Hi, Carlos, On Tuesday 01 February 2005 08:58, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On Tuesday 01 February 2005 05:15, Randall R Schulz wrote:
... I hadn't noticed about KMail, but it is so slow firing it up that I seldom use it.
Slow to start up? So what! I keep it running at all times when I'm logged in. One of the beauties of multiple virtual desktops under KDE is that I have created a nice breakdown of different (groups of) applications in each of the 8 virtual desktops I configure. I bound
Ok, but I power off every day, often more than once, so I have to start it up. And last time I started it (months ago), it took me like half an hour to get it started, because it complained about outdated indexes or something similar, and created one message box ("warning:...." press ok) for every folder, and I have a lot of them. I had to hunt and click like a hundred of those message boxes.
That's grotesque. I've never seen anything as bad as that. For me, KMail starts in a matter of seconds--certainly less than 10 seconds from double-click to fully drawn main window, even when the buffer cache is empty w.r.t. anything KMail needs to start up (e.g., just after reboot and login). As I understand it, one thing that the KDE team has worked on over the years is improving application start-up time. They have, apparently, made ongoing, if incremental progress in that regard.
Look, I'm answering this email with KMail. The aforesaid nuissance did not happen today. Maybe I changed some configuration to prevent that last time, maybe I updated kde, or maybe that was SuSE 8.2. Or maybe last time it wasn't so long ago, and the index is not so outdated this time. I don't remember.
Good, things are improving.
I switched from Windows to Linux less than a year ago, starting with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Now, following a hard drive crash that necessitated a new install, I'm running 9.1. I've been upgrading all my software components using all the supplementary releases SuSE has made available and I can say with certainty that KMail has progressed significantly in that time. I believe I started with KMail 1.6. Now I'm running 1.7.2 and while it is missing a little from what I liked in Eudora, it has some things I sorely missed there, in particular threaded message viewing.
I still prefer Pine for most of my uses ...
For example, I like sorting by thread, and those that had new mail first (ie, at the bottom), so that I can see easily new emails, in their threaded context. I can do that with Pine - I have no idea if I can with Kmail.
KMail does threads and can enable and disabled threaded views on a mailbox-by-mailbox basis. I keep all my mailboxes (folders) set for threaded view. I rarely need to switch to another mailbox viewing mode.
On the other hand, I like KMail setting of flagging threads as important or ignored. I like that very much. But then I miss a "Go" button to go to those - perhaps I'll have to create a filter. Another one would be to see threads on which I wrote, and to which a new email has been added.
That's one thing Eudora does better. You can apply arbitrary labels (eight of them) to messages. Each such label as a title and a corresponding (and optional) column in the mailbox display and an associated color. Filters can apply labels. I made extensive use of that capability and would do so again if KMail ever adopts it. And that's in addition to Eudora's importance levels and a "spam / ham" flag (oh, how I hate that terminology).
CTRL-ALT-<ArrowKey>) to navigate through the desktops. Also, I use the KDE's "Special Window Settings" to cause particular application's windows to always display initially in particular desktops. It's far better than having only the "minimize" function as a desktop organizing and management tool.
I have nine (9) desktops - but in Gnome. I'm using KMail from inside gnome ;-)
Gnome? You're an odd duck, Carlos!
Also, the latest KMail can be kept running with a system tray icon visible but with all its windows closed (i.e., closing all the KMail windows does not cause it to quit. For that you have to issue the File -> Quit command or the tray icon's context menu's Quit command). Thus it can occupy only the tiniest amount of screen real estate (i.e., the tray icon) while still doing its work of periodically retrieving mail.
I don't use a MUA to retrieve email, that is done by fetchmail, and then sorted by procmail.
I've never done that and I'm not sure I see the advantage. I have several mail accounts that I manage in KMail (as I did in Eudora before it). I subscribe to quite a few lists, including a few high-volume lists (none higher than SuSE-Linux-E@suse.com, though!) and I have a fairly extensive set of filters. Two things about KMail's filtering are especially useful: Header editing and external filtering. I have two manually activated filters, one to remove SpamAssassin headers (for the occasional false positive) and another to strip out the In-Reply-To: References: headers. The latter allows me to remove a reply messsage that is conceptually a new post from the thread to which it was posted. (As we all know, that happens a lot when people use their mailer's Reply function because they find it the easiest way to get a message with the To: address preset.)
Add to that the ability of the filters to play sounds when certain mail arrives (variously important mail) and you need pay only a few dozen megabytes of resident memory to keep it running.
I prefer a simple number at the folder name listing new arrivals - and it does. I would like it even better if all email clients understood how other clients using the same folder marked emails as read or whatever. That's what I like about Balsa: that it understands Pine.
If you've enabled the KMail tray icon (assuming it works under Gnome), it shows the total unread message count across all mailboxes. Within the KMail main window, each folder / mailbox indicates both the total and unread count. When the unread count is non-zero, the mailbox name is displayed in bold. I KMail keeps all its extra indexing information outside the mail storage in its set "*.index" and "*.index.ids" files. No doubt the format of those files is particular to KMail and probably those files are ignored by other mailers.
This email was started with Pine, and finished and posted with Balsa.
You're sick, twisted and mixed up. But what would we expect from a guy whose first name is Carlos and whose last name is Robinson! (I'm kidding, of course!)
X'-)
And now I'm answering with KMail. I like variety :-)
Well, that's cool. I'm surprised that all those mailers get along as well as they seem to for you.
Carlos Robinson
Randall Schulz