Re: recommended mail clients [was] [PATCH] ati-agp suspend/resume support (try 2)

[Peter Williams <pwil3058@bigpond.net.au>]

Michael Clark wrote:
> Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 20:03 +0000, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
>> 
>>
>>
>>>On Monday 26 December 2005 17:54, Lee Revell wrote:
>>>   
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 15:35 +0000, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
>>>>     
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>On Monday 26 December 2005 14:38, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>>>>       
>>>>>
>>>
>>>[snip]
>>>   
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>I use pine and evolution.  Pine is text based and great when I ssh into
>>>>>>my machine to work.  Evolution is slow, but plays well with pine and it
>>>>>>handles things needed for LKML very well. (the drop down menu "Normal"
>>>>>>may be changed to "Preformat", which allows of inserting text files
>>>>>>"as-is").
>>>>>>         
>>>>>>
> 
> This is also the way to do it with Thunderbird. It will do the right
> thing (and disables all formatting changes such as line wrapping to the
> inserted text) if you select 'Preformat' before pasting in a patch - at
> least my Thunderbird 1.0.7 does this.
> 
> 
>>>>>Dare I say it, KMail has also been doing the Right Thing for a long time.
>>>>>It will only line wrap things that you insert by typing; pastes are left
>>>>>untouched.
>>>>>       
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>It seems that of all the popular mail clients only Thunderbird has this
>>>>problem.  AFAICT it's impossible to make it DTRT with inline patches and
>>>>even if it is the fact that most users get it wrong points to a serious
>>>>usability/UI issue.
>>>>
>>>>Would a patch to add "Don't use Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail" to
>>>>SubmittingPatches be accepted?  Then we can point the Mozilla developers
>>>>at it (they have shown zero interest in fixing the problem so far) and
>>>>hopefully this will light a fire under someone.
>>>>     
>>>>
>>>
>>>Fundamentally the issue with Thunderbird is that it line-wraps AFTER you 
>>>compose an email, not during composition. I've never understood how, or why 
>>>this is useful to the end user, except for composing HTML emails (which 
>>>should be banned anyway).
>>>   
>>>
> 
> Thunderbird will not linewrap anything that is inserted in 'Preformat' mode.
> 
> 
>>>Thunderbird is Yet Another mailer that could have been a good piece of 
>>>software if it hadn't attempted to be a clone of Outlook Express (defaulting 
>>>to Top Posting, HTML composition, line wrapping pastes).
>>>
>>>It's the mindset; fixing Thunderbird is probably easy, but convincing the 
>>>Mozilla developers to include such "fixes" is probably much harder.
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>
>>Should be trivial to fix, when the user puts the editor into "Preformat"
>>mode or inserts a text file you surround it with <pre> tags.
>> 
>>
> 
> Fix the user behaviour you mean? Get them to select 'Preformat' before
> pasting patches into Thunderbird.

In my thunderbird, the "Paste Without Formatting" mode seems to be 
continually grayed out (i.e. unavailable).  I couldn't find anything in 
the preferences that altered this situation.  What's the secret?

-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@bigpond.net.au

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
  -- Ambrose Bierce