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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned.

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GMail's IMAP server actually works well... it just violates the spec in several obnoxious ways.

For Inky (http://inky.com) we had to devote a bunch of Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE.

And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a duplicate of every message in every folder.

But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain nameless).

Is there any way to use Inky without it syncing all of my account passwords to the cloud? It looks awesome, but I just can't do that.

No. But it's important to realize that we don't actually store any of your mail in the cloud. You're not really syncing to anywhere but the Inky instance on your device.

I may checkout inky.

There are degrees: I doubt that Google's actually surprise-deletes users' email, for example. On the other hand, their SMTP servers have interesting issues[0].

"I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily."

I've been using mutt for many years and have not found a single bug or issue. It's fast, powerful, ridiculously configurable, and never surprises me.

   [0]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/

Mutt sucks less.

I've seen some bugs over the years, but very very few. I wouldn't use anything else.

I run mutt on a distant server, so I wrote a simple attachment handler that can save or view attachments locally. Despite my wishes, the real world does occasionally send me photos. :)

I wrote one of these too, but eventually I decided it was simpler just to run mutt on the local machine.

"the real world does occasionally send me photos."

Dealing with the real world, while using mutt, is made easier with muttils: http://lee-phillips.org/muttheaven/

So THAT's what happens when I try to reply to ticketing systems with a mail+address-extension@example.com and it just keeps bouncing or creating new unlinked tickets :(

I haven't had any issues with thunderbird.

I find it's got some unpolished corners with regards to my university's exchange system. Not really sure why it does it, but it'll occasionally deliver me emails a few hours late.

I have come across some interesting ones, like showing an empty forwarding email when the original email's to field was empty. That client must have done something very strange.

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