The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 15:01 UTC (Tue) by johill (subscriber, #25196)
Parent article: The notmuch mail client

They need to combine forces with Timo Sirainen (of dovecot fame) and actually make this a server-side feature.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 15:45 UTC (Tue) by ptman (subscriber, #57271) [Link] (14 responses)

I'd really like for mail to be like dvcs: fast and local with syncing. While
I don't want to say no to server-side xapian search, I believe it has to be
possible without a connection.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 16:44 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (13 responses)

Theoretically, disconnected IMAP is what you want, e.g. with OfflineIMAP.

I haven't tried it though.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 17:40 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (12 responses)

I used to buy into the superiority of IMAP as a given, but lately I've decided that downloading the email and processing it on the client-side is actually a good way to do things. Just because it's a pain to have to log into a remote system to do fairly mundane things combined with the lack of a really good GUI Imap client for Linux.

But sync issues is what makes IMAP worth it.. (as in lack of good sync for the desktop)

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 17:58 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (10 responses)

Um, nothing about IMAP prevents client-side processing. In fact that's
exactly the use I was talking about.
http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offli...

Not to mention that fetchmail has explicitly recommended IMAP over POP
forever, and it's inherently about downloading the email and processing it
locally.

Hooray for offlineimap

Posted Nov 17, 2009 18:06 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

I use offlineimap, mairix, and mutt, but just pulled notmuch and will try that too. Offlineimap works great for the sync up part -- I'd rather do an explicit sync and move stuff around in local folders in between syncs.

(Thinking about re-running spam filters at IMAP time, to handle newly-caught bad Received: IP addresses.)

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 18:12 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (8 responses)

Yes, but when I put lots of effort into making custom rules and sorting
stuff then that does not get translated to any other client.

If I want to make, say, a mailing list filter I have to do it on the server
if I want the changes to automatically propagate to other clients. Otherwise
it starts getting messy.. some clients will properly update the local
folders and on the server, while others will not.. all depending on what I
happen to be using at the time and whether not I remember or have enough
time to manually copy rules around.

It's all a PITA and things should be better then this.

Not to also mention that email clients on "Desktop Linux" suck. Evolution is
the only one that has the features that typical users expect nowadays, but
it's a not programmed well.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 18:21 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (5 responses)

Sieve is supposed to make it easier for clients to mess with server-side
filters, but unfortunately support for it isn't quite universal.
http://sieve.info/

I'm not sure what you include as "features typical users expect nowadays",
but I find Kmail to be quite featureful, and there certainly others.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 2:23 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

> I'm not sure what you include as "features typical users expect nowadays",
> but I find Kmail to be quite featureful, and there certainly others.

Well MAPI support would be a big one.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 6:47 UTC (Wed) by magfr (subscriber, #16052) [Link]

You mean like this?

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 11:26 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

I would normally expect 'typical users' to mean 'home desktop users', in which case MAPI support is irrelevant - who runs their own Exchange server?

I presume you are thinking rather about the sort of features that might encourage large-scale corporate deployment?

I kind of think this is leaving the realm of mail clients though. MAPI clients (without using nasty hacks, are there any other than Outlook?) aren't really the same thing as mail clients to my mind.

While Outlook is *technically* a mail client, it's about the worst you're ever likely to find (with the exception of Evolution once you start paying attention to things like performance and stability), but it's not really meant to be its function, per se, just one of its features. (It's interesting that Outlook does everything badly - but it does several things all together, which makes people happy)

Jack of many trades

Posted Nov 18, 2009 19:00 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I use it at work, and "happy" is not the word. "Constantly bothered by it, but not sufficiently annoyed to actively fight it" is more like it. And the bloody calendar is not that bad if you have, say, 10--20 meetings a week. Yeah, my life sucks :(

Many people fail to understand the fundamental truth behind your wise statement: if your software doesn't do X, corporate buyers will not even consider it. It can be badly done, not scale and generally be poorly engineered, but do whatever they want it to do and suddenly you are eligible. Sounds reasonable, right? The vast majority of people are not able to see beyond the "what" and into the "how".

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 2:52 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Oh, and thanks for bring up seive. That's something I've been wanting for a
while now.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 13:14 UTC (Wed) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (1 responses)

"Evolution is the only one that has the features that typical users expect nowadays"

You don't like Thunderbird?

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 23:23 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> You don't like Thunderbird?

No support for Exchange. Cannot edit LDAP address books, AFAIK.

linux GUI IMAP client

Posted Nov 17, 2009 18:55 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

take a look at mulberry http://mulberrymail.com/

it does a good job of properly using IMAP (including sieve for server-side filtering), although most of the code is old so it may not have all of 'the features that people expect today'

it was released as opensource a year or so ago, but compiling it has been a horrible pain so very little progress has been made in that time. however in the last week or two there have been a lot of commits to SVN that make it much easier to compile, so I expect a lot more changes to start happening now.

The notmuch mail client

Posted Nov 18, 2009 10:03 UTC (Wed) by cworth (subscriber, #27653) [Link]

Thanks for the idea.

I've intentionally put the most interesting pieces of notmuch into
what I think is a clean and well-documented library interface. I'm
hoping that people will take the code and integrate it into lots of
things I haven't imagined yet. (And integration with dovecot is
definitely something I hadn't imagined.)

Things that I have imagined are a web-based client, and using notmuch
to get good archives of mailing lists. (The fact that mailman's
default archiver, pipermail breaks threads at arbitrary boundaries
likes months has driven me crazy for years.)

-Carl