on the OS of your mail server
> and understands the storage format of the mail.

Why does it have to run on the mail server?  And why does the OS of my
mail client have to match that of the mail server?

I can run Cygwin, pine, ssh and screen all on Windows and use
fetchmail to access my IMAP server to slurp all my e-mail down just
fine.  Or, I can be on a Linux laptop, use fetchmail to grab my e-mail
off of an Exchange server via IMAP and store it into whatever type of
folder I want and read it with less.

>   The point was I was getting at was that IMAP is also *client*
> independent.

And my point is that the client is ultimately irrellevent, if the
point is access to the data long term (oh, wait, am I conflating two
threads? /me checks subject line.... Yep.  Sorry, I was thinking we
were in the tape/long-term data storage thread.....)

Okay, so, under the premise of being able to access your e-mail in 25
years, my point is the choice of client is pointless, it's the storage
format that matters.  For that, plain text files where you can easily
get at them is better than a network protocol if you've long since
left the company and your e-mail was on their server :)

> You can switch back and forth between any number of clients

As one who's only really used 3 different e-mail clients over a 12-15+
year period, how often do others here switch mail clients?  And why?
I find it annoying to switch mail clients since they all have wildly
different UIs.  So, I tend to find something that does almost
everything I want, then stick with it for a *loooong* time.  The
impetus to migrate has to rather huge for me.


-- 
Seeya,
Paul


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list