[maemo-developers] Modest/TinyMail problems (continue from the blog comments)

[From: Dave Cridland]

On Wed Jun 25 10:23:44 2008, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 10:00 +0100, Graham Cobb wrote:
> > On Wednesday 25 June 2008 01:10:28 Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > > Polymer does a similar thing to Mulberry.
> >
> > I also have some very large folders and I liked the Polymer  
> approach a lot.

Thanks.


> > It is a shame the author doesn't have the time/resources to turn  
> it into a
> > full-featured mail application.

And also the motivation - I think the total number of users was about  
three at its highest.

> > I haven't tried Modest yet but will do so as soon as I install  
> Diablo as it
> > sounds like it is at least a step in the right direction.
> 
> 
Tinymail is good - if Luca upgrades his IMAP server to Cyrus 2.3,  
he'll see a big speed increase from both Modest and Polymer, I think.


> The right direction would be a guy like Dave together with me  
> writing a
> nice Tinymail-API like library, and the guys who wrote Modest  
> adapting
> that UI to use that.
> 
> Who knows, some day? ;-)
> 
> 
But sadly, probably never. I see Luca's complaining about Polymer  
being "too basic" - which makes me giggle a bit - but that's because  
Polymer essentially won't offer anything in the UI unless it can do  
so quickly and effectively. There is no compromise, and it's not  
helped by me being rather crap at UI design. (Polymer gets a lot more  
user-friendly if you tell it to colourise the display, but doing so  
is a bit of a dark art, since I never got around to writing the UI.  
Everyone can type in IMAP SEARCH criteria, into largely unlabelled  
dialogs, right?)

But it means there's no threaded display, not because I didn't want  
to, or because I can't, but because threading is quite (or  
exceedingly) slow over low-bandwidth, so it's a feature that has to  
go - if the server supports THREAD it's helped a lot, but not enough  
to make it work on the kinds of mailboxes Polymer can normally handle  
comfortably.

Similarly sorted views - Polymer will, probably, manage these when it  
grows CONTEXT=SORT support, but without that, sorted views are  
painful on decent sized mailboxes. (And the one I filter away my  
Maemo list traffic, hoping one day to get back into it, accounts for  
only 18k messages - my INBOX has 73k.)

Filtered views, on the other hand, are relatively easy, so Polymer  
does those (in several different places in the UI, for convenience -  
right click on a mail and do Filter, or define Views in the Tools  
menu, or use the quick search bar), and it'll also do pretty good  
tagging, too. (Which you can also use to build views).

Also, because of the lack of threading, it has a "thread up"  
navigation button to help make up for that. I might even do a "Show  
this thread" when INTHREAD happens.

Basically, Polymer tried (and still does try, when I've a moment or  
two or a pressing bug to fix) to get as much out of IMAP as possible,  
without compromising the speed and efficiency for the sake of UI  
features.

My biggest problem with Modest has always been that the UI  
requirements seem to have driven the development, to the extent that  
although Tinymail is pretty good, both its development and its usage  
has been severely compromised by trying to build a desktop mail  
program on an internet tablet.

The result is a program that looks the part, and has the right  
buttons to press, but by insisting on those features as priority over  
all else, it's hog-tied itself into poor use of the network, so it's  
totally unusable on my mailboxes, whereas Polymer just trundles  
through them.

Is Polymer pretty? Hell, no - it's quite possibly the most ugly  
client in the world - but I find it useful, and I don't miss the  
"proper" threading it doesn't have.

> But as pointed out did Dave mostly made the E-mail clients for
> experiments (at least afaik).
> 
> 
I wrote Polymer really in order to demonstrate ACAP to people. :-)  
The low-bandwidth, big mailbox support was mostly accidental  
initially, and only later turned into a really experimental, cutting  
edge, thing. (It's now not quite so starkly cutting edge, since  
Tinymail has caught up rather a lot).


> If somebody would pick it up, I'm sure he'd fully support making  
> Telomer
> and Polymer full featured E-mail clients indeed.
> 
> 
Heck, if people would simply use it, I'd put some time into tidying  
it up, but yes, if someone else wants to really run with it, I'd hand  
it over.

Dave.
-- 
Dave Cridland - mailto:dave at cridland.net - xmpp:dwd at dave.cridland.net
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Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade