Automatically moving marked mails?

[Greg A. Woods]

This is getting way off topic now, but I'm not sure how best to reply
privately to you.

At Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:57:23 -0400, Jorey Bump <list at joreybump.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
> 
> I disagree. Apple Mail has some fundamental usability issues that need
> to be addressed. Every time I try it out, I can't get past the fact that
> there's no easy way to step through all unread messages in a mailbox.
> How do people quickly read new mail with Apple Mail?

Just like you can in many other MUAs (GUI and non-GUI):  click on the
header to sort by flag, scroll down to the first unread message, then
read the successive ones by pressing the cursor-down key.

It can't get much more intuitive, but of course you have to understand
that sorting and re-sorting the message display is a fundamental feature
that needs to be actively used in order to take full advantage of pretty
much any modern MUA (even Pine).

I'm sure there's a trivial way to bind a keyboard shortcut to jump to
the next unread message, but I'm no OSX expert by any means and the most
I've done with keyboard shortcuts is rebind the quit sequence so that it
isn't quite so easy to hit (since it doesn't confirm in most apps, nor
should it ever, really).


Personally I don't like the way threads are visualized in Apple Mail,
but that's hardly a show-stopper.



> [[about Thunderbird]] The message
> filters are also pretty nice, if you don't have access to server-side
> filtering. 

I would have said Apple Mail's rules were better, but I don't really use
them so I can't say for sure.


What would be better for any and all IMAP MUAs would be a rules editor
to write and edit Sieve rules and which would work with Cyrus IMAP for
managing server-side filtering (but I personally wouldn't use it either
-- I'd just edit the source :-))  This is the one place where IMAP as a
protocol fails miserably -- sieve rule management should be integrated
into it as otherwise server-side filtering will never become usable by
the average person.


> Finally, its support for multiple accounts seems to be
> superior to any other client I've tested.

Again I would have said Apple Mail's ability to handle multiple accounts
is better.


I liked Mulberry, but without ongoing development it cannot be
recommended any more.

I tried Opera Mail the other day, but I didn't like it much (though it
seemed very complete) and I couldn't get over the fact that it was
integrated right into the browser as an extension and my mailbox summary
could be just another tab in my browser window.  That's way too scary
for me.  I'd hate to think what the security implications might be, and
I suspect there are many, but that they'll be a lot harder to find and
fix than they would be if one used an integrated web browser and mail
reader in Emacs (or a Smalltalk environment, for that matter).

-- 
						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>