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Linux Desktop Email Key to Success
littlepill writes "It looks as though email clients are vital for Linux to succeed in the desktop battle. ZDNet says, "the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop". So, even though Novell's Evolution is one viable and valid product, it seems that there is a clear "message to application vendors to focus on developing a quality email application for the Linux desktop"." I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook? There are many decent e-mail clients on many platforms, but IME it's the lack of things like calendars and Exchange connectivity that get in the way at the office, and cause things like Thunderbird to be rejected even though there's a Windows version.
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I've itched about this before as well - Thunderbird very well could blow away Outlook in many organizations, but the CALENDAR *SUCKS* - Sorry, Sunbird sucks more ass than anything that has even sucked ass before. The last time I tried it, it was incapable of recognizing its own calendar files, instead they were opening as plain old text in Mozilla.
Here's my idea: Ditch flippin Chatzilla. Put a lot of effort towards the calendar.
The Calendar is one of the big reasons (that I have found) that people stick with Microsoft Outlook.
It doesn't even have to be the whiz-bang calendar like Outlook has, but it'd be nice if it would actually work worth a crap.
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I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Why? Webmail is slow at times and your Internet connection could be unavailable or only available at intervals. GMail, while great and all, isn't something I'm comfortable with even though I have 100s of labels and filters to make it readable. It's extremely slow on older CPUs and just b/c Google thinks that you don't need the "Folder concept" doesn't mean I don't want that.
With Webmail I can't get my e-mail to my machine and HOLD IT. I like the feeling that my e-mail is stored on *my* machine. I choose to archive my e-mail at GMail but it's not something I *must* have. In fact, depending on their future choices, I may remove all that e-mail and go back to just having it archived on WORM media.
What's wrong with Connector? Evo seems to work as well with Exchange servers as Outlook. I use meetings/calendar all the time.
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I use Thunderbird as my mail client on my desktop and I think it is great, however it is lacking one big feature: calendar. I know there is Sunbird however it is (IMO) complete rubbish. Outlook may be lacking in some areas, however until thunderbird gets a decent calendar (as well as calendar sharing, todo lists etc) then it will not be suitable for the majority of businesses running Outlook.
The key problem to mass adoption of a linux desktop is the lack of proprietary apps on linux.
For example: I work in the dental industry. We use digital xrays and a computerized practice manager. There are few valid options for a practice manager running on linux, and NO digital xray apps.
Hence, we use windows.
I think if you go looking, you will see it's much to same for other industries.
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...and that can be fixed with a backend change to decent groupware servers running open protocols. Oh, is that it? Well then, I'll just email the admin of my university and insist that he/she immediately take down that exhange server and replace it. Same goes for the admin at my enormous company, whom I'm sure will be more than happy to make a simple backend change to a decent groupware server from MS exchange, nevermind all the management being dependent on MS products.
the email clients should conform to the backend that is being used in reality, not the other way around.
People just don't know where to look or realize that sometimes, programs like mutt, fetchmail and all the other "do one thing well" programs are a better solution than having a large bloaty email app.
That kind of bullshit doesn't fly in a corporate environment. Perhaps you've never worked in a corporation that uses groupware effectively.
And "mutt" being better than Outlook? What are you smoking! 90% of the people in a corporate environment can barely use Outlook - there is no way that you are ever going to get them to use mutt.
How about things like HTML email, shared calendaring, or any of the other things that you can do with Evolution / Outlook?
Before you go pissing all over the IS departments of major corporations, you should at least have the courtesy to think why Exchange/Outlook might be so popular:
- Active Directory integration
- Single server / desktop program for calendaring, email, contacts, etc.
- Distribution lists, polls, meeting requests and other features that are simple enough for the typical office user to use
- Integrated server solution (don't need different programs for IMAP, SMTP, webmail, etc.)
- Excellent webmail experience using AJAX
- Contact / Calendar / Task / Mail integration with PocketPC, Palm, and BlackBerry
After spending multiple hours mucking with different (poorly documented) configuration formats, multiple different daemons, mucking with the DB - it's really clear that Linux just isn't there. Exchange is easier to install, easier to configure, and easier to manage.
