Sunday, July 31, 2005

Long Busy Summer, and a KMail Whine Continuing apologies for the dearth of posts these last weeks/months. While one project appears to be finished, the other (SUSE) got pushed back into the fall release of SUSE 9.4. So I'm busy writing extra text for that instead of visiting the blog more often. Now that that's out of the way, let me tell you what's really on my mind: KMail. Just last week, I upgraded SUSE to 9.3 and got the latest and greatest KDE 3.4. Overall, pretty happy with it, but one particular annoyance is about to overwhelm me. As a technology guy, I get a LOT of email. I'm subscribed to a half-million lists to try and keep up with all that happens. To keep it all straight, and myself reasonably sane, I filter those lists into a bunch of different folders (some of which I actually do keep up with). The problem with KMail is that--unlike Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora and most other decent email clients--you can't create a new folder from the New Filter dialog. The really frustrating part is that KMail handles so many other list-related chores so well. If you right-click on nearly any message that goes to a list, one option is to "Filter on List." Once you have created a folder, you can also set properties that identifies the list the folder holds, lets you identify a custom signature for that list, and when you're reading a list-connected folder and create a new message, it assumes you want to post something to the list! This morning, I finally thought to post this minor request to Bugzilla, figuring that perhaps this just hadn't been called to anyone's attention. Wrong! The KDE folks consider this a solved problem.The solution (which I haven't yet tried) is to simply create the folder in the main UI with the Filter dialog open. Theoretically, the new folder will appear in the dialog now. This involves too many steps, if you ask me (and others have, as you can see from the Additional Comments added to this bug). But perhaps there's good news, now that I look at the bug again. At the very bottom, it appears that new code was added to the application on 5-26-05. I'm not prepared to say "Never Mind!" at this stage, but perhaps in one of the upcoming versions (or maybe even in the just-released 3.4.2), this prayer just might get answered. Coming soon: a requiem for OS/2. 10:57:19 AM    comment []