Quoting from the article Radical Serbia speaker steps down (source: The Beeb, emphasis mine):

Earlier, opposition MP Nenad Canak said Mr Nikolic's nationalist and anti-European stand no longer had a place - especially as Serbia had just won the Eurovision Song Contest.

Mr Canak said Serbia's neighbours had all awarded his country maximum points in the contest. But Russia, described by Mr Nikolic as Serbia's only friend, had only awarded his country five points.

Clearly, five points are not enough to prove friendship, don't you see?

Dear overly correct Nederlands politie officer,

thank you for going by the letter and showing no common sense at all. I am sure you had no better things to do, like, uh, stopping real crime.

Instead, you chose to harass me while I was unpacking heavy boxes and furniture from my car, and hence had it parked directly in front of the door of our new home. Yes, on the sidewalk. At 23:30 hours, when there is virtually no other traffic. Anyway, my car was in no way on the street, thus not obstructing even potential traffic. Neither was it on the bike lane, thus not impeding bikers. And the sidewalk in front of our new apartment is wide enough that my (small) car fits there, plus there is enough space left for, e.g., moms with oversized twin buggies. And I was running around there, carrying stuff, so I could have put the car away, if there would have been urgent need.

I was really almost finished with unpacking. Yet you still insisted on me leaving RIGHT NOW and my asking for five more minutes to unload at least the heaviest boxes (you unload the heavy stuff last because it is below everything else, right?) fell on deaf ears.

It was particularly hilarious that while I was standing there, listening to your speech how poor pedestrians (I haven't seen any) would not be able to pass due to my car blocking the sidewalk, a biker came riding along there, between my car and the wall of the house. On the sidewalk (did I mention the huge bike lane which I left completely free?). With no lights. Against the traffic direction. Through the too-narrow-for-pedestrians gap, huh? (Yet all this was ignored.)

So, nevertheless you made me leave and bring the car to a parking lot. Which costs outrageous sums per hour even at night, yet recently the only sane way of paying (Chipknip electronic cash terminal) was removed, leaving only coins as payment method. Good luck trying to find somebody at this time of day who can change you a bank note. (Did I mention that I did not see any pedestrians?) And I had just not enough coins so that the next morning they will probably come and put a clamp on my car, while I am waiting for de monteur. Which we know from experience is always dependable and on time...

But I digress. Now, for some more fun, my car recently acquired an odd little quirk: it does not start well the first time after I drove on the highway... After the first successful try, everything is well again. Anybody wants to guess where I was driving before unloading the car? Yes, 250 km highway. So, I tried to start the car and the first N times it did not work, of course. I could already see in their faces how police thought I was doing it on purpose... Only instants before they would have left their car (surely to give my car a push, right?), I managed to start it and drove to the parking lot, under supervision.

Where were you then?

Dear officer, with your precision, I wished you would have worked instead at my local municipality, which gave me wrong information and sent me through half the city for nought; or maybe you could have helped out at Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst (IND), which were unable to find my computer record for weeks with lame excuses, and only after I called there a hojillion times on expensive 0900 numbers with hours in the waiting loop and tracked myself who could have potentially lost the record, they suddenly found it between two calls on the same day, which surely had nothing to do with me homing in on the culprit.

Or perhaps at KPN who misplaced my ADSL order, so that my seamless internet connectivity transition during the move remains a pipe dream, because it takes them 14+ days to flip some switches?! (Time for that starts running after the second try of ordering, of course).

Or, you could have worked at IKEA Amsterdam, preventing them from being twerps who were lying to me about the availability of their furniture. Only recently they admitted that it eventually might take five instead of the promised two weeks until the bed arrives, leaving me sleeping on the floor for 15 days. THE REASON WHY I ASKED ABOUT AVAILABILITY WAS THAT I WOULD HAVE ORDERED SOMETHING OR SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THAT CASE!

Or you could have helped out at LTU International, who were apparently unable to handle my zipcode for credit card validation, causing my return flight not to be booked (the outward flight and another flight was booked fine with exactly the same data on the same day with LTU Germany, just as every other flight I ever booked with any other airline). And while other airlines call their customers to recheck if something goes wonky (after all they request phone numbers when booking), LTU International feels no need for that, and instead relies on sheer luck that I called there preemptively. And then I needed to call another couple of times for a confirmation email because they first managed to scramble my email address in their database, and then finally sent an email message looking exactly like the spam which funnily passed my spam filter more often than not during the last couple of days. This time it did not, being 0.2 over the threshold. I was of course suspecting something like this, so I grepped for "ltu" in the mail server logs, but helpfully, LTU sends their confirmation emails from pop3.amadeus.net, I as now know. Yeah sure, go ahead and tell me it is my fault that I use a spam filter...

