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Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

sparrowmailapp.com

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Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#81

Post by tensor »

T_S_ wrote: post #58
macrael wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, IMAP is a mess of a specification that is not consistently implemented between different vendors. Gmail itself is not built on top of IMAP at all, it just has a layer thrown on top for compatibility. This path seems to make a lot of sense.

Thank you. I was going to ask what's up with IMAP support. I won't even try an application that won't support multiple IMAP accounts. Instead I'll ask: am I being too demanding?. As a former corporate goon, I always assume that it's IMAP or nothing. Does anyone think POP is OK for business?

No, IMAP is pretty essential. POP is passable, but people really want IMAP or exchange for most business email. Especially since companies and universities often forbid you forwarding company email to third parties like gmail.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#83

Post by pyre »

jfb wrote: post #77
pyre wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was something better than offlineimap. It is tends to work horribly for me when run in an automated fashion: * It doesn't tend to deal well when it is in the middle of a sync and the laptop is put to sleep. * It recently put me into some weird password prompt hell where neither C-c nor C-\ would quit out if it and it just kept asking for my password, no matter how many times it failed. * It randomly will…

Huh. I've never had these problems (on a Macbook Pro); the only problem I have is that if you run it from a terminal window it fucks up the tty and you have to close the session. But it goes great guns from cron and I've never had it lose or misplace a mail, reading from IMAP and writing to Maildir. I know, anecdotes aren't evidence; but I'm just happy I don't have to use the godawful fetchmail/procmail combo.

I've never had it screw up any of my email. Thankfully, no matter what the errors ended up being, it really gracefully handled leaving IMAP/Maildir in a stable, non-corrupted state. The major pain comes from keeping it going.

If it dies on a "Can't call X on NoneType object" exception, then just running it again is fine (though it's really annoying that 'production-level' consistently code dies with these types of exceptions). But protecting against offlineimap freezing when the laptop suspended in the middle of a sync (or because it hit some infinite-loop that wants to eat 99% of my CPU) is another thing altogether. It's hard to write a simple shell script to protect against those things, and I don't think that I should need to create some convoluted system of parallel processes that monitor each other just to keep offlineimap running.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#84

Post by Judson »

jordantbro wrote: post #57

This reminds me, what ever came of http://lettersapp.com ? Last I had heard, John Gruber was taking the reigns. I wonder if it has been deadpooled?

When I clicked on the link I was thinking that it was the Mac app I had read about a while ago...and I couldn't think of the name! Thanks for jogging my memory.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#85

Post by moconnor »

This sounds odd, but just typing in a message feels unusually slick compared with e.g. GMail in the browser, which I struggle to explain. Has anybody else thought this? Is it a projection caused by a pretty-looking interface? Or the instant updates in the message thread while you type, noticed in the corner of your vision? Or perhaps the font choice? Or do the characters actually appear a millisecond or so sooner? Does the cursor work slightly differently? I can't put my finger on it, but it surprised me.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#86

Post by tumult »

pyre wrote: post #76
jfb wrote: post #59

I guess I'm probably the last person on earth not using GMail, but I downloaded this and poked around with it some. The conversation view is nice, but the app is clearly a long ways from complete. I don't often find myself saying this (because my computer is very fast), but better performance would be great. Also, stricter adherence to platform UI convention would be good, if not perhaps minimalist. For me, I'll stic…

I wish there was something better than offlineimap. It is tends to work horribly for me when run in an automated fashion: * It doesn't tend to deal well when it is in the middle of a sync and the laptop is put to sleep. * It recently put me into some weird password prompt hell where neither C-c nor C-\ would quit out if it and it just kept asking for my password, no matter how many times it failed. * It randomly will…

There is, it's called mbsync.

Re: Sparrow - The New Mail for Mac

#89

Post by mike-cardwell »

tensor wrote: post #81
T_S_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I was going to ask what's up with IMAP support. I won't even try an application that won't support multiple IMAP accounts. Instead I'll ask: am I being too demanding?. As a former corporate goon, I always assume that it's IMAP or nothing. Does anyone think POP is OK for business?

No, IMAP is pretty essential. POP is passable, but people really want IMAP or exchange for most business email. Especially since companies and universities often forbid you forwarding company email to third parties like gmail.

Universities are increasingly outsourcing their email to Google and Microsoft. Especially those in the US and UK.
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