getting off this mailing list

[Bob Nielsen]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 03:50:44PM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 04:18:56AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> >> No offense guys, but this argument is starting to sound just a *little*
> >> strange.  :)  It doesn't matter which is "better" to use, procmail or
> >> fetchmail, because truthfully, to an end user they both *suck* as far as
> >> ease-of-use (sorry, but I've used both).
> > 
> > I realize the point you're making, but I'd like to point out
> > that fetchmail and procmail are two totally different
> > programs serving totally different needs:
> 
> 
> Yep, you got me on that, they do different things, sorry.  Since discovering
> kmail & knode in KDE, I haven't used either one, nor anything like them for
> years.
> 
> 
> > I agree that procmail and fetchmail have bad UI. But I think
> > we could build a good UI on top of both -- which would be
> > good, because they're both infinitely expressive tools for
> > handling their specific tasks. They each do one thing and do
> > it well -- which is what open-source tools are supposed to
> > be about.
> 
> Well.... I would argue that any good idea is good, but usually only in
> moderation.  :)
> 
> Given that fetchmail is nothing more than a shallow wrapper around the POP3
> internet mail transfer protocol, I don't think a command-line tool like
> that is sacrosanct, especially for a GUI environment like GNOME or KDE,
> where the command-line methodolgy for program-to-program communication is
> actually inferior and less flexible.  Its like saying we should right a GUI
> frontend for ls, rather than simply make the system calls to collect the
> directory information directly from whatever tool you're using to manage
> files.  :)  If you're using mignight commander, or a GUI file management
> tool like krusader, or konqueror, or whatever GNOME uses, do you still want
> to be limited to only what ls can do for you?
> 

The easiest way to use fetchmail is as a daemon, where no user interface 
is needed at all.