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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 11:33:28 -0400 (EDT)
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From: David Bakhash <cadet@MIT.EDU>
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To: XEmacs Beta List <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
Subject: Re: News and Mail toolbar icons to be removed (was Re: Removal of 'gnus' calls...)
X-Mailer: VM 6.31 under 20.2 XEmacs Lucid

Colin Rafferty writes:
 > SL Baur writes:
 > 
 > All our mail-readers, on the other hand...
 > 
 > > The Mail icon is dangerous
 > > for people using any other mail reader than VM (I recently discovered 2
 > > year old mail eaten by VM and carefully hidden for the duration from my
 > > first moments with XEmacs 19.12).
 > 
 > Very good idea about removing the Mail icon.  I remember when Netscape
 > first shipped with its mail reader.  A colleague called the little mail
 > icon, "The button that will destroy everyone's Z-Mail."

okay.  But I must say something here, since I'm a big VM fan.  

I was an emacs user for 5 years.  I heard stuff about XEmacs and used to 
laugh at people who ever extoled it, since I was so damn narrow-minded
and cynical about it.  But just for the heck of it I downloaded it at
work and gave it a shot.  I instantly fell in love with it.

Still, I used Solaris/Mailtool, which (I believe) leaves stuff in your
spool file.  I haphazardly clicked on the XEmacs mail icon and had never 
even heard of VM.  This was the best fortuitous electronic event that
happened for me last year.  VM moved my whole spool file into my home
directory, under ~/INBOX (no problem).  It kept up with the mbox/UUCP or 
whatever format, and gave me an interface that was so far superior to
MailTool that I will not forget it.  My personal opinion is to leave it
there, but I completely understand how this would botch up other
people's mail.  For me, it was a gift.  I say: curiosity killed the
cat.  If people click there, it's b/c they want to see what mail is like 
under XEmacs.  I would rather that VM detect a non-existent INBOX and
notify the user about what was going to happen.  

as for the news toolbar: please leave it (IMHO)
also, please make a w3 toolbar icon. :^)

and if people dislike this, then just make the toolbar-mail function a
bit smarter.  defvar something to NIL instead of VM and then make
toolbar-mail DTRT.  

dave

