Re: ANN: GNUMail & Pantomime 1.2.3

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Xavier!


On 25/08/2017 13:28, Xavier Brochard wrote:
> Thanks for this release!
> I'm curently writing a short paper about it on the well known
> http://linuxfr.org (in french)
>
> (see http://linuxfr.org/redaction/news/gnumail-pantomime-1-2-3 for the
> collaborative writing)

I don't know french and I can't access that page, however thanks a lot 
for the interest!

> Could you answer some little questions, please (feel free to skip, add or
> changes questions) ? I will use this for the writing.
>
> - is Ludovic Marcotte aware of the fork ? BTW he posts some times to
> linuxfr.org

I don't know. I wrote him and wrote the list about the status of GNUMail 
several times in the past years, I never had a word from him. From what 
I know, he didn't continue work, so more than a fork, it is a kind of 
"continuation", since there are no changes from his side. The original 
website is partially down.
I would very much appreciate contact from him and if he would "Bless" 
the new repository or even contribute with some fixes.

> - in the past GNUMail suffered from stability, how is it now ?

Well... To my knowledge it is better! A lot of bugs were squashed. Not 
perfect yet however, it also depends quite a bit on your OS and also 
your mail provider, different people have different issues and some 
appear to work very well now.
Portability to several OS improved compared to the last "Ludovic" 
release (e.g. NetBSD). Two releases were now done and I think a lot of 
work went in, you should check the announcements and also the ChangeLog, 
I can't summarize it now.
A lot of work also went into keeping GNUMail "up to date" with GNUstep, 
Linux and BSD in general which evolved in the past 10 years (e.g. amd64, 
current GNUstep-make and core libraries...)

> - is GNUstep "feature complete" on IMAP ?

I don't know. To my knowledge no "features" were added to the last 
Ludovic version.

> - can it handle lots of accounts ? lots of email ?

Personally I don't use it with more than 2 or 3 accounts and it works 
with them. "Lot of email" is relative, for me it works fine and I have 
thousands of mails, although organized in folders. It may have issues if 
a single folder goes beyond 2Gb more than the "number" of mails, but 
also that depends apparently on your mail server.
> - on MacOSX what is you favorite mail application ? Why GNUMail is
> better/worst ?

I use on Mac although in some things Thunderbird is better, but not 
everything.
I like the compact interface. It works well on PPC and supports 10.4 and 
10.3 MacOS, so I can perfectly read mail on my vintage iBook.
I hope I (we?) can continue to improve it.

Riccardo