Ask Slashdot: Current State of Linux Email Clients? 464
mcloaked writes "We get all kinds of news about new developments, but one subject has been lacking for some time and that is email clients for Linux (or Windows for that matter). A number of reviews (mostly not all that recent) have pointed to the main clients as Thunderbird, Evolution, Claws-mail, and Kmail as possibilities. Up to about a year ago, Thunderbird seemed to be 'the' email client with the best mix of positives. However there are no recent reviews that I have seen. In the meantime Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change — and little new development. Thunderbird also won't be significantly altered in the future, if one interprets the available news information. Evolution is reported to be rather prone to bugs, and Kmail even more so. Claws-mail has limitations, as does Kmail. So where is the future of Linux email clients going, absent any real innovation? We need a well maintained and capable mail client, preferably with good calendar integration (webcal/Google calendar), properly supported HTML composing, good maildir format storage for local mail, and good security support (including the capacity to deal with both GPG and S/MIME encryption and signing). It needs a modern UI and good import/export facilities, as well as good integration with its address book, including import/export of addresses. Are we likely to see this kind of package as we move into the future, or will mail clients slowly disappear? At the moment it looks like email client support is dead — Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"
no love for mutt? (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO mutt is still king
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:4, Insightful)
I still use Alpine (free/libre version of PINE). I hope I never have to give it up. So fast, so clean, so configurable.
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Why not Mutt?
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the parent-post, but I too use Alpine.
I tried to switch to Mutt back... in the 90s I think? People were ranting and raving about it. Frankly I found it much harder to use than Pine. People pointed out that I can configure Mutt to act exactly like Pine, to which I said that you know, Pine already does that.
So my question would be "Why SHOULD I switch to Mutt?" Alpine does everything I need.
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IMO mutt is still king
Yes, mutt is efficient. But people that keep sending HTML messages are a bit annoying to read on mutt
.
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But people that keep sending HTML messages are a bit annoying to read on mutt.
You could have left off the "to read on mutt" bit.
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah go Mutt! Year of the Desktop for Linux? Hey everyone, use a ASCII based e-mail client! We're rockin it like it's 1950 baby!
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:5, Funny)
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ASCII? You have no idea what you're talking about - Mutt can handle unicode just fine!
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Re:no love for mutt? (Score:5, Interesting)
but when you receive mail from business people, it's usually an image embedded in a Word document, or at the very least a pdf. This is where mutt fails.
I'm not sure about images, but mutt has a really fantastic auto_view [mutt.org] feature, which will automatically decode HTML email, PDFs, Word documents, etc into text and display it inline in your viewer. When people email me PDFs, I can not only view them without spawning an external viewer, but the PDF/MSWord text gets included in the quoted text when I hit "reply", so I can just reply to their PDF/MSWord text in-line.
Is Mutt the command-line email client I'm seeking? (Score:3)
I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '
In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll proba
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, I'm supposed to run evince over remote X on a slow link? Or install it and libreoffice on a mail server in the first place? I'll pass.
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the beauty of mutt, I have my configuration save on a git repo, so it is trivial to get any new linux/similar OS to run locally mutt so that remote issue is not a problem
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the beauty of mutt, I have my configuration save on a git repo, so it is trivial to get any new linux/similar OS to run locally mutt so that remote issue is not a problem
I do that for all my dot-files (including ~/.muttrc). Log in to a new system, svn checkout ~/src/env, run make install there and boom, it's like coming home. Wonderful.
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Try that sometime, see how far you get. Remember there are still a lot of people in the "civilized world" who don't wash their hands after taking a shit. Technology is evolving faster than people.
Re:no love for mutt? (Score:4, Informative)
It might not have helped that my work's server used a custom IMAP namespace either.
I suspect that may have been your only problem. I set "folder" to "imaps://hostname.of.mailserver", set an imap_user and an imap_pass and away it goes. No external program required.
