On Jun 18, 2014, at 9:12 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
--On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 12:38 -0400 Scott Brim
Yes, there are many traps for the average user on a MUA that
tries very hard to look spiffy. I like mutt ... but an
alternative is to use a GUI MUA that where you can keep its
behavior conservative. Thunderbird is not bad at that.
But not so good at some other things.
<mini-rant>
........ But the evidence is that those who are
making product decisions don't believe we constitute a market on
which they can get adequate ROIs, so we periodically end up in
these almost-pointless "where is the action" discussions that
lead nowhere... except back to the conclusions that some people
are more or less happy with whatever they are using and that a
lot of people (who presumably don't deal with the combination of
very high mail volume and the periodic need to work offline) use
some flavor of "webmail".
Sad situation, IMO.
</rant>
+1, it is a very expensive integrated, moving target design issue, especially
for smaller operations. It pays to picky and choose, be conservative with
incremental changes, when you already have an established base of differ
multi-portal needs. Honestly, we haven't really had another good top notch
integrated IETF technologies RFC that puts it all together ala what RFC1123
(STD3) did for integrated internet protocols application hosting systems. At
that point, the applications developers will have a better handle of what needs
to be done. The mail related RFCs these days written mostly by same usual
folks, tend to be overly verbally complex, confusing, ambiguous, too open
ended, and if I may say, not always "protocol complete" from an integration
standpoint.
Personally, I use a mix of MUAs, and it's changes depending on what's going on.
Right now, relaxing at a pool, with my new iPad mail app. It has absolutely no
display rending options that it can see and the other day I wanted to see a
message in fix font mode, so I switched over to the web interface with safari,
a 1996 web ui design that still works but needs to be streamlined for the new
smaller, keyboard less device environments, with lesser real estate to display,
less needs to over do it with display options.
With the INTL stuff, I'm still catching up to this, but overall, adding
functional UTF wrappers around the field displays, etc and this is only being
done at the web ui. With the other legacy views, you see the UTF prefixes, etc.
--
Hector Santos
http://www.santronics.com