performance issue (imap spool on san)

[Scott Adkins]

--On Monday, September 11, 2006 2:14 PM +0200 Daniel Eckl <deckl at nero.com> wrote:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion and yours is certainly welcome.
However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder... I have heard comments
the cover pretty much the whole spectrum with regards to its usability
and looks, and really, I don't see any particular opinion winning over
the other.  For the most part, opinions are based on how well that
particular user loved a favorite e-mail client they previously used.

> And it misses a lot of features I use every day. Virtual folders, inline
> attachments (jpegs for example), forwarding emails attached, view
> attached emails, Drag and Drop support and so on and so forth.

I must admit, I would love to see Virtual Folder support... however, is
this implemented in the majority of IMAP clients out there?  I am not sure
that it is... so, to single out Mulberry for that is unreasonable.  Is it
a wish-list item?  Certainly.

Inline attachments are a long heated topic of debate here... of course
there are features left to implement... however, Cyrus is one man and he
has to prioritize what order of features should get implemented in.  When
Mulberry was not a free product, the features that were requested most
and/or payed for were the features to get implemented first.  Now that
Cyrus is a one-man show (currently), it may be awhile before we see any
new features get added...

Forwarding as attachments is a function that already exists.  Viewing
attached e-mails exists, but maybe not the way you would like... If it
can be viewed inline, Mulberry allows it... otherwise, you right-click
and click "view" and it opens an external viewer...

Drag and drop support is also implemented... though, without context in
your complaint, I am not sure what you are expecting... I certainly can
drag and drop an attachment from my desktop to the attachment section of
my draft and it works as expected.  Admittedly, I haven't dragged and
dropped things anywhere else...

Your arguments that things aren't as intuitive and easy to find is a good
argument.  Some people don't have problems (like me), but other do.  This
may be why some of the features you mention above aren't known to you.
There was a project from CMU (by students?) that had taken on the job of
analyzing the Mulberry interface to make recommendations on how to improve
it.  They did surveys and usability testing, and had entered an agreement
(contract?) with Cyrusosft (Isamet) to implement most if not all of the
recommended changes.  This was a great step forward and a great idea.
However, the project seem to go slowly and then disbanded when Isamet
fell apart.

> And a thunderbird with cached headers is multiple times faster in
> resorting and scrolling, not only over 3 MBit DSL Line, but even over
> LAN. It's fine that mulberry doesn't need to cache headers, but why
> isn't it able to do so? Loading on demand and then caching it would be
> the best of both worlds.

The same could be said for IMSP preferences.  It isn't as noticeable over
high speed connections, but over dialup... *whoosh*.  The first thing I see
is Mulberry download all of my preferences (and I have a lot).  Then I see
it turn around and write all the preferences back (at least from what I
could see).  Only then can I start to use Mulberry.  Shutting down is also
just as hard... all of my preferences get written back.  I am not sure if
there is a good answer... especially since I don't REALLY know what is
going on...

Another popular problem people complained about is the multi-threaded
nature of Mulberry.  Some Mulberry actions freezes the whole application
and prevents you from doing anything until those actions are done.

The point it, there is lots of improvements that could still be made and
were in the works.  Cyrus acknowledged the problems it had and was very
clear where he stood and where he was going.  It is a tough job being the
author of one of the most popular IMAP clients on the marget, as a lot
more demand and expectation gets added to that...

> So just implementing every IMAP feature available might be the best
> thing for the server and the protocol, but not for the user. You need a
> intuitive interface and nowadays it really has to look nice, too if a
> non-geek should use it. And to be honest, mulberry simply looks horrible...

I would not agree with the "horrible" philosophy.  I personally like the
look and feel of Mulberry.  I think the CMU approach was a good one and
it would be nice for something like that to be resurrected.  There is
something to be said for surveys and usability testing... it answers
some of the issues you have brought up.

> But it's nice, that everyone who doesn't care about looking and
> usability now has a suitable free IMAP client availiable.

Uh... okay :)  Of course, we really don't know how big the "everyone
who doesn't care about looking at usability" really is now, do we?  As
I said before, there are a lot of people on BOTH sides of the equation.

Your points are well taken and they are valid... just offering another
user's perspective!

Scott
-- 
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      Scott W. Adkins                http://www.cns.ohiou.edu/~sadkins/
   UNIX Systems Engineer                  mailto:adkinss at ohio.edu
        ICQ 7626282                 Work (740)593-9478 Fax (740)593-1944
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