You do need an external program (muttprofile) to switch between profiles/servers though, and that does take some setting up.
Answered in reverse order (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes
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I like being able to access my email from anywhere, including my phone. I used to use a heavily modified Thunderbird but the few missing features in Gmail were not enough to stop me preferring the ease and freedom it offered.
Re:Answered in reverse order (Score:4, Insightful)
Thunderbird isn't adding new features because it is friggin' email. At some point, all the features you need have been implemented and security and bug fixes are what is of primary importance. Thunderbird is at that point, which is why that is what they are doing.
Re:Answered in reverse order (Score:5, Insightful)
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable, though it does sometimes screw up (since email was never designed to actually have this in the first place).
Do other clients have this yet? At my last job I had to use Outlook Web Access, and the job before that I had to use regular Outlook (can't remember the version), and neither one had this, and as a result, it was a complete PITA to manage work email, with all the email chains going on between other coworkers, customers, etc. I ended up having pages and pages of emails that I'd never look at, and missed a lot of emails unless someone told me about them; the volume was so large I pretty much gave up even trying to read them all, and only looked at ones that had subject lines that looked important to what I was doing. As useful as I find Gmail's conversation-grouping for my own personal email, it would have been 10x more useful for my work email, with all the CCing going on in email chains there.
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Oh. You mean like sorting by sender and then date? If you use quoting properly in your emails it works just as well, and is just as easy, and has the added benefits that your conversation threads are still at your disposal when you are offline for whatever reason.
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Actually, I don't believe it's like that at all.
GMail will group threads together that don't necessarily have to come from the same person. I can have several people reply to the same email and they're all grouped together into a single "conver
Re:Answered in reverse order (Score:5, Interesting)
on thunderbird:
edit > account settings > [account in question] > copies & folders > tick "place replies in the folder of the message being replied to"
admittedly a few more steps than "click on 'conversation view'" .. but it is there .. and i love it so much
suchetha
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Ugh, no. It's crap compared to threading that's been around since usenet days. Why we're going backwards these days is anyone's guess.
Re:Answered in reverse order (Score:5, Insightful)
Threading, meaningful subject lines, and proper message references in replies is a lost art. They all require an attention-span long enough to grasp contextual communication.
Today's email user cannot even remember their correspondents' email address nor figure out how to use a contact list, so they just reply willy-nilly to any other message they find from that person in their inbox, or grieve their lost friend if no such message exists. The lure of social networking is that they don't even have to think about whom they are addressing anymore. The future is full of psychotic people wandering about, issuing forth monologues and an intelligent messaging system beaming these selectively into the heads of other psychotics wandering half way around the world.
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The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable
Not quite -- the mail client integrated into Opera had this.
It also had the idea of labelling messages rather than sorting them (the same message could appear in more than one "folder").
I have to use Outlook at work, and have similar problems. The worst thing is that I can't easily hide a message but not delete it -- everything clutters up the inbox, basically forever. My GMail inbox just has messages I've yet to deal with (about 50, the oldest is over a year old, but still relevant).
Thunderbird works (Score:5, Informative)
Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
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Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
When I set a Windows 7 machine for my mother and discovered Microsoft's new "Windows Live Mail" agenda, I wiped that an put in Thunderbird, which was judged as "just like the old computer". So now she spends nearly all her computer time using Thunderbird and Firefox, and a little bit of LibreOffice, so the obvious next step is step is, boot to KDE with an autologin and that will be one more soul saved from the grasping tentacles of Microsoft.
For my part, I suffered through the nasty port of Kmail to Akonadi
Re:Thunderbird works (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, the new functionality in Thunderbird is in the add-ons. I think it's great that the core client developers can work on, ya know, stability and bugfixes, while the community at large builds add-ons to extend functionality. Beats having bloatware like M$ outlook where everything is all inclusive, including what you don't need or want.
