Jesper Holmberg writes: > Hi all! > > Check out the first "Letters to the Editor" in today's "Linux Weekly News" > (www.lwn.net), it contains some critique of mutt by Erik Kidd. To me, all > of it doesn't seem accurate, e.g. "Mutt can't search message bodies.", but > I guess someone more knowledgeful than I am could compose a response. A > discussion of the points he raises could be interesting here, as well. | * Mutt can't handle big folders efficiently. I have some mail folders | with 25,000 messages or more, and mutt insists on rebuilding the indexes | every time I switch folders. And since mail files tend to be highly | fragmented, this can take close to 30 seconds on a 1.4 GHz box.
This is possibly true, but may depend on the sorting mode one uses. That said, I find 25k msgs folders insane ;-) | * Mutt is inherently modal. I can't, say, compose two messages at once, | read a third, and poke around in a mailbox at the same time. If he means "do all this in one instance of mutt", he is correct. Of course, it can be done running multiple instances of mutt. | * Mutt can't search message bodies. Blatant nonsense and utterly wrong. | * Mutt can't read the HTML-only e-mails that some people insist on | sending me through Hotmail, unless I screw around with mimecap files. | And even then, it's pretty clunky. This has been discussed so many times on this list, it should be easy to find in the list archives. That said: "The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism." -- Paul Tomblin (With apologies to whoever I snarfed that .sig from ;-)
