[GTALUG] what MUA do people like? Use?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
| Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500

| I'm beginning to like Thunderbird.  It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail,
| mutt, and vim for mailing.  I miss vim, though.

I'm interested in improving my email routines.  I spend a lot of time 
with email so any improvement would be useful.

So: what do you use?  Why?

Here's my answer.  It is not a recommendationo.

Most of us in this household use Alpine.  Thats a venerable text-based-GUI 
mail user agent.  I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when 
I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)).  As you can tell, 
I'm quite conservative.  I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, 
but I'm behind now.

Why do I like and stay with Pine?
- inertia
- modest subset of EMACS keystrokes
- stable but well-maintained
- works well through SSH
- I'm very comfortable with it
- has most features that I know that I want.
- Alpine does not hold my mail hostage: ordinary UNIX text tools can get 
  at it.  (Alpine supports various formats but I use mbox.)

Molly (my wife) uses Thunderbird.
- she's used to WIMP GUIs
- she does not use any advanced features
- dislikes and avoids updates

Thunderbird:

- seems attractive

- was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of.  
  I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault.
  Nothing said by Ubuntu folks convinces me that it is safe to unpin
  (archived mail is very important).

- I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't 
  put my mind to the problem)

- future looks precarious.  Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird 
  project loose

GMail:

- seems to be taking over the world

- I'm sometimes forced to use it.

- runs well on smart phones

- someone else does the maintenance

- But: I want control over my mail.  I don't want it in the cloud.  I 
  don't want it to go through Google's hands (we run our own mailserver).

- I want painless offline access to mail archives