Re: ANN: GNUMail & Pantomime 1.2.3

[Bertrand Dekoninck]

Hi again Xavier,
some little follow-up on this subject.

I could finally setup all my imap mail accounts in it and I'm testing 
it since several days.


> Could you answer some little questions, please (feel free to skip, 
> add or 
> changes questions) ? I will use this for the writing.

> - in the past GNUMail suffered from stability, how is it now ?

Clearly not ideal. I had to disable some imap folders in my gmail 
account ("All messages", for instance) because GNUMail crashed each 
time I tried to access them (too much messages ?).
And I encountered a bug a first launch on linux, where my "Local" 
mailbox was displayed twice in the MailBoxes window (the drawer on 
OSX), and then a crash. I discovered that I could get rid of that bug 
by creating a folder in that mailbox. At next launch, my "Local" 
mailbox wasn't listed twice and I could erase the newly created 
folder. No more crash.

Now I can use it and it's relatively pleasant :
- it always had a very cool icon ;-)
- it's well integrated in my GNUstep desktop and beautiful with the 
rik theme.
- it works closely with AddressManager.app so this app can finally be 
usefull.
- it feels a lot like the old Mail in OSX but it's lacking html 
parsing (obviously, without webkit or simplewebkit...).
- it's better translated in French on gnustep than on OSX, but the 
translation is still unfinished - on my todo list from now :-).
This is why I had so much pain setting up my mail accounts : some 
english labels are very confusing in the preference window.

> - is GNUstep "feature complete" on IMAP ?
I can't tell. All my imaps folder are listed. I can access to my 
mails, write, send but didn't test  filtering.
One behaviour is bugging me though : one of my imap server (from the 
french internet provider "Free") suffers from connection problems. 
Thunderbirds deals very well with that : It displays one alert and 
that's it. I can then access to all my emails in their mailboxes. Not 
GNUMail : it displays an alert for each folder in my Free account, 
each time it tries to access that account and can't because the 
connection got lost. That's - really ! - a lot of annoying alerts. 
Moreover, once the connection to Free gets lost, all my Free emails 
disappear and become unavailable until I reconnect the account. As if 
there wasn't any local storage of my imap accounts.


- can it handle lots of accounts ? lots of email ?
I've got random crashes when I access my gnustep-discuss folder 
containing 1779 mails.



> - on MacOSX what is you favorite mail application ? Why GNUMail is 
> better/worst ?

I didn't tested it a lot on Leopard. Clearly, it's inferior for now. 
But it's free software.
Compared to GNUstep, having the mailboxes in a drawer on OSX is better 
than a floating window ( drawers are buggy on GNUstep) : there is less 
desktop clutter and less window management problems than on GNUstep.


> Thanks in advance
> Xavier

You're welcome.
Bertrand

PS : I accessed several times  to your article draft on Linuxfr and 
don't see any progress. Need help ?