I find that people's style of reading email differs a great deal
from person to person.

For instance, I find that if I don't read mail sequentially as it
comes in, I'm very likely to skip things that might be important.
(this perhaps something to do with the hugh volume of non-relevant
(but work-related) mail I get every day.)  Other people bin and
prioritize stuff, but I'm not sure they don't miss things too...

I read most of my mail using a CLI-based mailer under unix.  It has
excellent searching ability.  I can give it a text command like
    read from billw to billw subject benchmark
far faster than I can set up the equivalent search screen in a
typical GUI mailer.  It handles very large files 'adequately',
is 20+ years old, and never does HTML, or MIME, or pictures, or
runs an attachment in any language whatsoever.  I had to patch
it for Y2K, and occasionally recompile it for the latest version
of some operating system.  The source reflects the style of C as
of 20 years ago (It sucks. and it contains much conditional compilation
designed to allow it to work on any of the myriad versions of unix and
unix-like operating systems that existed at the time.)  I have the
same aversion to changing that Olin does, plus numerous security
concerns.  But I frequently feel like a luddite.  (I did add a command
to pipe messages through a mime-aware filter, so it's not quite as
bad as it used to be, but...)

Relatively recently, I decided to move some of my mailing-list mail
that wasn't strictly work related off of my main email address, and
onto my .MAC account, which I read using Apple's Mail.app.  It works
ok, and it's nice to be able to click on links and things :-)  It
has a threading capability, which I use if I've been offline for
several days and need to catch up on a particular thread before
I answer it, but it seems to miss subject changes when it shouldn't,
or chases tangent even when the subject changes, so I normally still
read things in the order they come in.  So far, not much trouble with
security issues (as far as I know.)

I wish...  The thing I hate most about microsoft is the way that they
have succeeded in creating essentially a monoculture.   You can't (sell)
a word processor unless is mostly looks like microsoft word.  You can't
write and sell an email client unless it looks mostly like Outlook. The
email clients I was used to were HIGHLY configurable; much more so than
most current clients.  If modern clients ARE configurable, it seems that
the options are buried somewhere hard to find ("a manual?  Are you
kidding?  Just point and click, or buy one of the 250 books that
explain things in more detail.  For 2 versions back...")

BillW
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