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I wiped that an put in Thunderbird, which was judged as "just like the old computer". So now she spends nearly all her computer time using Thunderbird and Firefox, and a little bit of LibreOffice, so the obvious next step is step is, boot to KDE with an autologin
Did exactly that with my wife, Thunderbird, Firefox and LibreOffice. She is very happy with the result, two years running now. Never crashed, every now and then I run updates. No problems.
Re:Thunderbird works (Score:5, Insightful)
Now she received Thunderbird's "Chat" feature in recent updates which includes Facebook chat, Google talk, IRC, Twitter and XMPP.
I'm not sure why people are saying Thunderbird is not getting new features, that one came from a module for the InstantBird IM client, and Thunderbird will get all the new core features that Firefox gets in future.
Why the hell is there a chat client in a mail program to start with? I saw this new 'feature' and died a little inside. It is a classic sign on developers losing their direction.
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WTF?
Back to your basement kid.
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"Adequate" is the best I can say about the new Kmail. There are still many bugs, but severity is decreasing. On some recent upgrade my spam filter finally started working again, without which email life is nearly unbearable, compounded by the glacially slow rate the Akonadi horror deletes mails. To pour salt on the wound, after ever so many deletes it will get itself confused and claim to have duplicates, pop up a dialog for the you resolve the bogus issue, and thus, stall the already seriously painful proc
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It works, but not well.
It frequently uses a lot of disk space, RAM, and CPU. All of which abnormal.
It also still sucks at searching, and there are frequent problems with the editor.
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It kind of works. Addressbook contacts can only have two email addresses, which took on a new level of irritating recently when my wife changed her name. More annoying is the use of mbox format instead of maildir, which results in whole mail folders being selected for backup every time, so for me that could be an unnecessary few hundred MB every hour with Time Machine.
mutt! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thunderbird also won't be significantly altered (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird can sync with Google Calendar, via plugins... Here's How [techiecorner.com]. There is really only so much you can do to an email client before the only updates are security. In my opinion, that is a good thing. You want a good core client that's not over-featured (buggy) and has good security support. Thunderbird fits that bill, and with a huge constellation of plugins I don't see what the fuss is about.
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"but it cannot sync with Carddav, so owncloud is no option right now." ... is what I wanted to write.
Even if the Carddav plugin did not exist, if you would have written that then I would have called you a fool.
There is a difference between "cannot", and "does not yet support" AKA: "No one's written a plugin for X yet" vs "No plugin for X can be written". If the difference seems too subtle to you, then consider that to a developer it's the difference between: Impossible, and Possible.
Furthermore: Missing a plugin? Croud-source some funds and pay some devs to make it. That's the beauty of open source.
Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:5, Interesting)
I really haven't used a desktop client for email in years. Where's the gain for the user?
I want my mail and calendar wherever I am. So why keep multiple copies of gigabytes of mail on multiple machines. I just don't see the gain for the average user. I think the lack of demand from users who are moving to webmail is why the Thunderbird is getting less developer attention.
What I'd really like to see is improvement in the webmail interfaces available to us. Gmail is fast, but I find the interface limiting and clunky. The best I have experienced was Zimbra, but it really prefers to be run on a standalone machine and is pretty resource intensive.
Re:Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:5, Informative)
I want my mail and calendar wherever I am. So why keep multiple copies of gigabytes of mail on multiple machines.
Somebody should invent IMAP.
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Personally I've had terrible luck with IMAP.
Ultimately while I'm not usually a fan of web apps in general, they are a perfect solution for email (which is probably why webmail is so popular).
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Personally I've had terrible luck with IMAP.
What problems did you have? Not trolling, genuinely curious.
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Mainly related to buggy server or client or both I assume.. but connection would fail in the middle of retrival, or not retrieve some messages, or things would somehow get out of sync (despite that being precisely what it should prevent).
Even now, I use gmail and use getmail to backup using imap and I find I have to run my script several times to get all messages if there are a lot.
