One more damn thing to do after prelims
Jul. 28th, 2012 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo the University of Michigan has switched to having all its email handled by Gmail! If there was any warning about this, I sure as hell missed it.
And sure, Gmail has IMAP access, of course, but it can't behave like just an ordinary IMAP server, no. It has to do its own crazy shit. And that potentially screws with my ability to do things client-side. Which is how they should be done. It's fricking email. The server shouldn't be doing weird things on its own.
Now I guess when you consider that Gmail is primarily a webmail service, this makes sense. But I have no intention of using it that way. Then why did I sign up for it, if I didn't want to use that? I didn't sign up for it voluntarily, the school just suddenly migrated my official school email account over to it!
To hell with this. Maybe, sometime after prelims, I'll just get a free email account somewhere else and forward everything to that. Anyone know one that *doesn't* insist on doing weird things on the server and that I can use like just a normal IMAP server?
I mean, OK, I might never get around to this -- consider that I still haven't gotten around to switching from Thunderbird, even though I *know* of better mail clients out there. Back when I first started using Linux back in middle school, I used Kmail. Then of course that didn't exist on Windows, and I used Thunderbird, which is (SFAICT) noticeably inferior. Somehow when I switched back to Linux again I... continued using Thunderbird? And still haven't taken the time to switch back? Yeah. (Also, anyone know anything that might be yet better than Kmail? I expect there's still room for improvement there.)
Tangential: I actually did open up Kmail today intending to switch over, then decided against it on the basis that I'd like to at least see what the hell's going on with just the one switch before I add an additional complication. Looking through the options, I notice it has an option for X-Face. (IIRC, back when I used it, you had to do that manually. But at least you could do that manually; with Thunderbird I don't think you can even do that sort of thing manually without an extension. Also, I think I'm misremembering and you didn't actually have to do it manually, because I think it could display them and taken together those don't make sense.)
Now I'd say, "Does anyone really use X-Face anymore?" But I noticed when looking through the Gmail settings that there was an option for "send a picture with your email". Somehow I doubt that was via X-Face -- I think most people would be pretty disappointed if they found they could only send black-and-white images -- but I have to wonder...
-Harry
And sure, Gmail has IMAP access, of course, but it can't behave like just an ordinary IMAP server, no. It has to do its own crazy shit. And that potentially screws with my ability to do things client-side. Which is how they should be done. It's fricking email. The server shouldn't be doing weird things on its own.
Now I guess when you consider that Gmail is primarily a webmail service, this makes sense. But I have no intention of using it that way. Then why did I sign up for it, if I didn't want to use that? I didn't sign up for it voluntarily, the school just suddenly migrated my official school email account over to it!
To hell with this. Maybe, sometime after prelims, I'll just get a free email account somewhere else and forward everything to that. Anyone know one that *doesn't* insist on doing weird things on the server and that I can use like just a normal IMAP server?
I mean, OK, I might never get around to this -- consider that I still haven't gotten around to switching from Thunderbird, even though I *know* of better mail clients out there. Back when I first started using Linux back in middle school, I used Kmail. Then of course that didn't exist on Windows, and I used Thunderbird, which is (SFAICT) noticeably inferior. Somehow when I switched back to Linux again I... continued using Thunderbird? And still haven't taken the time to switch back? Yeah. (Also, anyone know anything that might be yet better than Kmail? I expect there's still room for improvement there.)
Tangential: I actually did open up Kmail today intending to switch over, then decided against it on the basis that I'd like to at least see what the hell's going on with just the one switch before I add an additional complication. Looking through the options, I notice it has an option for X-Face. (IIRC, back when I used it, you had to do that manually. But at least you could do that manually; with Thunderbird I don't think you can even do that sort of thing manually without an extension. Also, I think I'm misremembering and you didn't actually have to do it manually, because I think it could display them and taken together those don't make sense.)
Now I'd say, "Does anyone really use X-Face anymore?" But I noticed when looking through the Gmail settings that there was an option for "send a picture with your email". Somehow I doubt that was via X-Face -- I think most people would be pretty disappointed if they found they could only send black-and-white images -- but I have to wonder...
-Harry
no subject
Date: 2012-08-02 11:55 pm (UTC)The tree format -- or even such things as the point-by-point quoting and response -- allows you to do things you can't do in an linear thread, in particular, keeping on multiple points simultaneously and non-disruptively.
A linear format encourages forgetting and dropping earlier points. Or, if earlier points are kept live, the result is a jumbled mess, as distinct topics alternate with each other. If instead distinct topics are segregated to different branches of the tree, they can be kept live while still maintaining organization.
In general, I would say, the proper format for writing is not necessarily linear -- nor a tree, either. (Writing my recent paper with Josh, I recall thinking how much easier it could be if I could just write it as a DAG. Nowadays you can write things as hypertext, which helps somewhat, but you can't do that in a journal. And of course you can't expect a mail client to support a DAG. Is having multiple In-Reply-To headers even supposed to be allowed?) But a tree is still better than nothing.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say little subconversations elsewhere are hard to keep track of. The software keeps track of them for you -- it organizes them into a tree, so you can look and see which other messages they relate to. By contrast, if you force them into a linear format, they won't necessarily be near the things they most relate to; you can't collapse a tree (or a more general graph) into a line in a distance-preserving way. And note that this organization means that if the subthread is about something that isn't even relevant to you, you don't have to read it! Whereas with a linear thread, it's hard to predict this in advance; the branches are bound together so you have to read them all unless you're ignoring the entire thread.
Unrelatedly -- rethinking the custom headers thing; if it's free to be a "dumping ground", that means it should be ignored entirely, because it shouldn't offer evidence either way. Spam tries to hide its spamminess, but it necessarily has giveaways in A. the parts that contain the payload, the parts the user can see and B. anything it can't fake. These are the areas that matter. Something like custom headers should be simply irrelevant.