I wish I could switch to Thunderbird [LWN.net]

I wish I could switch to Thunderbird

Posted Jul 22, 2006 1:51 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: I wish I could switch to Thunderbird by proski
Parent article: Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog)

I used to prefer Evolution to Thunderbird too, but sadly Evolution does
not support the POP3 servers of a couple of my e-mail accounts (it takes
several minutes to check for new messages). Thunderbird, KMail or even
Outlook Express work fine, though. I submitted a bug report to the
Evolution team, but it was classified as a "not-a-bug" and they suggested
changing my POP3 server - not an incredibly useful suggestion, as you can
imagine. (When I say "my" POP3 server, I don't literally mean "mine" or
"under my control" :-)

The explanation offered was that my POP3 server does not support CAPA or
UIDL, so there was no way to fix Evolution. Now, I am not an expert in
POP3 protocols, but in the face of the overwhelming evidence of all other
popular email clients working fine with my e-mail accounts, that
explanation didn't convince me.

Bottom line, I lost all confidence in Evolution and I wouldn't recommend
it to anyone, unless it is absolutely required.

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I wish I could switch to Thunderbird

Posted Jul 22, 2006 16:04 UTC (Sat) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

> Now, I am not an expert in POP3 protocols, but in the face of the overwhelming evidence of all other popular email clients working fine with my e-mail accounts, that explanation didn't convince me.

The issue is not whether it works fast for you, but if it works at all for others. Without CAPA, it can't know if your server supports the "fast" POP commands. Thunderbird might just send the commands anyway, and if your server supports them, great. However, then the poor guy whose server doesn't support CAPA or the needed download commands cannot get his email at all.

Please think of the user

Posted Jul 22, 2006 23:54 UTC (Sat) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

That's pretty extreme. Users don't care about commandsets and other technical mumbo-jumbo nonsense. They want to READ AND WRITE EMAIL. If an email client can't do it, even though others can, it's a bug. Yes, there are buggy and obsolete POP3 servers, but users can almost never do anything about that... they just want to read/write their email. Any mail client needs to include a backoff approach so that it can deal with reality.

Please think of the user

Posted Jul 25, 2006 6:10 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

Please reread what I wrote. The user doesn't have to care about that, which is my whole point. If I had said "There should be a CAPA checkbox in the UI" then the user would have to care. Evo's approach is designed with the user in mind -- check for CAPA, if that fails, use the slow approach. That way everyone can send email.

Please think of the user

Posted Jul 26, 2006 18:41 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

Oh, come on, this is ridiculous. I cannot use Evolution because of this, so I don't see how it is in the user's best interest. I was forced to use any of the other e-mail clients, which work out of the box with my e-mail servers.

1) Evolution: Too slow to use. Impossible to configure to be fast.
2) Thunderbird,KMail,OutlookExpress: Work fast out of the box.

I really can't fathom a scenario where 1) is better than 2) in any sense whatsoever.