Personal computing discussed

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meerkt
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Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 11:20 am

Web, Android, Windows.

It's either nerfed or stupidified (Web 3.0-style, also in some offline clients), or missing basic features, or doesn't work right (Android clients), or a mess (Thunderbird)...
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 11:31 am

I learned a long time ago to love Windows Live Mail (the first version) and don't have many complaints. But then, I use it mainly to send email, not receive. My work email is Office365 based and I use hotmail and gmail for my personal email purposes. Works for me. Hate Office Outlook with a vengeance. Crappy, crappy piece of software when it misbehaves. When I was an IT support assistant in my first job in Dubai, literally half my time was wasted trying to fix people's Outlook problems. I wish there is some completely customizable or programmable email client, so it only does things I want, rather than having to find ways or workarounds to get the job done.
 
just brew it!
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 12:16 pm

I still use Thunderbird. I used the Mozilla Suite before that, and Netscape Communicator/Navigator (going all the way back to Netscape 3) prior to that. So basically the same e-mail client for ~25 years (and counting).

Yes, it's buggy and clunky, and the UI has changed little since the Windows 95 days. But you know what? It's familiar. I know its quirks. Furthermore, it (and its predecessors going all the way back to Netscape Navigator) stores messages in plain text files that haven't changed format since... EVER. So I know I'll never have problems importing my old mail folders into a new version, and can even write my own one-off tools to scrape old e-mail folders for whatever purpose.

Is it slick? No. But it still gets the job done, just like it and its ancestors have for the past quarter century.
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 12:34 pm

just brew it! wrote:
... can even write my own one-off tools to scrape old e-mail folders for whatever purpose.


I had tons of fun writing stuff in C/C++ to read the eml files stored by Windows Live Mail. It was really satisfying for quite a while, until I finally learned how to write and run C/C++ based CGI in IIS5 on Windows XP and then, all the load shifted to that server. Even with its inherent max 10 sessions limit, it served its purpose nicely, until we got some company to do basically the same stuff in .Net. It's better but also SLOWWWWW compared to my quick'n'dirty solution.
 
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 12:36 pm

meerkt wrote:
... missing basic features ...

May I ask what other "basic features" are missing? I can read, send, and forward emails. Some give me filters. Search is hit and miss but more often than not I find what I need. You may have a different opinion (from me at least) as to what "basic" means.

Ninja: ability to interface programmatically to parse/load emails like above is not considered "basic" feature
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meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 12:54 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
May I ask what other "basic features" are missing?

It varies, depending on the client.

Recently I started using Outlook Live (née Hotmail) more. A few random observations:
- No message count for conversations (as far as I can find).
- In incoming emails, no quick way to see the To email address (and obviously by now it's unthinkable to have it permanently shown).
- Reply works stupidly with aliases: it replies from the main identity instead of the one that was used in the email you reply to (a problem not unique to Outlook Live).


@jbi
Last time I looked, not too long ago, Thunderbird's "conversation view" was far from great. Wasn't there a big redesign planned? So far the main redesign I recall is some bad bits from Firefox's GUI.

Also not a fan of its messy storage, but that's probably a problem with all clients.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
hotmail
Nowadays Outlook Live? Microsoft naming needs work.
Last edited by meerkt on Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:07 pm

meerkt wrote:
Also not a fan of its messy storage, but that's probably a problem with all clients.

I actually LIKE the fact that it still uses good ol' fashioned MBOX format. :wink:

Vastly preferable to Outlook's brain-dead PST format, which renders any kind of incremental backup solution problematic.
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meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:08 pm

I don't mind that. Open text-based formats are good (though why not inside ZIP or 7Z?).
I just hate storage that mixes emails, configuration, box profiles, generated indexes, temp files... Not that I ever found a client that does it much better.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 3:56 pm

meerkt wrote:
Not that I ever found a client that does it much better.


Which ones have you tried? Ever come across "The Bat!" ?
 
meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Apr 20, 2020 6:46 pm

Yes. It's been a while, but I think still no conversation view?

