On 2001-12-06 11:24:28 +0100, Jesper Holmberg wrote: >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."
Frankly, I don't think it's a good idea to start a MUA war between Mutt and Evolution. Eventually, Evolution will eat our lunch for all those users who'd prefer something with a GUI, but have sticked with mutt so far because most current GUI MUAs suck too much (think Kmail). Also, the more integrated the entire Gnome desktop becomes, the more attractive Evolution will be. Finally, it'll eat our lunch with all those who actually want a PIM (see below). I don't have a problem with this - that's live. After all, mutt has been eating elm's lunch to a certain degree, too. Concerning Erik Kidd's individual arguments: - There is ~b to search e-mail messages' bodies, but it's slow. - He's right about mutt being inherently modal. Curing that is not possible with the kind of interface we have today. I.e., it won't change. - Concerning reading HTML-only e-mails, it's easy enough to configure mutt to do this right. Of course, it's still easier for users when it "just works". - Concerning index caching, Eric is right. Mutt is slow at loading folders when compared to a MUA which caches all the meta information in some kind of database. Adding something like this to mutt would be feasible. It would, however, ruin the designed-in robustness advantages of maildir folders (for instance). - Palm integration and the contact database: Mutt normally doesn't work on a new-style "contact database" where you store all the information about other individuals. It's, so to speak, quite old-fashioned in this. This _may_ be "cured" (at least partially) by using abook - which is, bad enough, lacking Palm integration. On the other hand, I prefer my personal contact database (which resides on the Palm and its backups) to be reasonably small - as opposed to my e-mail address database, which just eats all the addresses my lbdb ever encounters in e-mail headers. So, what does this mean when we summarize? Mutt is an old-style Unix mail user agent, with modern features. It's quite good at that. It can be a very efficient environment if you're used to it (and know how to handle the limitations) - in particular for those having to handle lots of e-mail. Evolution is a new-style Personal Information Manager - that is, e-mail plus organizer plus handheld integration, plus exploiting synergies between these modules, plus integration with the user's GUI. From what I've seen and heard so far, Evolution seems to be doing its job quite well (just like the rest of Ximian GNOME). Congratulations. I wish these guys success. (But I'll nevertheless continue to use and maintain mutt. ;-) -- Thomas Roessler http://log.does-not-exist.org/
