2 ms·
Email is bad for various reasons, but being open and universal is far better than anything else. MUAs on contrary suck because people have never touched the po
by kkfx 4y ago
Email is bad for various reasons, but being open and universal is far better than anything else.
MUAs on contrary suck because people have never touched the power of desktops and so they shift blindly and acritically toward webmails for the sake of few giants and as a result most MUAs are stuck in the late '90s at best. Modern ones are just small projects by very small community (like notmuch, mu), too small and geeky to develop a full automation to give something working out-of-the-box for most users.
Another problem is that people still fail to understand their assets. They understand something physical they own, like cash money in their pockets, but they fail with digital assets, so most people fails to understand the value of their mails, from address/domain (like a personal one vs some from GAFAM&alike) to messages and so fails to comprehend why having local mails is important...
We need, for the sake of the society, to improve people knowledge/culture about the tools they need in current daily life, otherwise even a modern MUA will simply be a big effort of few with not much future.
- Avamander 4y agoI agree with a lot of what you said. I think quite a few MUAs could absolutely be rescued from their shadow death, if funded properly (and if they're capable of being funded). It's just that I personally haven't seen a strong candidate yet. I don't like any of them, they are irritating. Aerc is promising, but CLI is simply not for everyone. Then Thunderbird was on life support for a while, maybe if it gains some speed again? I'm not sure. So lack of support from users is one side of the coin. But the other side, developers and companies doing email, I don't know if that can be fixed. Sidelined maybe. There's just an immense amount of feet-dragging and archaisms in the ecosystem. "We can't because others don't" - everyone. Can't enforce TLS, can't enforce SPF, can't enforce basically any standards that would improve the quality of the ecosystem. When was the last email-related flag day? Enough of that rant, it's just a bit frustrating. Forced to use with no visible QoL improvements.
- kkfx 4y agoTry notmuch-emacs to see a modern one: - search based, entirely - tags, like GMail labels NOT folders, while they are equally integrated in search (just folder: instead of tag:) The issue: - does not embed ANYTHING to fetch your mails, so you need something else to do so, like OfflineIMAP/mbsync or fetchmail etc - does not touch files so you need wrappers to delete/refile etc them Why? Because no one have felt the need to integrate to help new users... Similarly no modern UI, there is a semi-abandoned WebUI, Astroid a webkit/GTk GUI, but almost no one develop them...