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You can drag things in Gmail, and labels are superior to folders (objectively so--they do the same thing as folders, only with an added feature). I...really don't understand how threading is weird. It's the primary reason I switched to Gmail in 2004.
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Then someone should make a web interface and mobile client for it so you can use it anywhere. Oh, wait...
Re:Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. But one problem I have with web-based solutions is that the provider is free to tinker with the interface at any time. And you know engineers... they love to change things. :-)
What I want is for some reputable, responsible company to offer a cloud-based webmail solution with a decent interface and a very good API that supports search, address book integration, etc. Then I want a variety of clients for that API -- some open-source and maybe some not; some fully-browser-based, some standalone, some written for Android... you get the idea.
In short: universal access everywhere, but I decide what UI I'll be using.
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In short: universal access everywhere, but I decide what UI I'll be using.
You can always run your own mail server with one of the free webmail scripts out there. Assuming you can find one that doesn't suck (I've been considering this.. does anyone have any recommendations?)
Re:Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:5, Informative)
Roundcube (http://roundcube.net/) seems to work pretty well. And it has some nice add-ins for changing passwords & Fail2Ban.
Re:Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:4, Informative)
Zimbra [wikipedia.org] has a very slick, Ajaxy web interface that looks and feels a lot more like a traditional email client than Gmail does. I haven't tried to install it yet, but I will. I can't yet comment on whether it is easy or hard to make it work with my existing exim setup.
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You mean, you want your email *wherever you have an internet connection*.
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You mean, you want your email *wherever you have an internet connection*.
Gmail has an offline mode. I'd imagine other webmail providers offer something similar.
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I really haven't used a desktop client for email in years. Where's the gain for the user?
The best I have experienced was Zimbra, but it really prefers to be run on a standalone machine and is pretty resource intensive.
Now let's start to think for a somewhat longer moment:
1. The gain is there. Not in carrying around GBs, but in a constant and consistent interface, without adcrap, without changes to the whims of the writer, and without the need to download totally everything evrytime; plus the opportunity to download IF someone so desires. No, these are not asked too much.
2. Zimbra is not Exchange, and is neither FREE.
3. Sorry, I forgot: which was the FOSS client to connect to all intricacies of Exchange?
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I use a desktop email client (Evolution) for a few simple reasons:
1) I have multiple email accounts which I want to access all from the same place.
2) More than one is legacy, with a provider that I no longer trust. I expect it to do something nasty any year now. I have downloaded all email from these accounts and deleted it from the server.
3) IMAP works mostly OK, which allows me to use webmail when I need to.
---
Problems with Evolution:
Not as good as Outlook (Lookout!) when it comes to integrating tasks and
Re:Why do we need a desktop client? (Score:5, Insightful)
Desktop clients are just much more powerful, don't require an Internet connection, and are not tied to a particular email service provider.
If you're not using one, you just aren't a power user. That's all there is to it.
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1) Please, please, please, for the love of the FSM, stop trying to integrate mail and scheduling. They are two different tasks.
I tend to think they are linked well enough. I want to schedule a meeting, I email it out to people, they add it to their calendar. Most of my scheduling is a combination of email and adding stuff to calendar, makes sense to integrate it.
Outlook is one of the few things Microsoft does right (at least from the user perspective) imo.
Re:They have improved... (Score:5, Insightful)
Improvements are happening to your webmail all the time, it's just they are for the advertisers and buyers of your personal data ;)
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen. This is obviously going to get worse and worse. Like Youtube, where ad infestation is nearly intolerable already and rapidly deteriorating. And it is just downright creepy when Google snoops my mail and runs the same pushy, stupid ad in Youtube over and over. Moral: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second Moral: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Third Moral: the writing is on the wall, the way of Google is the way of pain for the average netizen. Something needs to be done. Not sure what. Google is rapidly becoming what Microsoft always wanted to be: proprietor of the internet. We're probably saved from a worse fate if Microsoft or horrors, Apple managed to secure that position, but it's still bad. This kind of infrastructure needs to be a kind of commons like the highways, power grid, sewage system and so on. A life under the gaze of Google, dancing on Google's string, is just not a life I can accept, and by now it is abundantly clear, that is just where this is all heading, veneer of benevolence notwithstanding.
