On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 13:23 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote: > But _why_ do people think Thunderbird or Pan > is better than KNode, which comes with KDE? > > Simply saying "I like Pan" is not much help. It's been a while since I tried out different clients, and when I tried out KNode I found it painful. So here goes for comments about the others: Thunderbird: ----------- It's not WYSIWYG, it's "you see what Thunderbird thinks of the message content" (it reparses it, then displays it as if it were rendering HTML). It's dire at offline/online work (not caching what you wanted it to, regetting what you'd looked at moments ago, caching more than you wanted it to - requiring manual cleaning periodically). It's quoting just plain sucked. Pan: --- Almost WYSIWYG, more a case of you can expect that what you type on the screen gets sent as you've typed it (no mangling of source code examples, etc.). Seems to handle online/offline work mostly okay. Caches a reasonable amount of data, as per your requirements, and manages cleaning off old stuff by itself. But it seems to fail getting messages from some servers sometimes, and doesn't retry. If it times out because of a busy network, for example, it just sits there until I quit and restart it. The whole program, no amount hitting stop and trying to refetch a message I've clicked on worked. It's quoting is proper verbatim style: Send back what you got as it was sent, without mangling it. You can massage things if you want (unmangle previously mangled quoted text). Both of them just plain sucked at handling messages with files attached, compared to using something like Agent. Using Agent, you could hop into some newsgroup with fan pictures from a TV show, for instance, select a group of messages, fetch them, and the attachments would end up in your downloads folder - no further action required of you. It could even automatically put back together large multi-part messages. On the other hand, other clients require you to go into each message and individually save out each attachment. Some are a right pain to deal with multi-part messages. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
