Paul, On Saturday 10 June 2006 15:04, Paul Foerster wrote:
Hi Randall,
I use Thunderbird at work, but not by choice. It pales by comparison to the current KMail. If I were you, I'd check that out instead of Thunderbird.
... that's obviously not the answer I expected. Nevertheless, I'd be happy if you could tell me what KMail has to offer that Thunderbird does not, other than that it mimics Outlook way better than
Eh? Mimics Outlook? That's a good thing by you?
Thunderbird. But since I hate Outlook, the choice is obvious for me.
Ah, good. KMail in no way "mimics" Outlook or Outlook Express.
Also, I don't like it when applications start to integrate into each other too much like KMail does in Kontact. This creates a lot of security and stability issues which M$ has demonstrated to suffer from way too often. So, what is it that makes you love KMail and hate Thunderbird?
I don't use Kontact or any of the other KDE PIM suite. Integration is not a bad thing and does not in and of itself cause security or stability issues. When it makes sense for the applciations in questino, integration is a good thing. Microsoft has demonstrated only that if you don't design for security, you don't get security nor can you treat security as something that can be retrofitted. KMail has superior filtering and mailing list management, offers the choice of maildir or mbox format mail storage. It shares with most KDE applications a great degree of user interface customizability. It's message searching is much more sophisticated than Thunderbird's. You can readily choose fixed-width or propotional font, both when viewing and composing mail. When composing, you can choose in the message composition editor whether or not to line-wrap the outgoing message (and you see the result of the wrapping, when enabled). KMail can optionally use the Subject header as an auxiliary threading criteria when the In-Reply-To header is missing (as it is when you correspond with one or more users of Outlook or Outlook Express). You are not imposed upon with a spell check dialog, you simply see spelling errors in red while composing. You have the option of being reminded if you use certain words ("attach", "attached" or "attachment") but don't attach anything. I tend to think of this in the "busybody-ware" category, but in this case it has proved much more useful than annoying (this mesasge, for the obviosu reason, is one of the few false positive hits for this feature). There's much more refined control over how much of a message's headers you're shown. Not only are its built-in filtering capabilities extensive (including regular expression pattern matching, if you require it), it can subject messages to processing by external programs (typically scripts written in shell or Perl). It can rewrite, remove and add headers, which I have found handy in a manually applied filter to "un-hijack" a thread and to remove those obnoxious [list-name] tags injected by lame mailing lists into the subject fields of messages they distribute. Another manual filter I use is one that strips spam headers when they reflect a false positive. You elect on a mailbox-by-mailbox basis whether to interpret HTML automatically and separately whether to automatically retrieve external resources (usually images). KMail makes it easy to selectively (interactively, on a message-by-message basis) interpret HTML and, separately, load external resources when the mailbox in which they reside does not have those options on. The message composition editor handles quoting much better than Thunderbird's does. The automatic address completion is much smoother and less instrusive than Thunderbird's. The space-cleaning works better, too.
Thunderbird does exactly what it's supposed to do,
I suppose, if what it's supposed to do is rather minimal.
beside the little bugs it has. But KMail also has bugs, so that's not
At the moment, I'm aware of only one issue with KMail that could be considered a bug, and it is quite minor and only cosmetic.
an issue to discuss. I guess the rest is kinda religious and thus academic, unless of course you can tell (and convince!) me what is so great about KMail compared to Thunderbird.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything and I don't care what mailer you use, but if you want to use the best, Thunderbird isn't it.
Until then, I stick with Thunderbird and the spell checker bug.
Right. Better the devil you know. You'd rather fight than switch. Etc. Suit yourself.
...
Paul
Randall Schulz