M2 (Opera) Re: What are people using for MUA's nowadays?

[Timothy J. Luoma]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Brett Glass wrote:

> At 06:18 PM 9/22/2003, Timothy Luoma wrote:
> 
> >M2 doesn't use folders. Really. Instead it uses what is essentially a database. All of your email goes into the database and is stored in there. Think of it as a circle. All of your email is inside the circle. You can enter the circle from a number of different directions.
> 
> That's correct. It's all a big database; instead of having "folders," you
> have "views."
> 
> The problem is that if this big, monolithic, proprietary-format database
> gets corrupted, you're hosed. You can lose everything.

This is absolutely NOT true of M2.  M2 stores the messages in plain-text
format.

Goto opera:about and find the folder marked Mail directory.

Goto the 'storage' subdirectory and you will find your mail in <foo>.mbs 
files.

It is also not in one big file either, but in several smaller files.  
This was done for speed purposes, although I don't know or understand the
specifics.

> And because every access is a database query, opening a "view" with a
> lot of messages in it can be painfully slow. My wife subscribes to
> several mailing lists, and recently upgraded from an older version of
> Opera to Opera 7, which uses M2. When she opened a "view" of a mailing
> list with several thousand messages, everything slowed to a crawl.
> Paging up or down in the list of messages was annoyingly slow as well.
> She's now pushing me to find her a better MUA.

I don't have any views with that many messages in them yet, but I 
previously used an earlier version of M2 with about 60k messages and found 
that seemed to be a tipping point.

> Last I heard, the FreeBSD version didn't have the mail client. Has
> this changed?

Yes
http://www.opera.com/products/user/m2/index.dml?platform=freebsd

TjL