After three years I’ve changed my eMailclient. I’m going away from sylpheed-claws to a combination of getmail, procmail, stunnel (for SSL) and Evolution or if want so, mutt. The main arguments for this decision was the unability of Sylpheed-Claws-gtk2 to handle with maildir, the format I want to use and the tempo of developing the Sylpheed-Claws-gtk2-version. GTK2 is released two years ago and the Sylpheed-Claws project seems to be unable and unwilling to create a stable an usable GTK2-Release. I’ve waited a very long time, but now it is enough. The CVS-Release is buggy without an end, it is very slow (reading my inbox with ~500 mails takes longer than 30 sec.). So I decided to change to Evolution as Client. Evolution is a DAU<sup>1</sup>-Client and had a lot of Feature less than Sylpheed-Claws but it looks much more as a Programm of 2004 and don’t uses a stone age GUI-Lib as GTK1 is it.
It is hard to say goodbye to a programm, who manages ~200.000 Mails in the last three years but there is no other chance. Sylpheed-Claws is the best client at all but the best must not mean a good.
My current solution ist very nice: getmail fetches the Mails over an stunnel-SSL-Connection every two minutes from Schokokeks and procmail filters them into maildirs. Filtering means not spamassassin and clamav, this is done on Schokokeks. Filting means only put them in the correct maildirs. Evolution is able to read maildirs and so it is just uses as a nice frontend to maildir ;) . Also the calendar-function of evolution ist really nice. I also tried Evolution 1.5. It is a fine app, but currently segfaults while reading my maildir :-/ I’m curious to see it stable!
But be careful: there were a lot of stumbling blocks. For example evolution nees every signature in the format <pre> signature… </pre>. So I edited the perl-script for random quotes and here is it again:
#!/usr/bin/perl
srand($$);
$sigfile = "/home/lars/Quote/lars.sig";
$quotedir = "/home/lars/Quote/";
opendir(SIGS, "$quotedir") || die "Folder of random quotes not found…" ;
@tops = grep(/^\w*\.quote$/, readdir(SIGS));
closedir(SIGS);
$top = int(rand $#tops);
open(TOP, "$quotedir/$tops[$top]");
print("&lt;pre&gt;\n– \n");
while(<TOP>) {
print("$_ ");
}
print <TOP>;
close(TOP);
print("\n");
open(QUOTE, "$sigfile") || die "Signature not found…";
print <QUOTE>;
close(QUOTE);
print("&lt;/pre&gt;");
I’ve also converted my old Mail in mbox-format to maildir. This was nut a lot of work because I find a script named sylpheed2maildir. I’ve edited a few things for my own need and then it works quite well (you find it here)
Screenshots of the new solution
[1.] German: “D
Filed under Gentoo, GNOME & three comments & three trackbacks
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anonymous reckons:
published on August 17th 2004, 07:59:56 pm> or if want so, mutt
could you send me your mutt.tar.gz please, which look more as a programm of 2004!!??
You critizise the gtk1 look of sylpheed. Then I think you must HATE mutt which mutt I know.
Thanks a lot for your qtk4.6 enabled MUTT!!!!!!
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Anonymous reckons:
published on August 17th 2004, 09:02:20 pmYes, I don’t really like mutt. But there are some issues where it is nice, to use mutt for reading mails. Sylpheed-Claws is a GUI-Programm, and GUIs should be good to use (Sylpheed-Claws ist fine to use) and should look well. The second thing is missed in Sylpheed-Claws.
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Anonymous answers:
published on October 17th 2004, 09:16:59 amBTW, Sylpheed-Claws-gtk2 can handle maildir if you use the Maildir++ Plugin.
GTK2 may have been release 2 years ago, but it’s not necessarily been stable all that time.
To say the Sylpheed-Claws team is ‘unwilling and unable’ to release a GTK2 version is just plain wrong. The development team work in their spare time, no-one is paying them for this, and they have real lives too. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that Novel pay a team of developers to work on evolution.
I use the CVS GTK2 version of Sylpheed-Claws, and although it does crash a little more than the GTK1 stable branch at present, but to say it is ‘buggy without end’ is a gross overstatement, on the contrary, it is very usable on a day to day basis. It is also not very slow, but equal to the GTK1 branch, i.e. fast.
I have no opinion on which email client you choose to use, but your comments on why you stopped using Sylpheed-Claws are little misleading and/or unfair.
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