Apple Mail Readers, continued

I can’t say I’m surprised to find most of the alternative MUAs to Apple’s Mail.app are shareware. What I am surprised is to find that they’re not terribly functional – and some aren’t even pretty! Mail.app’s threading support is pretty basic: it’ll collect related messages together, highlight related messages, and let you collapse a thread into a single line. Fine, fair enough, it’s free and came with the OS. But apparently that’s actually some of the better support for threading available in the Mac world! And meanwhile, other clients don’t even support IMAP. Geez, I’d say join the 21st century already, but it’s not like you could even write programs for Mac OS X prior to that. What are these things? Is there going to be some apocalyptic global war with spambots that will decimate MacOS X mail readers, leaving barely a few survivors, scarred, crippled and lame, to be sent back in time to try to save the future?

I’m not impressed. And I’m quite sure that porting mutt to Quartz isn’t an option.

Oh well, let’s try *gulp* downloading Thunderbird and reading my email in a web browser.

(Addendum: Thunderbird’s great. Only feature I miss is automatic underlining of misspelt words. It does threading, GPG signing and verifying, it’s pretty, and it supports IMAP reasonably well. It doesn’t even seem too unpleasantly web-based, at least once you actually uncheck the option to say you want to send HTML email. Its handling of word wrapping still isn’t perfect, but it’s better than Mail.app’s.)

AppleMail and IMAP

Continuing my transition to Mac OS X as desktop of choice, I’ve been trying to get my email to work. Getting GPG working was happily easy – just a matter of downloading some stuff, and having AppleMail suddenly support signing email. It seems reasonable functional.

Harder is dealing with the couple of hundred megs of “personal” mail I’ve saved over the past decade or so, filed in a few thousand different mailboxes; and the stupid number of lists I’m subscribed to. Currently I’m using mutt, and a couple of different directories to manage it all: “inbox” is a Maildir for personal mail, “lists/” contains a different Maildir for each list I’m subscribed to, and “links/” contains a different Maildir for everyone I’ve corresponded with. When I hit “s” to save a message, it’ll look at the From: and choose a Maildir to save to; when I send a message to someone, it looks at the To: and copies the outgoing mail to the same directory. Which isn’t perfect, but is okay.

Doing the same with AppleMail would suck – while it at least uses mbox format for its storage, it surrounds it with a bunch of random cache files. So that seems to mean using a local IMAP server to manage my email. It’s been more of a struggle than I expected to get an IMAP server; fink doesn’t have any precompiled debs for Panther, and doesn’t have the server I wanted anyway (namely Courier IMAPD which supports Maildir format), and then that didn’t compile out of the box (gcc seems to think “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar;” doesn’t define the structure, but is quite happy with “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar = {0};”), and didn’t configure out of the box either (since PAM on Mac OS X is somewhat different to whatever it expected).

And then, once I’d gotten that far and started poking at my mail, I get a kernel panic. Lovely. Sending my first email resulted in a reasonable success, albeit with some bodgy word wrapping. At least there was too much word wrapping rather than too little. And at least it actually ended up as plain text!

So things are looking okay so far. Yet to try importing all my archived mail or deal with my mailing lists yet. Or setup the funky BSMTP stuff I use to get mail from there to here and back.

UPDATE 2004/11/09:

Erk, when you're editing AppleMail wraps at the window size, which is 80 characters by default when you switch to the default fixed width font; but then switches to wrapping at 72 characters when you actually send the mail. And that's a hard wrap if you've got an 80 character "word", it gets broken after 72 characters. Eww. And it looks like it's not something you can change at all. It's also not something that only affects the text you type -- it affects the entire message, including .sig and quoted text. Yay.

My New iBook

* aj continues waiting impatiently for his ibook
* Rukh continues waiting impatiently for Bush to be booted out
<blender> rukh: a week to go
<aj> Rukh: true, i suppose i could be happy that my wait will be a lot shorter than others’
<Rukh> heheh
<Rukh> aj: so you’re getting your ibook in a lot less than one weeks time? :)

As it turns out, I did get my iBook in less than a week’s time – it arrived midday last Monday. We’ll refrain from reflecting too heavily on how much shorter a wait that was than Rukh’s continues to be…

Anyway, like I suggested, it looks like I’m going to stick with running MacOS X on it instead of just installing Debian (or Ubuntu) like I did on my last. The ability to reliably suspend and use the inbuilt modem and wireless aren’t things I’m willing to give up, and it’s nice to have the little extras like having Expose just work, being able to play with iTunes, iMovie, and Command & Conquer, having QuickTime work natively, and generally just having a desktop that doesn’t treat me like some genius hacker for which nothing is too hard, is a pleasant change too. Shark, Apple’s profiler, sounds pretty nice too, so hopefully there are more things to look forward to.

The real irritation switching from Debian to MacOS is the crazy complications involved in installing third party software. Apple’s software updates with an “updater”; Unixy software gets installed with fink, either by apt-get, or using the “fink” tool, or the “darwin ports” system. Third party software gets installed by downloading a disk image, opening whatever the vendor wants – the installer for my printer driver from HP insisted on closing all my open programs, including my terminals, eg. Nice. I’ve had to google and separately install, hrm, Camino, Blapp, GnuPG, GPGKeys, GPG-AppleMail, SubEthaEdit, RealPlayer, X11, XCode, and my aforementioned printer driver. And so far I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can collect my mail or code comfortably.

On the upside, I’ve got something like 4GB of freshly ripped music, and made up a fun little ski movie.

But I hate to think of the security implications; there are just too many different sources of software that can all have problems, and for which I’m never going to hear about updates. Oh well; here’s to defense in depth.

But hey, if you ignore that detail, what you get is pretty cool. The slot loading DVD/CDRW drive is much snazzier than trays, and the hardware is generally really nice – even the keyboard is quite a step up from my previous iBook. Specs are heaps better (11Mbps to 54Mbps, 20GB to 80GB, 128MB to 256MB, 500MHz G3 to 1.2GHz G4, USB1 to USB2), and the software’s pretty pleasant overall. I’m not even sure I’m bothered by the lack of focus-follows-mouse.