Though the immediate things that lead to this thread were Web and Android clients.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue Apr 21, 2020 12:37 am

meerkt wrote:
Though the immediate things that lead to this thread were Web and Android clients.


Among web clients, gmail feels consistently superior to me, as it has retained the same look and feel but kept on adding new features and their search is a WHOLE LOT better than what I have to go through when trying to find old work emails in my Office365 company email account :evil:
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue Apr 21, 2020 1:40 am

meerkt wrote:
Igor_Kavinski wrote:
hotmail
Nowadays Outlook Live? Microsoft naming needs work.

My email domain is still hotmail.com and I really think HEY!mail(TM)(c) sounds a lot better than Outlook Live.

Microsoft, that is my original idea and you gonna have to pay me through your nose if you want that name. Nobody else dare to register that! Or my ghost will haunt your ghost and your coming generations' ghosts for as long as your generations exist.

Found this: https://hey.com/
 
meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue Apr 21, 2020 8:13 am

Gmail's web client might generally be better, but I don't use only Gmail and I don't want to collect external boxes there.
Though it's not better in everything, and sadly it's worse than it used to be, long ago.

Off-topic:

One feature I recently realized exists in Outlook Live is real custom email aliases. That's unique.

In Gmail there's only basename+whatever@. Which reveals the real box, plus the format's rejected by some.
In Yahoo there's only 1 alias, and alias-whatever@ in addition (minus more compatible than plus), which is better but still limited.
 
meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue May 12, 2020 4:09 am

BTW, I don't get (web) Outlook's two-level recycle bin.
Deleting "Deleted Items" moves them into "Recoverable Items".
 
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue May 12, 2020 4:15 am

meerkt wrote:
BTW, I don't get (web) Outlook's two-level recycle bin.
Deleting "Deleted Items" moves them into "Recoverable Items".

Because people are careless and/or stupid, and MS has gotten enough requests for a "super un-delete" that they decided it was a worthwhile feature.

Or, possibly, it exists to satisfy retention policies for some segment of industry/government.

Maybe there's a setting to disable that (which may or may not be available depending on how the account is set up).
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meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Wed May 20, 2020 12:56 pm

Yahoo Web:

Reply -> enter text -> delete quoted previous correspondence.

Result: Entered text is magically sent in quoted style (even though it didn't look like that before sending).
The receivers, depending on their client, may see an empty message and have to click to expand quoted block. Also when they use Yahoo Web. :-/

(Why doesn't email use forum style formatting and quoting? Makes much more sense.)
 
IreneAdler
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Jul 06, 2020 2:06 pm

I use the Mozilla Suite for a few years and I have no issues. Luckily I think
 
just brew it!
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Jul 06, 2020 2:11 pm

IreneAdler wrote:
I use the Mozilla Suite for a few years and I have no issues. Luckily I think

If you're still using it you really need to upgrade to something else, or at least to SeaMonkey (the successor to Mozilla Suite). Mozilla Suite has not been updated in over a decade.
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meerkt
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Mon Jul 06, 2020 3:03 pm

Innocent until proven otherwise, but jbi, you should know better. :)
 
Flying Fox
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Tue Jul 07, 2020 8:31 pm

meerkt wrote:
Yahoo Web:

Reply -> enter text -> delete quoted previous correspondence.

Result: Entered text is magically sent in quoted style (even though it didn't look like that before sending).
The receivers, depending on their client, may see an empty message and have to click to expand quoted block. Also when they use Yahoo Web. :-/

(Why doesn't email use forum style formatting and quoting? Makes much more sense.)

I would around that by entering my reply text first with the quoted text still there, then remove. No big deal for me.
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Re: Email clients are trash, everywhere, why?

Thu Jul 16, 2020 3:51 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Or, possibly, it exists to satisfy retention policies for some segment of industry/government.


Yeah, the Recoverable Items folder is actually used for retention policies.

If you want to know way too much about Exchange, there's a 'great' diagram showing how messages move around inside a mailbox here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchan ... ems-folder

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