Mike's general stuff ~ Random
A kind of continuation from my previous article, I've decided to test Mozilla Mail again, this time testing Mozilla 1.2.1. Most of the major problems I previously talked about appear to have been sorted out, being:
- Plain SMTP authentication works very badly
- Moving folders around the mail folder structure isn't user friendly [clunky]
- Mail importing (from Eudora in this case) is bloody slow
- Text-wrapping bugs in viewing/replying to mail
Well, the first and fourth actually, but those are the two I kept running into in my previous use of the software. The other two you might notice from time to time, or just once, but they're still present. I worked out that the disk throughput during the Eudora mail import was about 100KB/sec, which is pretty damn slow, even if you take into account that every email has to be checked, written, bits changed, and then committed to disk. There's a number of possible techniques that could be employed, such as caching the output to memory then writing to disk in large chunks, which would lessen filesystem fragmentation. One could also be processing a number of mail folders in parallel. But the fact that SMTP authentication appears to be fixed means I can use my old own server for SMTP from my home machine's dialup account while still keeping a reasonably secure SMTP relay configuration.
So now I'm using Mozilla Mail for my email. I have a couple of minor nigglies about it, as well as ones already mentioned, but Windows needs good email clients... Qualcomm charge a 'little too much' for Eudora in Paid Mode, and Microsoft mail clients just plain suck in too many respects for me to bother to go into, especially because most competent computer users know, and there are plenty of rant pages on the Internet about the subject already :-) With Mozilla I can make a bit of a difference through bug reporting, and get a better product in return. I think. :)