Live CD Request for Enhancement: Smarter Mail Client

[Martin Sourada]

V Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:59:03 +0100
Raphael Groner <projects.rg at smart.ms> napsáno:

> My suggestion is to replace claws-mail with a smarter mail client:
> either Balsa or Geary 
> First benefit is to save same space in the image. Second, Geary and
> Balsa are both based at gtk3 which should be the better hope instead
> of enforcing gtk2.
> 
> % LC_ALL=C yum info geary |grep Size
> Size        : 4.8 M
> % LC_ALL=C yum info balsa |grep Size
> Size        : 7.3 M
> % LC_ALL=C yum info claws-mail |grep Size
> Size        : 17 M
> 
> I assume it's not needed to ship all those great plugins for
> claws-mail, and both geary as well balsa have great configuration
> wizards open at the first start. Settings can be considered to be
> vanishable in the sense of a live image, don't they?
> Balsa is themable via gtk3 while Geary has a more modern design. 
> Both packages seem to be actively maintained. No idea about upstreams.
> 
> All in all, a live user should not be expected to see as many feature
> as possible with an image that has a feature to limit in size.
> 
> What do you think?

Hi,

I'm talking from the perspective of a long time both Xfce and
claws-mail user. Back in the day (many years back) when I was switching
away from first thunderbird and then from evolution (still back in the
gnome 2 days) I was considering balsa as an option, claws mail ended up
the most user-friendly and feature complete for my use cases. Upon your
mail I decided to try them again. So I installed geary (I'm currently
on CentOS 7, and geary is available through nux-desktop), no balsa so
far, it's not in my repos. And my two cents (at least until I reboot to
fedora to try balsa) from the *quick* look are:

  * Geary is definitely an *awful* choice for Xfce. Most of all it has
    the completely gnome-shelly look which is out of place in
    traditional desktop interface. Symbolic icons are also a no-no in
    my opinion in Xfce. Also the interface is really unsuitable for
    usage, IMHO, with high traffic mailing lists.
  * Also in geary, I don't see anywhere any kind of setting of the
    default mail servers -- do I use TLS, Do I use pop or imap? Can I
    use POP for customly configured servers? Can I gpg-sign mail? Can I
    reasonably use it for plain-text mails, i.e. non-HTML? Do I
    download full messages or just headers on check-new mail? Can I set
    it?

Regarding GTK2/3 in XFCE I strongly think we should still prefer GTK2
to GTK3, as the base desktop and most themes are still GTK2 based.

Regards,
Martin