Automatically moving marked mails?

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 6 July 2009 17:42:04 -0400 "Greg A. Woods" <woods-cyrus at weird.com> 
wrote:

> At Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:40:44 +0100, Ian Eiloart <iane at sussex.ac.uk> wrote:
> Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
>>
>> Suggestions?
>
> The answers will depend entirely on what platform one chooses and what
> requirements one has for e-mail use.
>
> Personally I'd suggest Mac OSX and Apple Mail as a first cut for anyone
> who wants an easy-to-manage and easy-to-use, and half-decent MUA.
>
> It doesn't do everything I want to do as a hyper-experienced e-mail
> user, nor is it apparently easy to write proper extensions for, but it
> certainly does cover all the main requirements the average user has.
>
> Equally I'm sure Thunderbird works well for many people too.
>
>
>> For an integrated email and calendar tool?
>
> After all these years I still fail to see what e-mail and calendar
> keeping have to do with each other.  It's lunacy to put them in the same
> tool.  Use the right tool for the job.

I guess people organise lots of meeting invitations by email. We use 
Meeting Maker, which uses synchronous server/client communications to pop 
up invitation alerts, reminders, and so on. However, many of our Meeting 
Maker accounts are used rarely. The mailbox is the only place you can be 
sure that a meeting invitation will be found, so even a Meeting Maker 
invitation has to be backed up with an email invitation.

> Yes, doing scheduling and calendar maintenance requires communicating
> between multiple parties, but e-mail is _not_ the right tool for this
> kind of communications!

I tend to agree, and that's part of the reason that we use Meeting Maker. 
However, it still requires use of email to organise meetings when some 
participants don't have diaries on the Meeting Maker server.

I guess that Outlook users regard email and calendaring as belonging in one 
tool because that's what they're used to. Even Apple Mail - with its data 
detectors - makes a nod in this direction. Of course, what Mail should do 
is create an ics file an import it into your preferred calendar tool.

> Personally I'm still a big fan of centralization wherever it makes
> sense, and it especially makes sense when the model one is using to
> design an implement solutions to a given problem requires shared access
> to unified data.
>
> Perhaps Google Apps calendaring is the right tool for some folks.
>
> Perhaps Apple OSX iCal works well enough (and for those who insist on
> using e-mail to communicate calendaring information, well it just so
> happens that iCal does integrate with your mail reader to send and
> receive notifications and facilitates some basic ability to "share"
> events, but of course iCal also supports full management of proper
> central calendars too, as well as read-only subscriptions to centrally
> maintained calendars, etc.).
>
> Perhaps Mozilla's answers to calendar management would work for many
> folks too.  Mozilla even cater to those who can't seem to separate
> calendar management from e-mail in their minds with Lightning, but
> personally I'd stick with Sunbird if I were to use Mozilla's tools.

I think Mozilla have abandoned Sunbird. They haven't the resources for both 
projects, and Lightning is easier to develop because it has access to 
Thunderbird's email functionality.


-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
01273-873148 x3148
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