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From: mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Rich Text and comp.sys.next
Message-ID: <12613@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 8 Dec 90 19:56:27 GMT
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In article <356@heaven.woodside.ca.us> glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes:
>You guys have been bashing Mail.app a lot

. Major security holes (some fixed in 2.0, I haven't tested 2.0 yet).
. Lack of basic features that even text-oriented mailers have.
. Limitations on the To: field of messages.
. Limitations on what may be in the Subject: field of messages.
. The attitude that "all the world's a NeXT" (like "all the world's a
  VAX"), so there's no need to worry about non-NeXT users.
. The attitude that "all the world's a tiny cluster of NeXT machines"
  so you have low-res bitmaps of everyone's picture.
. A non-intuititive interface (how would you know that the way to
  attach a file is to go to the directory browser and drag its icon
  into the message?  I'm still not sure how you insert a file).
. Obscure buttons with pretty icons but no immediately obvious
  purpose.
. No internal help to explain the interface or obscure buttons (it is
  unforgivable for an application not to have a help button for every
  menu and every major window).
. No way (that I can tell) to display more than one message at a time.
. No way (that I can tell) to have more than one mailbox open at a
  time.
. By default, Mail.app steals the mail from /usr/spool/mail into its
  own Mailboxes directory, taking the messages away from other tools.
. Mail.app's non-textual formats (NX_Attachments?) are not published
  in the RFC library, making it difficult to create compatible
  implementations for other architectures.
. Mail.app's non-textual formats are completely different from the
  non-textual formats used in present Internet multimedia e-mail
  research.  The world is moving towards open, common standards, not
  closed, proprietary ones.
. Mail.app periodically clobbers its mailbox.  [The victims of this
  bug are a great source of new MailManager users.]

> I also think you must be joking by putting
>/usr/ucb/Mail in this list.

It is the single mail program that more Unix users use than any other
program; particularly administrator and non-computer types.  I never
use it myself, but I have to acknowledge its overwhelming importance
and the fact that any mailer that is incompatible from /usr/ucb/Mail
cuts itself off from a large body of potential users.

>What I think you really mean is "what
>I'm used to" or perhaps "what I require by feeling the need to read my
>mail from eighteen different computers at various times of the day."

This sort of personal insult does not belong in a serious discussion.
It so happens that some individuals, including me, have multiple
mailboxes at two or three machines for the purpose of vectoring
messages relevant to business at that machine.  For example, it makes
little sense to receive Unix patches on a DEC-20 (or vice versa).  I
rarely log in on other machines -- that's that IMAP was designed to
solve.  I use the graphical MailManager when logged in on the console
of my NeXT, and the text-oriented MS when using a modem and a 24x80
terminal.  Internally, both programs use the same mail-access library.

>While I'm at it, I tried your MailManager app and found that it had
>one of the worst interfaces I've used in quite some time, didn't
>dovetail at all well with Mail.app, and I forget what else, because I
>deleted it.

You are entitled to your opinion.  A growing community of MailManager
users have the opposite opinion.  One man's meat may be another man's
poison.  But, as noted above, there's a lot more to bash Mail.app on
that merely user interface issues.

Some of my most enthusiastic users are former Mail.app users who found
that Mail.app was unusable and who find MailManager's interface to be
a great improvement.  Some are "computer weenies", others are computer
novices, e.g. a faculty member who was pushed into using Mail.app by a
local NeXT-junkie and gave up on it in favor of MailManager within a
week.

It was a non-goal of MailManager to dovetail with Mail.app -- the goal
was to dovetail with other Unix mail tools.  It is Mail.app that fails
to dovetail with anything else.

 _____   | ____ ___|___   /__ Mark ("Gaijin") Crispin "Gaijin! Gaijin!"
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