Re: [Nmh-workers] masquerade settings & spost

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:53:04 -0500
    From:        Ken Hornstein <address@hidden>
    Message-ID:  <address@hidden>

  | Well, here's the problem ... it's easy for you to say that, isn't it?
  | I mean, you're not the one doing the coding. :-/

Believe me, I understand that, but ...

  | It's not that I disagree with the theory ... but it's running up
  | against the cold hard reality that a) we have people clamoring for
  | features like being able to select between different mail identities,

I don't understand that, I've used multiple identities, without any
particular difficulties, for a long time now (> 20 years), and MH (and
later nmh) just works as it is.   That is, to say, in this area I see no
need for any changes, and consequently no need for any code to be developed.

>From what I can figure out, the thing people most want to add is some magic
to have nmh choose which identity it should use, rather than needing to
be told.   Personally, that is exactly what I don't want - automation like
this gets addictive, and we start to assume it always works correctly,
and so don't bother to verify it every time - but in this area, it is
almost impossible to be perfect, that way can lead to embarrassing mistakes.
So, I prefer to simply tell it every time, manually, which identity to
use (or at least when I don't want my "normal" identity) so that I know
it is picking the right one.  For that, nmh as it exists (modulo any
problems it might have selecting the Sender address when needed, which I
was not aware of) is just fine, and I'd simply leave it alone.

  | and b) my development time is limited.

And I absolutely understand that, and for whatever my opinion as to how you
should allocate that limited time is worth, and I understand that is not
much, I'd prefer you use it in the areas where it is clear that MH does
need work, of which the most obvious is MIME handling (particularly
for replies, the rest of it might be clunky, but kind of works).

kre

ps: not related to this topic, but the other that comes and goes from
time to time - I believe that what makes MH special, and why most of us
here grew to love it in the first place, is that all the mail is available
for processing by the full set of unix tools - and without necessarily
requiring use of mhpath (that is useful when I need to find the path for
a particular message, but if I just want to sort messages by word count,
I don't need that - unless I really need to make the method of finding where
a folder lives highly portable, which for my local hacks, I don't).
If all you want from mh is "show/next/comp/repl/rmm" you might just as well
use thunderbird, or sylpheed, or even outlook express - they all provide
methods to read, delete, reply, ... to e-mail, and usually with a user
interface that is easier to master.   The point of this postscript is
that someone noted earlier that fetching e-mail from an IMAP server just
reduces IMAP to POP - my point is that for nmh, that's exactly what we
want (what I want anyway), and that having the e-mail on some inaccessible
server is useless to me, and should be just as useless to any true MH user.
(nb: this is not to denigrate IMAP.  For people whose needs it serves, it
is just fine, it is just that those needs, and MH's requirements, aren't
compatible.)