Automatically moving marked mails?

[Greg A. Woods]

At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:26:16 -0000, "julian at precisium.com" <julian at precisium.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
> 
> In the present commercial environment - they are more likely to "learn"  
> (with the not so subtle help of certain consultants),
> that their MUA works perfectly well with an Exchange server - and that  
> their current server provider is probably using some dodgy free system...  
> so the client should change email providers. It's not always easy to  
> counter that sort of thing.

I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor
corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an
MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, especially if they've
previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server.  Most
folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's
because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the
sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange.

BTW, I find telling folks that Cyrus was built to satisfy the needs and
demands of tens of thousands of picky but highly intelligent users in an
academic environment where e-mail is arguably even more important than
it often is in corporate circles, and where the developers really
couldn't pull the wool over anyone's eyes usually makes the nay-sayers
think twice, or at least hopefully shows them one tiny inkling of a clue
that their own experience may not be at the true centre of the e-mail
universe.

> Switching to thunderbird is likely to be a  
> harder change for some departments or companies than changing service  
> providers. (especially if they have existing business processes or  
> integration with other office products etc)

Well, as many have said, Thunderbird is hardly the pinnacle of
perfection when it comes to IMAP clients.  Sadly many of the other
common, and especially other free ones, are not ideal on all fronts
either.

For me Apple OS X Mail has been better than some, but it also has some
very annoying traits, and it lacks the one feature I earlier suggested
is ideal for handling IMAP 2-phase deletion and expunge.  Mulberry mail
was on the right track, but it seems to have died.

Maybe the Qualcomm folks will do something better with Thunderbird with
their Penelope extensions.

As always, the best thing is to choose the right tool for the job.


> It can hardly be accidental that Microsoft's flagship email clients don't  
> quite interoperate nicely with standards based IMAP servers.
> Seems to me it's a driver towards sales of Exchange server services.

Indeed -- it is no accident, and it's not just about MS-Exchange, it's a
whole philosophy and business methodology engineered to put the screws
to open standards and open source.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                VE3TCP          RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>      Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>