[Oberon] Re (2): Re (2): Usable "Oberon" workstation;

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 18:15, <peter at easthope.ca> wrote:
>
> From:   Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
> Date:   Thu, 3 Dec 2020 15:15:59 +0100
> > Peter, you are trimming away too much in your quotes -- I cannot tell
> > what you are responding to. Also, every time you change the subject
> > line, it creates a new thread in Gmail and so I cannot readily follow
> > the conversation backwards to find out.
>
> Right oh.  Some topics wander so far that a fresh subject seems
> warranted. Will try to avoid further breakage.

:-) No problem.

> Another way to trace is to retrieve the archive for the year. Open
> with ET.  Search is simple and fast.

Well there is that. I have adapted to the Gmail browser-based
workflow; I just open another tab, open another instance of Gmail, and
search in there.

I do have Thunderbird running locally, to maintain a local archive of
my email in case of disaster.

> > I was asking if you used the wrong units, because Thunderbird
> > definitely will not fit into 50 kB!
>
> Oops.  You are correct.
> https://packages.debian.org/buster/thunderbird
> Wojtek also quoted from it.

Yes, I got that. It's easily done.

T'bird is my preferred email client and the one I use at work. It's
big but it works very well, and talks to virtually any email server
there is -- including Exchange Server, Novell Groupwise, Gmail,
Hotmail, etc.

The main reason -- one of them -- it's so big is that it embeds a full
copy of the Mozilla web browser. It uses this to render HTML emails,
which are sadly common now, but also to run Javascript applets and so
on. Since browsers are so big now, and emails can include all manner
of web content, then full-function email clients are big too.

Some email clients don't embed browser engines, of course. There are
various choices then:
• don't handle HTML mail at all, only show text content (which many
messages don't have)
• try to extract text from HTML (erratic, may miss stuff or show
non-readable material)
• embed a much simpler basic-HTML rendering engine that only does
basic formatting (meaning some emails won't be readable)

I know people who use such solutions. I prefer plain-text mail –
https://useplaintext.email/ – myself, but for work stuff I just want
the minimum hassle: show me the mail, whatever it is, but compose in
plain text with no formatting.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
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