Re: Prefs and window positions

["M . Thielker" <balsa t-data com>]

Hi,

 procmail will do it - for local mailboxes. So will some other tools. But
that's, again, not the point.
It is an easy thing to do in Balsa and I don't see why I should have
another program checking my pop3 mailboxes and sort the mails into local
folders.

Many of you probably come from a long history of using unix, where mail is
delivered to a local mailbox file by the MTA running on the local system
and then this file ist simply read by the mail reader.

Well, welcome to the desktop world. You average user doesn't have an MTA
running. She may have sendmail installed, but wouldn't know how to
configure it. It's not used anyway, she has a pop3 mailbox on her
provider's system which also accepts SMTP connections. She connectcs her
standalone desktop to the internet using ppp. Now imagine such a person,
would she have or want procmail? No! She'd want an email reader that will
poll the pop3 server(s), sort the mail into inboxes, allow her to read it
and that's it.

MTA's where useful on multi-user systems, and they are useful on systems
having a direct internet connection. They're useless on a desktop system.
Normally, when a user logs into her desktop and connectes to the internet,
the email program will be opened to get new mail. The user then
disconnects, reads her mail, composes the replies and then connects to the
net again to send them.

Balsa does not support that yet, because it always tries to send mail
immediately. There should be an option to hold all outgoing mail in the
outbox until a Send/Receive button is clicked. Then Balsa should check all
pop3 mailboxes, to make sure that SMTP after POP3 solutions will work as
expected and send everything in the outbox.

After that, the user disconnects from the internet and goes away, sometimes
leaving the email program open in the tasklist or in window-shade mode.

This is known user behavior, so we have to provide the means to use the
program that way.

Here's another one: Leased line connection (as I have). I have Balsa in
.xsession, it always starts up. Here, it should regularly check email and
alert me when new mail has arrived. There is no alerting feature currently,
it would have to be a persistent visual alert (a dialog box) as well as a
sound, because I may be afk for extended periods of time and I need to see
at a glance when new mail has arrived while I was gone, because I have so
many things to do, I forget to check.

There's a major design flaw in some parts of Balsa, especially the
background pop3 checking. Checking pop3 mailboxes will happily lock libmutt
and if a user like me or Karl happens to do anything with the UI at that
moment, Balsa will hang. This happens to me about 3 times a day, I had to
adopt a policy of closing, then reopening Balsa to make sure my local
folders are flushed to disk so I don't get all the moved mails back into my
inbox.

It's a drag, and it may be the next thing I look into. SOme more checkboxes
for prefs, I'm sure!

Melanie