OT- Thunderbird ugliness, Was: Eudora email client source code released

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/23/2018 09:41 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> I'd prefer to keep my own messages

I do too.

> and just use gmail as a server.

What sort of server?  IMAP, POP3, SMTP, file & printer, fax?

I'm asking sort of to be ornery but it does make a difference which you 
mean in the context of this discussion.

> Courser used to be called Calypso.  One of the older (1996) Windows 
> clients.  Got passed alsong until it was discontinued by its current 
> owner, Rose City Software around 2009.   There's still a Yahoo community 
> for it.  But it's 32-bit Windows only, AFAIK; Calypso was 16-bit.  At one 
> point, RC released source, but I don't know if any copies were preserved.

Hum.

I'll have to check it out.  (I have an unhealthy habit of playing with 
software / servers / infrastructure from the late '90s and early '00s. 
So it sounds like that falls in that sandbox.

> It was useful back in the day because it allowed multiple accounts, 
> like most email clients do today.

Now I'm trying to remember.  I want to say that Thunderbird has always 
had multiple account support for as long as I can remember.  I naively 
assume Netscape's email client (part of the Netscape Communicator 
package) did the same, but I'm not sure.  (Insert typical "AssUMe" joke 
here.)

That being said, it may have been that it supported multiple POP3 
accounts that all dumped into the same messages tore.  (Sub)folders & 
message filtering rules aside.

> But it's old stuff; I wouldn't bother.

To each his own.

> Pegasus/Mercury is still around: http://www.pmail.com/, but I don't 
> know much about the current (2017) release.  I used it mostly because 
> it could import Calypso/Courier mailboxes directly.  From Pegasus to 
> Thunderbird was a very easy move.

I actually installed a handful of Mercury Mail servers this decade. 
Some of my clients wanted the advantages of self hosted email on their 
company Windows server.  (It was protected behind my filtering service, 
and not exposed to the Internet.)  Mercury Mail was actually a very 
price competitive solution for H.I.Y. email.  The features that Mercury 
Mail offered were fairly nice too.  It obviously worked with all of the 
standard POP3 / IMAP / SMTP clients.  —  Just hosted locally in house 
where disk quotas were not an issue.  —  It also helped that the clients 
tended to be remote locations with slow internet connections, thus fast 
access to a local mail server was GREATLY appreciated when sending 
attachments to coworkers.

I've dabbled with Pegasus in my aforementioned unhealthy hobby.  Usually 
associated with NetWare.

By the way, I do like your migration path.  ;-)

> When I moved my workload from Windows to Linux, I just brought along 
> the Windows mail profile content and I was up and running in minutes.

Yep.  I've made a very similar transition.  Just years (decade(s)?) ago.

I also migrated my from my local mail store (using POP3) to a central 
IMAP server w/ local client side cache for offline access.

Though I've got to say, I think the absolute very BEST online / offline 
email client integration that I've ever seen was Lotus Notes and Domino. 
  (I'll send a follow up email with details as to why I was /so/ impressed.)

> It's strange; although I still have some archives, I don't recall what 
> I used for an email reader when I was doing email with UUCP.  I do 
> recall that it was awkward--it required a separate utility to handle 
> MIME-encoded content.  Folks hadn't discovered email with HTML content 
> yet--those were simpler days.

~chuckle~

I'd think the biggest clue would be text vs GUI interface combined with 
when.

I've used UUCP as recently as 18 months ago.  ;-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die