Real name policy? [was: kmail has messed up the email accounts]

[Paul Vixie]

On Tuesday, 2 June 2020 12:43:00 UTC test wrote:
> ...
> 
> That doesn't mean the users shouldn't be allowed to say something about the
> software.  It doesn't mean that programmers will change the software.  It's
> all something that just happens, and it's possible that progress can be
> made when users provide useful input and programmers aren't ignoring them.

as someone who has in the past been blunt about the painful complexity and 
fragility of akonadi, i feel your pain. i've got control+alt+space bound to 
"toggle offline/online" because i have to do this several times per day to get 
the akonadi backend to go out and check for new e-mail. 

by the way, i would pay actual money to someone who could make the EWS driver 
able to make changes to my ms-exchange calendar. it's read-only, and this 
means i have to run ms-outlook in another VM just to manage my calendar. but, 
i digress.

> To give you an example: Kmail is broken in that it doesn't work anymore.
> I'm sure none of the programmers have made it intentionally so, and it
> doesn't matter what their design choices and reasons were.  Kmail is still
> broken.

kmail does work, and it's my main MUA, and it gets better all the time. i 
think the authors and maintainers prefer to know how useful i find it, even 
while i'm reporting occasional defects. the words "kmail is broken" spoken out 
of context are both unhelpful, alienating, and misleading.

> Now I'm bluntly saying that using identities like kmail does --- and other
> MUAs do --- is bullshit because it appears that doing so makes things so
> complicated that they easily break and because it's not good for the users
> because it's confusing and because users don't have multiple personalities
> or identies, with some exceptions.

my day job has a security officer role. four of us share a pgp key and the 
ability to send and receive e-mail as security@$domain. this means my mail 
account has one sending server, one receiving server, and two identities. if i 
didn't have kmail i'd have to use multiple e-mail accounts. so your word, 
"bullshit", may not mean what you think it means.

> I imagine that there were good ideas and reasons for inventing identities,
> and that's ok.  I appreciate the effort and the work that has gone into it.
> I wouldn't mind it if it was working because I would set it up only once
> and I can live with the confusion the way it's made is causing.  It even
> gets less confusing when you set it multiple times, until it's finally
> entirely broken.

all power tools can kill -- use at your own risk -- no warranties expressed or 
implied. it's software you don't have to pay money for, that you get source 
code to. if you find problems, report them. if the documentation could be 
clearer, contribute text.

also note, everything about kmail and akonadi gets better if you switch from 
the default database (mysql) to the other one (postgresql).

-- 
Paul