Ask HN: Is the state of mail user agents that sad?

19 points

4 years ago

A lot has been said about how and why e-mail is broken (such as [1, 2]) and how encrypted e-mail is a lost cause (such as [3, 4]). This is all true and sad enough. My gripe (both current and perennial), however, pertains to Mail User Agents (MUAs).

First off, we have to state that many people don't even use a MUA at all, but instead rely on GMail and other webmail, which runs in the browser, and the problems with modern browsers are beyond the scope of this thread; suffice it to say that I deem `modern web applications' too bloated, much like Drew Devault and others (see, i.a., [5]). (Just to be clear, this does rule out Electron-based MUAs for me.)

I used to use Thunderbird for almost forever, until I found that it had inexplicably high CPU usage every now and then (not caused by the search index, mind you), and it was a bit tedious to configure for plain-text mail [6]. Besides, Mozilla has threatened to drop this project more than once. So I tried a few other clients (such as Geary and Evolution) and switched to Claws mail.

Claws mail does have outstanding performance. But its source code was not very convincing (mixing several layers of abstraction, including GUI, in the same place). Besides, it's a GTK program.

I just can't help it — I find GTK very hard to configure: * On a fresh install, it is very well possible that some icons or mouse cursors are missing. * On some systems, I have to configure using the ini file. On others, it is some arcane gsettings thing. * You need to play around with themes for it to look decent, so good luck with the gsettings, the missing icons, and what-not once again.

Speaking of plain-text mail (as I did a few paragraphs ago), the website I mentioned [6] does list quite a few clients with textual user interface or command-line interface. I tried aerc, because it was fresh, written in Go, and because I do respect the principal author, above-mentioned Drew Devault, very much. But I found that the UX was not to my liking, and I don't quite understand why a MUA should include a terminal emulator. Or why it should be a self-contained application altogether.

This whole idea of a self-contained MUA application goes against the general UNIX-y paradigm of "no application" [7] and "choose extend over embed" [8]. Don't app me in, if I may say so.

Other MUAs, such as nhm/mmh or neatmail do in fact follow these paradigms. But their adoption seems very weak, and: * they are written in C (which is error-prone and also not the best language for quickly testing hypotheses regarding MUA design), * neatmail uses mbox, which I find rather limiting, * nmh/mmh do use Maildir, but they depend on context information (such as `current message') that they have to manage in the file system, instead of expecting the necessary information as parameters to the operations.

Now, in order to use these UNIX-y programs, I imagine (though I didn't check) one also needs dedicated programs for communicating with mail servers, i.e., for receiving and sending mail. So I read up a bit on sendmail, postfix, qmail, fetchmail, getmail, and fdm. And we seem to be treading buffer-overflow territory once again (or deprecated Python 2 in the case of getmail). I find this rather sad.

Am I missing something? Is the state of MUAs and e-mail in general really this bad/sad?

[1] https://doctorow.scribe.rip/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d [2] https://ploum.net/the-monstrosity-email-has-become/ [3] https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html [4] https://words.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/ [5] https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html [6] https://useplaintext.email/ [7] http://wiki.c2.com/?NoApplication [8] http://wiki.c2.com/?EmbedVsExtend