Thanks [http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.info/blog/en/stuff/mutt.html Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho] for your follow up on my blog entry.

The "nice folder overview" is pretty useless IMHO. At least with maildir i can't see any marker showing me the number of unread mails. it does only show me a single "N" for new mails. Which aren't "new" for a long time, since evolution moves them to "unread" automatically.

(BTW: pressing tab three times gives me the same result as pressing it once)

As for the "modal" thing. I wouldn't call it modal. Modal is what i call editing in vi. I would it call "single-tasked". Not too untypical for a console program.

I have less trouble with that behaviour. I know my keys to "postpone" a message, and i can just run a second mutt instance, too.

In fact what i really like about mutt is that i can use vim for editing. I can't think of any sane way to have a proper vim in mutt and have the possibility to read mail at the same time as i'm composing one.

I have to join [http://www.livejournal.com/users/wouterverhelst/33972.html Wouter Verhelst] and [http://raw.no/personal/blog/tech/2004-08-19-01-40_email_clients.html Tollef Fog Heen] on the topic of email clients.

I'm using offlineimap to synchronize my imap mailbox with a local maildir. (unfortunately, offlineimap sometimes had errors transferring emails, maybe it even lost a mail for me once, i'm not sure)

I can then use maildir-capable applications to access the mailbox at the same time which is great: as tfheen and wouter have noted, there is no perfect email client around yet.

I prefer mutt and evolution currently. Mutt is what i use on my mail server when i'm not at home. At home i use evolution and mutt.

Mutt has lacking folder support. I have it scan my important folders for new mail and when i press the change-folder button it will then show me the next folder with unread mails as suggestion. That is okay, but i'd really like to have a folder overview.

Evolution has this good folder overview. But it's lacking in other areas. With a bit of manual gconf editing i managed to get my "signify" signatures into evolution properly, but its missing a lot of scripting capabilities. For example in mutt i have identity defaults for my folders and for certain recipients. I.e. when i send an email to some @debian.org address, mutt will automatically choose my @debian.org identity.

Oh, and i can use vim to write my emails in mutt. I tried the vim bonobo embedding to use vim in evolution once, but it didn't work too great.

A long time ago i had a look at sylpheed. But for a long time sylpheed didn't have maildir support, so it was not an option. I believe that new -claws version do have maildir support i'll have to check.

Mozilla Thunderbird probably hasn't got Maildir support, but i could use it over imap probably. Still i'm as opposed to "mozilla" stuff as wouter. In my opinion, mozilla user interfaces are crap. They are hacks, ugly hacks. I do not care at all if an application looks the same running windows or linux, since i do not run windows. I prefer having an application using the same widgets as all my other applications (in my case: gtk), and i really appreciate applications to be well-integrated (in my case: in gnome)

I don't use the mozilla browser or firefox either. I use galeon, and my second choice would probably be epiphany. I still hope for someone to make gtkhtml full-fledged web-browsing capable, but that would probably require a fork (maybe you do not want a full-fledged browser to display local help files, but have different requirements)

One thing with email clients is the old "illness" called "featureitis".

I dislike applications trying to do everthing but not doing anything perfectly. I see no reason why email, calender and todo should be inside one application. tfheen noted that he expects his email client to have good filtering capabilites. I do not want these in my email client. I do Email filtering on the server. Oh, and i do not need mail fetching either.

Maybe instead of adding another new email client to this list we should think about making this more modular. Evolution already has a so-called "data server", which we could probably use to access mails as well as contacts. We'd then need probably a shell which can display the folders nicely, some email viewer component and an editor component. Eventually, each part should be exchangeable. (In fact i think evolution already does so.) - and we need a script language to automate actions between these shells. Lua could be an interesting choice, IIRC this language has been designed as a scripting interface language, easy to learn, but unlike some basic clones a more modern language. Or maybe python, albeit i find the "indentation is significant" still odd.

On the SELinux mailing list, openssh 3.9 changelog was quoted:

* Implemented the ability to pass selected environment variables between the client and the server. See "AcceptEnv" in sshd_config(5) and "SendEnv" in ssh_config(5) for details

This has potential: it could finally solve the charset issues that annoy me (i blogged about that earlier).

Unfortunately you can't just forward LC_ALL blindly. But i can deal with that in my login scripts. I just need a way to get the charset information from the client to the server.