[H-GEN] software runs the world

Russell Stuart russell-humbug at stuart.id.au
Sun Mar 20 06:56:23 EST 2005


On Sun, 2005-03-20 at 19:42, barry day wrote:
> Windows is an OS not an MUA. 

Umm, yes.  Actually, I did know that.  But solutions being
proposed used procmail and fetchmail.  These are not things
you typically run under Windows.

I guess I should also cut off the next obvious suggestion -
run them under cygwin.  That would work, but they don't
integrate with Windows email clients.  The native Windows 
clients are far better than those available under cygwin.

> >   . People who use a web browser to read their email.
> >   . People who don't have admin rights over the computer
> >     they use.
> >   . People who don't know what procmail is.
> >   . People who don't want to set up fetchmail.
> 
> If you can speak basic english, you can configure fetchmail. It's so damn easy!

I agree its not too hard - if you are a computer literate sort
of person.  Obviously you are.  But don't underestimate the
advantage you have over those that aren't.  Below is a 
fectchmailrc I set up.  Believe me, to the vast majority of
people most people this looks absolutely nothing like English!

  set postmaster "...."
  set no bouncemail
  defaults:
        antispam -1
        password '....'
        mda "/usr/sbin/exim4 -oi -oMt fetchmail -f %F %T"
  set properties ""
  poll aaaa.bbbbbbbbb.ccc with proto POP3
        user 'uuuuuuuu' there is 'nnnnnn' here

To finish off Bary, I notice you didn't set the Reply-To
address.  I just noticed as I was about to hit the reply
button.  The mistake I almost made is what this discussion
is about. It irks me that what is obviously a poor human
interface design isn't fixed - so I mention it from time
to time.  If you research the issue you will hear lots of
obviously knowledgeable people say that doing so in the
obvious fashion breaks the email system badly.  The only
problem with that is that the largest email list servers
in the world - those run by yahoo, msn and so on, mung
the Reply-To in the grossest possible fashion - yet the
world's email systems continue to run, so there is
possibly some exaggeration in their argument.

BTW, what I suggested wasn't that gross - it only added a
Reply-To if it wasn't there, and even then it could be
turned off by the poster.  Perhaps that might break something
somewhere - but right now I can't think of an example where
it would.

Anyway, that is possibly beside the point.  As you can
probably tell, I tend to favour easy use over technical
correctness.  Others tend the other way.  At its heart, that
is what I suspect what really drives this debate.  It is not
a debate about some single engineering point to which there
is an single answer.  It is a debate over whether one design
feature, ease of use, should be favoured over another design
feature, technical correctness.  There is no easy resolution
to it.






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