[3026] in Release_7.7_team
GUI mail client review complete
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Oct 21 17:34:34 2001
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 17:34:30 -0400
Message-Id: <200110212134.RAA00523@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu, aui@mit.edu
I have finished my evaluation of Balsa; see
<http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/plans/balsa-report.html>. I'm not
going to bother sending it here in text form.
Here is the status of the chart with all of the mail candidates
evaluated (KMail was never a real contender, since it would require
bringing in all of the KDE infrastructure):
1. Be able to use an IMAP server as the primary and only mail store.
2. Be able to use an MH mail store as a secondary mail store, if it exists.
3. Be able to send MIME attachments easily.
4. Be able to do krb4 IMAP.
5. Be able to do krb5 IMAP.
6. Be able to display HTML email natively.
7. Look and behave consistently with GNOME.
8. Not depend on a lot of libraries we don't already have in the release.
9. Not have a bunch of additional functionality besides mail
Candidate 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
--------- -----------------
Evolution n n y y n y y y n
Balsa n y y n n y y y y
Mahogany n y y y y ? y y y
In my in-depth reports, I gave each mail client a grade of "C": they
will all require about a month of intensive effort initially, they
will all pose significant maintenance challenges, and one of them
(Mahogany) has some notable usability issues.
I think my favorite choice is Evolution. It will require the most
initial work, but probably won't require much more continuing
maintenance than the other choices, and I think both we and our users
will be happiest with it in the long term.
