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Re: [Pan-users] Pan just keeps loading and loading...


From: Duncan
Subject: Re: [Pan-users] Pan just keeps loading and loading...
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:13:26 +0000 (UTC)
User-agent: Pan/0.136 (I'm far too busy being delicious; GIT 0efefbf /st/portage/src/egit-src/pan2)

Graham P Davis posted on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:25:21 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:43:37 +0100 Maurice Batey
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> > suggest switching to something like claws-mail
>> 
>> 
>> Looks good, but as soon as I saw that it deals only in 'mbox'
>> directories I lost interest, as I need the flexibility of 'maildir'
>> directories. I don't suppose later versions provide for maildir?
> 
> I don't know where you saw that Claws uses mbox directories. It uses the
> MH format, not mbox.

Exactly.  MH is similar to maildir in that each message is its own file 
(while mbox has all messages in a client folder in a single file on the 
filesystem), but the technical implementation is a bit different.  
Message files are sequentially numbered.

That each message is its own file is in fact touted as a major advantage 
of both maildir and mh, for a number of reasons including robustness and 
ability to manipulate messages with custom scripts, etc.  However, for 
whatever reason, mh-based clients appear to customarily place a rather 
higher emphasis on customizability, with script-extension hooks built 
directly into the UI to a rather greater extent than I've seen for 
maildir.

With claws-mail, that same customization emphasis extends to the whole 
client, with the ability for example to assign a custom hotkey to /every/ 
function, for instance.  It makes kde/kmail's hotkey customization look 
rather weak, in comparison.  (In that way it's much like pan, with a very 
similar hotkey customization approach, one anyone who has ever directly 
edited pan's hotkey dump file will immediately recognize.)

The one down side is that it's a bit inconvenient to convert one's 
current maildir to mh, but there's scripts to help, and other methods 
(like uploading messages to an imap server, setting one up temporarily if 
necessary to do so as I know one guy did, then retrieving messages from 
the imap server via claws-mail, or installing I forgot the name of the 
console-based mail client, which understands maildir, mbox and mh, all 
three, and using it to do the convert, as another guy I know from the kde 
lists did).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman




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