I guess, my story with the health insurance which lost my application as well and as compensation taking extra long to process the reapplication is already too old so I won't ask you there, but...

Where were you overly correct nitpickers instead of doing your job properly during the last three weeks when all the other shit happened?

Well, I did not get a ticket at least, and hey, it could be worse, I could live in a war zone or something...

UPDATE 2006-09-25: Karma Sequel

Let's see... Axis of evil... where are my Political Bullshit Bingo cards?!

Dear Dog Owners,

thanks to you, I can now begin to imagine how it would be to step through a mine field. During the last week, I would have lost both legs.

Please move out of my city until you have learned to take care of your (dog's) shit.

Thanks for your cooperation.

From the top of my head, here's a list of features I would like to see in a MUA (yes, I am blue-skying here):

• Must run at least under Linux and *BSD operating systems on various processors.
  

• Must support IMAP, including advanced features like server-side searching, partial message download, etc.
  Nevermind that IMAP is actually a pretty involved protocol and not very easy to get right, this is what I am currently stuck with. Maybe SMAP will be better (under some metric), but that remains to be seen.

• Must support external editors.
  A MUA should handle the network protocol part of email handling and message display, everything else (and in particular editing) is somebody else's problem.

  For various reasons I like to edit text in GNU/Emacs, so why should I be satisfied with some simplish, less configurable editor?

• Must be able to handle large amounts of email fast.
  I would like to be able to access at least the current year's worth of email without much hassle, without long periods of waiting. Access includes searching (by sender, recipient, date, keywords, etc.) and sorting.

• Must be standards-compliant.
  

• Must support Unicode and various charsets correctly.
  This affects message display and searching, mostly.

• Must support encrypted email.
  This includes PGP/MIME and S/MIME.

• Must support various means of sending mails.
  I do not want to run an SMTP server on my laptop, if I can hand off email to some MSA like /usr/sbin/sendmail instead. If not the sendmail interface, at least RFC 2476 should be supported.

• Must support offline reading capabilities.
  Already downloaded emails should be cached, so that I can read, manage and answer them while disconnected. Upon reconnect, the offline state is synchronized.

• Must be lightweight.
  Writing emails is not a main task, at least for me, so the client should be unobtrusive and not take up all the resources by itself.

• Must be able to actually print emails in a sensible way, where sensible means to decode and print attachments if I desire so, instead of dumping base64 encodings or worse onto the printer.
• Should support virtual folders.
  
• Should support ACAP
  

Already tested email clients:

Mutt

Mutt has been my email client of choice for a couple of years now. I am mostly happy with it. However, its IMAP capabilities are not satisfying. Offline capabilities are non-existent, and the modal interface is quite limiting: if while writing one email I want to refer to another one, I either have to start another instance of mutt or postpone the message, do the lookup and resume writing.

Sylpheed

Tried it for five minutes. No external editor, mail submission only via SMTP.

Balsa

Nevermind that Balsa first segfaulted on me because it did not like the trash file, I installed a new version and then it started working. It seemed fast, but does not support an external editor. Mail submission only via SMTP.

Mozilla Mail

Mozilla Thunderbird

Not happy. Details later.

Opera Mail

Delayed Header download (good!), header cache (good!), fast enough even with big mailbox, learning filter/sorting. On the downside: no external editor, mail submission only via SMTP.

Wanderlust

Fast, but clunky. An editor is not an email client. Also, SMTP seems to be the only way to submit email.

VM

I used VM a long time ago on XEmacs. I stopped using it when my email volume increased. VM was just too slow.

GNUS

The same applies as for most Emacs MUAs: clunky and slow.

etPan!

I tried version 0.6.1 on Debian and it segfaulted in various situations. Also, SASL is not yet supported. I will keep etPan! on my watch list, though.

KMail

[321]% sudo apt-get install kmail
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
[...]
Need to get 21.8MB/21.9MB of archives.
After unpacking 69.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
    

Thanks, but no thanks.

Polymer

Slow, and under heavy development. I experienced some freezes and exceptions thrown. I like that it supports ACAP. Unfortunately too sluggish for large mailboxes.

So, dear reader, which email client are you using, and where do you compromise? Write me!

Apparently, Brian Nelson seems to agree with me on this one. Others have similar griefs about email clients.

UPDATE 2005-10-05: Hints to IMAP client authors