I know "usual mail client interface" sounds like a straightforward thing but it's really not. There are so many tiny ways a mail client can drive someone batty, and numerous small dev teams have tried to "get it right, how hard can it be?" only to fail miserably.
I'm not making any claims about what's easy to write. But, like, Thunderbird does it, Kmail does it, and they seem to do it essentially the same (IIRC)... I don't know, are others worse? I haven't used anything else (except occasionally for crappy webmail interfaces when necessary) in years. :P
I don't know of any clients that support the former apart from like, mutt,
or Kmail! :)
and the latter sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with false positives from spam filters.
I don't see why. A custom header that doesn't exist elsewhere in the wild will be distinctive to you and hence a strong signal of not being spam.
There's also Gmail's "conversation" auto-threading, which is an extension to email that I wouldn't dream of not having these days.
So, this is interesting. Threading is obviously something I expect -- and that both Thunderbird and Kmail will do -- but one of the annoying things about threads in email has always been the asymmetry; other people's posts go in your inbox, but your posts go in your sent folder, and you have to keep flipping back and forth, and it's damned annoying. Up till now I hadn't really thought of doing anything about it.
What's an appropriate solution? Maybe just not to distinguish. Tell your client to put sent messages in your Inbox, instead of in your Sent folder, leaving the latter unused, and hey! Everything's nice! (Well, except perhaps that the client behaves inappropriately when you try to reply to a message you yourself sent.)
And this seems to be basically what Gmail -- considered as a webmail client -- does; it has its All Mail folder. Of course its folders are nondisjoint, so it also still has Inbox and Sent, but with a fancy client you can accomplish that even with disjoint folders by using a mechanism other than "folders" (though if you're using IMAP, the results won't transfer when you log in from somewhere else).
And this is, I think, a good solution (and since the client expects it, it gets around the potential problem mentioned above). But I'm not sure I'm comfortable with an IMAP server doing this sort of automatic-message-moving-around for me; it could screw with any further customization I wanted to do.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 12:22 am (UTC)I know "usual mail client interface" sounds like a straightforward thing but it's really not. There are so many tiny ways a mail client can drive someone batty, and numerous small dev teams have tried to "get it right, how hard can it be?" only to fail miserably.
I'm not making any claims about what's easy to write. But, like, Thunderbird does it, Kmail does it, and they seem to do it essentially the same (IIRC)... I don't know, are others worse? I haven't used anything else (except occasionally for crappy webmail interfaces when necessary) in years. :P
I don't know of any clients that support the former apart from like, mutt,
or Kmail! :)
and the latter sounds like a disaster waiting to happen with false positives from spam filters.
I don't see why. A custom header that doesn't exist elsewhere in the wild will be distinctive to you and hence a strong signal of not being spam.
There's also Gmail's "conversation" auto-threading, which is an extension to email that I wouldn't dream of not having these days.
So, this is interesting. Threading is obviously something I expect -- and that both Thunderbird and Kmail will do -- but one of the annoying things about threads in email has always been the asymmetry; other people's posts go in your inbox, but your posts go in your sent folder, and you have to keep flipping back and forth, and it's damned annoying. Up till now I hadn't really thought of doing anything about it.
What's an appropriate solution? Maybe just not to distinguish. Tell your client to put sent messages in your Inbox, instead of in your Sent folder, leaving the latter unused, and hey! Everything's nice! (Well, except perhaps that the client behaves inappropriately when you try to reply to a message you yourself sent.)
And this seems to be basically what Gmail -- considered as a webmail client -- does; it has its All Mail folder. Of course its folders are nondisjoint, so it also still has Inbox and Sent, but with a fancy client you can accomplish that even with disjoint folders by using a mechanism other than "folders" (though if you're using IMAP, the results won't transfer when you log in from somewhere else).
And this is, I think, a good solution (and since the client expects it, it gets around the potential problem mentioned above). But I'm not sure I'm comfortable with an IMAP server doing this sort of automatic-message-moving-around for me; it could screw with any further customization I wanted to do.