Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!ogicse!milton!Tomobiki-Cho!mrc
From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Rich Text and comp.sys.next
Message-ID: <12305@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 90 20:30:33 GMT
References: <130125@gore.com> <1990Dec4.045426.28457@ni.umd.edu> <12266@milton.u.washington.edu> <1990Dec4.141122.1679@ni.umd.edu>
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In article <1990Dec4.141122.1679@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes:
>Good set of goals, sounds very difficult to provide without a great
>deal of work.  In fact, this sounds like the basis for a fine
>replacement for Edit for those Emacs weenies amoung us.

Why do you think that I want NeXT to do it?  It is a lot of work, and
my boss isn't paying me to do it (U of W has no particular commitment
to NextStep, and in fact there is still some skepticism about NeXT's
long-term viability).  Just about the only way I would do it for NeXT
is if I got a free system out of it plus enough cash to cover the tax
consequences...

>[your mail program desiderata]

Thank you for these comments.  MailManager has a somewhat different
philsophy in dealing with mailboxes than MH -- note that you really
can't go between MH and /usr/ucb/Mail -- but provides a lot of this
functionality, albeit in different ways.  My design goal is more of
what I try *not* to do -- specifically, *not* preclude the user from
doing what he wants.  [Or, in the case of Mail.App, what characters he
may have in his Subject line...]

>Having little pictures of the sender doesn't really help ME all that
>much; I either already know what the person looks like who works in my
>organization or they are strangers and don't have any "faces" online.
>Is that *really* an aid to productivity?  How about this "lip server"
>that I mentioned in a previous message?  It's pretty spiffy, but
>before including that in an application, there are many more critical
>feature that I need, like the file inclusion capability.
>
>The Mail application is cute and usable for a great many folks.  But
>is it definately *not* a heavy duty tool usable for some of us that
>deal with large volumes of mail daily as a routing part of our work.

You can damn Mail.app on a lot more than its excessive cutesiness.  In
1.0, there are some serious security bugs in it.  NeXT supposedly
fixed the ones I reported in 2.0, but in a very kludgy manner (you
really don't want to know...).

Let's face it, Mail.app is a toy mailer for demonstrations.
Traditional tools (e.g. mh, mm, /usr/ucb/Mail, elm, etc.) and their
modern equivalents (in a sense, MailManager is a graphical MM) are
heavy-duty mailers for seriosu use.

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