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New E-Mail Client Wanted

March 3rd, 2010 Leave a comment

    Recently, a few Mail User Agents (MUA) – com­monly referred to as email client – have been updated, mainly Thun­der­bird, Sylpheed, Claws Mail, and eM Client. Dur­ing the next days (pos­si­bly weeks) I will take a look at them and their fea­ture sets to decide whether switch­ing from Thun­der­bird to another con­tender has its advan­tages or not. Last time I did some­thing sim­i­lar, I decided to go with Thunderbird.

    I’m not going to write a review for every email client I’ve picked for closer exam­i­na­tion, nor will I cre­ate a check list. My plan is to install them all and then just use them. I want to see how they dif­fer in their fea­ture imple­men­ta­tions and how intu­itive their user inter­face is. Because I want to remain open-minded about any­thing, I decided against a check list.

    Do you have some sug­ges­tions or want to tell me how you chose your email client? Don’t hes­i­tate to leave your opin­ion and enlighten me.

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    1. hydrostarr
      May 23rd, 2011 at 23:27 | #1
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      Very inter­ested in the results.  Thun­der­bird, Post­box, and Out­look are all falling short of my needs on my MacOS 10.6.7 (Mac­book Air) sys­tem.  Some details about my pri­mary strug­gles with Thun­der­bird:
      http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2203721
      Among other things, Sylpheed seems quite inter­est­ing.  But would like to know the results of the above “re-evaluation.”  :)

    2. hydrostarr
      May 23rd, 2011 at 23:30 | #2
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      Maybe this was the result (Thun­der­bird winnning)?
      http://www.brainassassin.com/2010/08/20/thunderbird-imap-tweak-preferences/
      If so… still have issues. Thun­der­bird really per­form­ing poorly for my large-number-of-IMAP-folder con­fig.  Removes and then has to resync folders/msgs seem­ingly at ran­dom.  Incred­i­bly intru­sive and vir­tu­ally unus­able at times (com­pared to my pre­vi­ous POP3 con­fig with same usage par­a­digm).  Maybe the “imap-tweak” stuff will help/fix things?  Will give it a try.

    3. JC
      May 25th, 2011 at 15:16 | #3
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      Actu­ally, I did try them all and – once again – I stuck with Thun­der­bird. Back then I didn’t have enough time on my hands to write about this re-evaluation and now I can’t remem­ber the details. I did like Sylpheed a lot, though, but I can’t remem­ber what really bugged me using it.

      Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t like my mail­boxes crowded with mails so I can’t elab­o­rate on that. Suf­fice to say that after my recent vaca­tion one of my mail­boxes had a cou­ple thou­sand new mails wait­ing for me and Thun­der­bird didn’t break a sweat. No lag­ging and no sync­ing problems.

      Hope­fully, tweak­ing Thunderbird’s IMAP set­tings will help you out. For the record, I’m on Win­dows (XP/7).

    4. hydrostarr
      May 25th, 2011 at 16:56 | #4
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      Thx, help­ful. A cou­ple questions:

      • Any other single-file-per-message (aka maildir/mh based; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir ), cross-platform “desk­top client” MUAs avail­able that are worth men­tion­ing in this “class” besides Sylpheed or Claws? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir#Mail_readers doesn’t even list Claws nor Sylpheed; any on that list that’s worth of eval­u­at­ing? fwiw, Lack of Mac OS X port makes Evo­lu­tion a non-starter for me.
      • Did you eval­u­ate Post­box? (guess­ing not, since it’s not free, but just checking…)

      Sep­a­rately: sus­pect my Thun­der­bird IMAP probs are now solved: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=10838195#p10838195 . Pos­si­bly solved by a disk-cache-size set­ting change, but not certain.

    5. hydrostarr
      May 25th, 2011 at 16:59 | #5
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      (fwiw: last post I made didn’t for­mat in WYSIWYG fashion–no bul­leted items.  Thus, sorry if flows/formats poorly…don’t see a means to edit it…)

    6. JC
      May 25th, 2011 at 20:19 | #6
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      Don’t worry, I’ve seen a lot worse. I should re-design the blog anyway.

      Mostly, I start out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients just to get an overview. I don’t have any expe­ri­ence with maildir whatsoever.

      Yes, I tried Post­box. The pro ver­sion comes with a 30-day free trial. I liked the folder lay­out a lot – espe­cially the sep­a­ra­tion of accounts and fold­ers – but regard­ing exten­sions I fig­ured I was bet­ter off with Thun­der­bird. Well, the devel­op­ers were busy I see so I just might try Post­box again. I wouldn’t mind pay­ing if I’m happy with it.

      Let’s hope you’re not expe­ri­enc­ing Thun­der­bird issues anymore.

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