How do I set up a meeting, viewing everyone's schedules at a glance, reserving an available room and projector, with mutt?
What the hell do any of those things have to do with email?!
I guess that's the one nice thing about working for a UNIX company. Or corporate calendar is a calendar app. Our corporate email is an email app. Our corporate browser is a browser app. Not really any need to combine them all, increasing the concurrent footprint and complexity posing additional stability risks.
"Only" power users? Power users were the drivers for the bloat of office applications over the last 15 years. If the power users in which ever office environment aren't satisfied with the amount of crap in an application, the word will get around that it's "crippled". Face it, if a mail client doesn't match or exceed Outlook's feature set (minus the security hassles), the closest it'll get to the mass of business desktops is as a bullet point on C/Net.
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Must we continue to follow Microsloths mistake of integrating calendaring with e-mail.
-- sas
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Most of the companies I have contact with use Outlook because of its meetings and appointments.
If a linux program can integrate with email to schedule tasks and meetings and have that information on a central server that everyone can view then that is all they really need.
Well... They also need server side rules and out of office replies.
Oh thirdly, they need the ability to recall messages and see if messages have been read by recipient. Its a corporate thing, trust me.
Oh and delegation! All these corp suits have this administrative assistants who need to be able to modify their calenders, read, their emails, send on their behalf, and then schedule meetings and set reminders.
Outlook can do all of the above, so can Groupwise, and so can Lotus Notes (well except the recall message and read receipt feature).
If a Linux program (or OS X program for that matter) can do all of the above then companies will be able to switch without too much problem. Pop mail and simple Imap won't cut it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
They don't really mean email. They mean a lot of extra stuff, including things I would never guess is email-related, such as calendars. Well, a todo list isn't "email!" They should have said what they really mean: that the platform is weak on "groupware" or something like that. That may be debatable too, but at least then they would be saying something that isn't completely stupid, misleading, and insulting/flamebait.
As for webmail, webmail is something I'll never take seriously, because you can't have privacy with webmail. Cryptography must be performed at a trusted endpoint, not a remote server. Webmail is a technological step backwards for email, simply one of those bad ideas left-over from the dot-com era, whose flashiness and "coolness" has allowed it to survive in spite of its fundamental flaws.
It's only a matter of time until some well-written news story breaks where some government gets caught red-handed drift-net-fishing through lots of innocent people's email (maybe combined with the realization that someone's robot is reading your email to decide what to advertise to you). When that happens, more people will wake up to the fact that having email be unencrypted is just plain dumb. How many times that can happen before critical mass is achieved, I have no idea -- but the day is coming, and it will be death to webmail.
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I thought one of the major complaints about desktop Linux was its inability to back a single pony, so to speak. That there were so many alternatives and competing products that the whole landscape suffered. That used to be the line, at least.
Now, apparently, it's the fact that there aren't enough choices. Well, guess what? That's wrong too. You've got the big names, the Outlook killers: Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail; and the smaller, more specialized ones: Sylpheed Claws or one of the eleventy billion other clients on Freshmeat; and if you need Real Ultimate Email Power more than anything, there's still nothing around that even comes close to the flexibility of Procmail+Mutt+Vim or Gnus.
Truth is, though, that none of this matters. Huge companies are willing to give email away for free, make it highly available, and give you more storage capacity than you'd get if you were willing to pay (my Exchange account at work is limited to ~100MB, Gmail gives me >2GB). You get collaborative spam filtering, virus scanning, keyboard shortcuts for nerds like me who want to blow through mail, some of the best search algorithms in the world with near-instant speed, universal access from anywhere, and now hot new drag and drop UIs.
In fact, probably the first thing AJAX will kill (and I'm not even *that* big on AJAX) is traditional email. Email has long been a pain in the ass, and offloading it to companies who can deal with its site-by-site issues in bulk (blacklisting, storage, availability) is a huge win for people without the resources of a Fortune 500 company. The day Gmail lets you point your own domain's MX record at their servers and deliver mail for your own domain to your Gmail account (making this a cheap, but for-pay feature would be a fabulous way to make money on the service) is the day I take my SMTP server down for good.
Email client? Hah. I'm looking for ways to get email software and traditional email infrastructure as far away from my computers as possible.
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