Re:They have improved... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen.
That's the price you pay for having a free service where they house gigabytes of your email for you and give you instant access to it from any device, with 5-9s reliability.
The catch is, whenever you access it with a web browser using the standard web interface, there's nothing stopping you from blocking the ads with AdBlock Plus. So no, it's not going to get "worse and worse", as long as they have a web interface. They'd have to disable the web interface and force everyone to switch to a closed-source proprietary client application, and that's never going to happen.
Complaining about ads on Gmail makes about as much sense as complaining about pop-up ads. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those, thanks to pop-up blockers.
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First, I /don't/ want my mail wherever I am. The quiet of being 'away' from the email and the phone is quite worth having. Puts a nice balance on things. Makes living in the city more placid.
Nothing compels you to open your webmail account or answer your phone wherever you are, unless you lack self-control or suffer from "Internet addicition". If so, get some professional help and don't blame the technology.
Resistance is Futile. You Will be Assimilated. (Score:4, Informative)
I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
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Given that you gave up Gmail's excellent reliability, scalability, and accessibility, why would you want to run your own private system?
Re:Resistance is Futile. You Will be Assimilated. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want all my emails mined for advertisement or other purposes.
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When something goes wrong, I can fix my own mail system. Google offers a *great* service, for free (or now, for a very low price of $50/year if you're a small business). However, when something goes *wrong* it can be very difficult to actually get Google to give you real honest-to-goodness end-user support. More often than not you're directed to their community forums. One of my coworkers lost access to her Google Apps/Domain account for nearly a month.
Remember: Google's customers are the advertisers. If yo
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as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
Oh! For want of a Linked List! Alas, William Richard, ye shall henceforth additionally be dubbed: Bob Dick
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I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
Interesting you say that - I recently upgraded from Thunderbird 9 to 17 and somewhat accidentally stumbled upon the search feature that resides in the toolbar. It's an order of magnitude better than the one in the Edit menu.
Have you tried the toolbar search, which opens in a new tab and allows for a fair bit of refinement? If so, how do you find it lacking?
Webmail (Score:2)
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I just don't like the idea of my mail hosted on somebody else's server. The privacy implications are just not acceptable to me. Not to mention the amount of hacking that this attracts.
Thunderbird (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird does a perfectly fine job of handling email for most users. It handles a decade or more of email for me, in a number of imap accounts for different addresses, totalling perhaps 6 to 7 gig of mail, without any problem at all.
What exactly is it about TB that is not capable of handling your need?
If an email client already does what you need, is complaint about slower development valid, or is it just wanting change for change sake.
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Me too. But perfect?? Search is long, if not lengthy. Does it provide the features that our Exchange server offers? Did it not slow down significantly with and after 3.0? Yes, here it still does. For some years now I have been getting used to sometimes waiting 10 seconds or more for a (e.g.) 7kB mail coming in. What's it doing there?
I for one would love a client that is as capable as Google online mail. It must be possible to be even better, since all data are local. Yes, I'm waiting impatiently for that cl
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> And you are composing mail in HTML, why? I read all of my mail as plain text.
Do you buy chicken? Why? I'm a vegetarian.
Uh..who gives a shit, mate. Keep your opinions to yourself. He wants to compose email in HTML, ok?
Re:Thunderbird (Score:4, Informative)
In a corporate environment replying to html mail and altering a table you have received to pass on an edited table is a standard requirement.
I have never seen this happen. If people are passing data around, I typically receive Excel files, not tables within HTML.
