Solving the e-mail problem
There are plans afoot in Macland to produce a good e-mail client. This is good. I’ve used Apple’s built-in Mail.app. I typically try it out, use it for about five minutes and then attempt to prevent myself vomiting up blood. I’ve been sorting out Outlook recently on Windows. I fucking hate it. You know what I hate most? PST files. Whoever dreamed that shit up needs to be killed in a particularly violent way that involves them the maximum possible feeling of panic, helplessness and suffering. I’m really not kidding.
There is a solution. Learn how to use Vim and Mutt. And use them. Really. It’s not that hard. OfflineIMAP sits on a separate thread. Most mail clients I’ve found need to actually be loaded up to do the checking. It’s chronically stupid. Having a dumb worker process sitting in the background getting your e-mail is sensible. And Maildir is a good idea. Again, duh. It doesn’t lock up like mbox does, doesn’t suck like PSTs or Arbitrary Data Blobs do. Just use it and be quiet.
Yes, it’s hard to learn. But it’s rock solid. It doesn’t waste CPU cycles on HTML e-mail. Just monospaced UTF-8 on a black background. If you don’t like how it works, you change it. As for editing? Give me Vim over a browser any day. Or, god forbid, a rich text editor.
The standard refrain will now come - “but normal people won’t use mutt!” I honestly don’t give a fuck. They can use Outlook or Mail.app or whatever. Normal people buy Lady Gaga records and read The Da Vinci Code. I don’t give a shit. Normal people also don’t try and read their e-mail while on planes or get hundreds of threaded mailing lists. If you feel you have complex, power user needs, stop complaining and use Mutt. Or Alpine or Cone or emacs or whatever. I’m running Mutt on my laptop at the moment: it uses 3.8Mb of RAM, 0.0% of the CPU and 19.4Mb of VMEM. Activity Monitor uses more than that. Firefox - which is idling away in the background with a whole stash of tabs open - is using 459Mb of RAM, the same again in VMEM and 20% of the CPU.
So, what is the problem with e-mail? It’s all you bastards. The software works fine. It’s the users at the other end of it who suck. It’s the informality, which completely breaks our social models (this seems to be a catalogue of pain for everyone involved). It’s the spam, the bacn, the HTML crapola, the top-posters, the business drones who send a two line e-mail suffixed with 30k of disclaimers, environmental impact statements and confidentiality notices. It’s the “Can you just do everything for me and send a response back yesterday?”. Solving the human problem is much harder…
