[libreoffice-users] Re: [windows] Re: Mac people

HI, Steve,

On 6/23/11 12:16 PM, Steve Edmonds wrote:

> Hi ken

> Doesn't the threaded view of emails in Thunderbird achieve the same as
> subscribing to gmane. I have all incoming email related to LO filtered
> into a folder and if it switches to threaded view it looks just the same
> as the view in gmane, but without the need for another account.
> steve

It does, but the devil is, IMO, in the details.   :-)  Some of the 
details are in your personal preferences of how you want to access the 
mailing list and for doing email.

I like to do email as HTML, embedding images, using Comic Sans font, and 
the other bells and whistles available to you.  But LO is text based 
only, meaning no formatting other than line length, no images, no 
proportional fonts, yada, yada, yada.   LOL

If I used my email account to write a reply to an LO message, I need to 
manually make sure of the line length, correct formatting of the replies 
(the number of ">" characters at the beginning of the line, making sure 
the text quoted is assigned to the correct poster, etc.), a monospaced 
font, and who knows what else I'm not thinking of.

Perhaps LO takes care of this at their end, I don't actually know.

I've always had "irritations" with TB when replying to emails that have 
been forwarded numerous times.  Editing was a real PITA.  I've installed 
the latest version of TB just a couple hours ago, perhaps those 
"irritations" have gone away.  :-)

But if I use the Gmane newsgroup account, and subscribe to the LO users 
list, then reply to the message, all of that correct formatting is 
automatically taken care of for me.  I don't have to worry about it, 
which is one of the good things about computers and good programming.

Using Gmane, when a message comes in that has quotes from numerous 
previous messages that are properly assigned to the writer, TB provides 
a different shade of grey background for the text, making it easier to 
see who posted what.  If this isn't making any sense, send me an email 
and I'll return a screenshot that shows what I am trying to say.  :-)

I am not an expert at TB, still in the learning stage, so what I write 
from here on may be in error, as I've not experimented with some of 
this, it's just what I *think* happens based on the vocabulary used 
within TB and my experiences so far.

Scenario:

Let's say you are a new subscriber to this users list.  And you do have 
some questions (that's why you came, right?  :-) ), and maybe some of 
your questions have already been asked and answered?  How do you, using 
just the mailing list, get the previous X (let's say 500 for discussion 
purposes) messages, to scroll through and see if your question has been 
asked?


LO does have a mailing list archive, and you can set it to threaded 
view.  But, those threads are not collapsible, so if there are 100 
replies to the first post, you have to page through all those replies 
before seeing the next subject.  As as I write this, there are 74 pages, 
@90 messages per page in my browser, to scroll through.  With Gmane, the 
threads can be collapsed in TB, giving you only one subject line to deal 
with all 100 messages.

Those messages are in your browser, not on your hard drive for reference 
later.  It is more time consuming to use that to simply scroll through 
the messages in TB, using either an email account or a newsgroup account.

This message of yours I'm replying to is already in the archive, I 
suspect the addition of new messages happens in real time.

Using email in TB, I don't see a way to automatically download the 
previous 500 messages automatically to your computer.

Using Gmane in TB, when you initially setup the account, you can can 
tell TB how many message headers you want to TB to download.  Tell it 
500, and you get the previous 500 message headers.  If there is a way to 
ask for more old messages, I haven't found out how to do it, other than 
to unsubscribe and the subscribe again and ask for more, or for all.

With email, message bodies are automatically downloaded, unless you tell 
TB to *not* download messages over a selected size.  Since you don't 
want you lose those photos of XXXXX being sent by someone, a small sized 
message from LO will always be downloaded.

With Gmane, and other newsgroups, you have to tell TB to download the 
message bodies at the outset.  Otherwise, the message body is downloaded 
when you open the message.  On my Mac, those message bodies are cached 
on the hard drive, so presumably the message body is only downloaded 
once, assuming the cached file is sound.

OTOH, with newsgroups and my understanding of the synchronization and 
storage settings is correct, you can tell TB to download all the message 
bodies to the computer.


For me, I see more advantages to having the mailing list displayed as if 
it was a newsgroup server, rather than email.  Not to mention, I 
currently read 2 LO lists, and possibly may add another one or two in 
the future.  With the Gmane account, I don't have to create any filters 
or deleted any filters as required.

At the moment, this is all I can think of.  Hope I didn't bore you to 
death!   :-D


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.7
Firefox 3.6.17
Thunderbird 3.1.11
LibreOffice 3.3.2


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