On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 10:51:19AM +0100, John Arundel wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 10:31:16AM +0200, Dominik Vogt wrote:
> > I strongly disagree.
>
> That's your privilege, of course.
>
> > Of course it does not make sense to
> > re-implement procmail in mutt. But the average user does not need
> > 5 percent of procmail's functionality anyway.
>
> Also true, and how do you think it got like that?
>
> "Oh go on... just one more feature!" ;)
>
> > I believe this is one of the most common features
> > people expect from their mail client
>
> ITYM "Windows users".
>
> >- and I don't mean UNIX
> > freaks but just an office user like our secretary.
>
> Well, thank you for the implied compliment, but whether or not it is
> something people want I don't think it should be part of mutt. After all,
> what you want is not always what's good for you. You wouldn't give an
> alcoholic the keys to the distillery, for example.
>
> It's not my decision to make, of course, but I will always argue for good
> software to do a good job at one thing, not a mediocre job at everything. A
> mail transfer agent is a mail transfer agent, and a mail user agent is a mail
> user agent. Mail filtering before local delivery is an MTA thing, and so
> shall it ever be.
Then perhaps you should look at it from a different point of view.
The average user (or windows user, if you prefer that) does not
care at all what happens to his mail before it's delivered to his
mailbox. Once he got it, he might want to sort the mails into
different folders. Although the implementation makes no
difference between his mail folders and different mailboxes for
different users, it is something totally different from the user's
point of view. All the user knows ist:
- I want to do xyz.
- My mail client can't do it.
Usually, this is how far he will get, since there is not the
slightest hint how he could solve his problem either in the manual
or in the built in help or menus. I think I'm quite competent in
configuring any software the way I like, but I couldn't have done
so with mutt in less that a day. So I had to ask on the mailing
list to find a solution at all with acceptable effort.
So, can you really say that purity of the software chain is more
important than usability? Even freaks like myself are one day
fed up with having to do all the work manually - especially since
many other mail clients already do it. Why not make 99% of the
users happy with 5% of the functionality? The remaining 1% of the
users that need more can still use procmail. Even more, mutt
already has a send-hook, but no receive-hook.
Bye
Dominik ^_^ ^_^
--
Dominik Vogt, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
LifeBits Aktiengesellschaft, Albrechtstr. 9, D-72072 Tuebingen
fon: ++49 (0) 7071/7965-0, fax: ++49 (0) 7071/7965-20
