[GTALUG] what MUA do people like? Use?

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2021-03-21 11:57 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> So: what do you use?  Why?

Thunderbird. Because it's like Netscape Communicator. Indeed, some of my
mail archives (and one of my mail accounts) date back to Communicator,
and it's fairly seamlessly managed updates since ~1998, going from Linux
→ Solaris → Windows → Linux → Mac OS → Linux over those years.

I may have so many legacy settings hanging about that Thunderbird may
not be working as well as it could. Maybe one sunny day I'll do a full
reinstall, but that would take a while.

What I dislike: Like all Mozilla products used to (I think Firefox
Quantum stopped doing this), Thunderbird uses its own font settings. For
some reason, they're set to "extra ugly" on this machine, and I can't
seem to back out of that. The display looks much prettier on RealVNC on
a Raspberry Pi via an ssh tunnel from my desktop than it does on the
desktop itself. Oh fontconfig we love you get up …

> Thunderbird:
> 
> - 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.

Since Thunderbird is effectively a browser, I'd maybe not pin it.

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

They're mbox too. A bit of a pain on the backups, but plain text, can't
go wrong. There was always going to be an option to switch to maildir
(or whatever you call a folder full of individual message files) but I
don't think it ever got implemented as a core Thunderbird feature.
There's a messy way of doing it through plugins, but I don't want that.

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

ehh, it's no more or less supported than most other open source projects.

I want to add:

1.) I don't run my own mail server, for the same reason I don't live
off-grid: I don't want to understand and repair the intricacies of a
byzantine system unless someone's paying me to do so. I once saw a
sendmail.cf file in the late 1990s and it took me months to recover. MX
records — they are something to do with the Nortec Collective¹ out of
Tijuana, right?

2.) All MUAs that are not Outlook on Windows 10 are doing it wrong. I'm
not saying that MS Outlook is perfect — it's a very particularly
radioactive dumpster fire — but unless you use it to send mail, you'll
be forever “That Guy that sends the weird-lookin’ emails” to most of the
world.

cheers,
 Stewart

%%%
¹: I recommend their music highly, if techno infused with heavy
Banda-style oompah bass works as much for you as it does for me.