If you are sending mail to a person who has vision problems then changing fonts and colours can be very valuable too
This should most definitely be done in the recipient's client, not in the message's composition. Not to mention other accessibility problems in which the HTML content isn't even used - their accessibility software uses the plain text version of the message.
What else does a mail client need to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather have a relatively lean (read fast) client that performs it's core function very well, rather than a monstrosity that does a thousand things in a kinda half-assed way.
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I'd rather have a relatively lean (read fast) client that performs it's core function very well, rather than a monstrosity that does a thousand things in a kinda half-assed way.
You mean like mutt or just basic file system access with cat, awk, base64, w3m and less?
Or do you really mean that you want core function plus your feature set, and you don't want to be bothered by or care what other people want?
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I'd rather have a relatively lean (read fast) client that performs it's core function very well, rather than a monstrosity that does a thousand things in a kinda half-assed way.
I'd rather have a system that provides an API to its core functions, and also loads plugins to provide additional functionality so that we can make it as lean or monstrous as we like. That's what Thunderbird does, but occasionally it will need updates due to the demands of said plugins or exploits in core features.
Going nowhere (Score:2)
Claws kept losing its configuration on ubuntu so I went back to sylpheed but that integrated badly with unity so now I am using thunderbird but it is full of bugs even after however many years of development. So yeah, pretty crap.
Kontact/KMail (Score:3)
Covers all the request features. However since the move to akonadi it does have a terrible reputation for bugginess, unrelalibility and resource hogging, unfortunately a not undeserved one.
However it has been improving steadly, even drastically since kde 4.7. I've been using it as my primary even despite the problems because when its working :) it is just so good. Fantastic integration with KDE, really good handling of multiple accounts and identities. PGP & SMIME, integration with Google calendar and contact, as well as other 3rd parties. An open plugin system for extending it. And it looks *really* good, the perfect blend of functionality and sexiness - when its working :)
I just upgraded to KDE 4.10 Beta 1 (via Kubuntu raring). There seems to be another qualitive improvement in reliabilty. Akonadi hogging the CPU seems to be fixed. Message searches are working - full text content and attributes.
There's still progress to be made, but its made huge steps and I finally feel confident in saying Kontact is back and will make it. The developers have the feature sets done and are just focusing on bug fixing now.
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However it has been improving steadly, even drastically since kde 4.7.
But it's still slower than an arthritic sloth on sopors. Which doesn't seem to even be on the developers' radar.
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Its quite snappy for me.
Devs are working on these issues. Broken functionality and bugs get the highest priority, but speed issues are most definitly being looked at.
Exchange access would be nice (Score:2)
I have yet to find a Linux email client that supports it, although my Android phone does it just fine. I tried Evolution once. Initial setup was most interesting. It wanted me to fill out fields with single character labels (???). Googling yielded little more than instructions that were years old and outdated for the newest version. I still don't know what it wanted and it crashed as I was guessing. It was immediately deemed worthless and uninstalled. When I'm using Linux, I'm using Thunderbird, but I can't
Re:Exchange access would be nice (Score:5, Informative)
When I'm using Linux, I'm using Thunderbird, but I can't access my school's email server because Thunderbird can't do Exchange.
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
grnbrg.
Switched to a webclient, never looked back (Score:2)
About two years ago, I had been stalwarthily been using Eudora, and could not imagine ever changing from a desktop-based client.
But then Eudora started to show its age (specifically, problesm with SSL certificates), and I started to look around for other alternatives, and found none what so ever.
I dug into a webclient, Roundcube, and have never looked back since, and so have a lot of my friends, so yes, i'm definately thinking that the desktop-based client is dying.
I want to like KMail (Score:2)
I've been using it since KDE 1.1, after all. But I don't know what gives with it any more.
It used to be the compatibility champ -- all of its message stores were open format. Now it's all stashed in a binary database.
It used to be blinding quick. Now it takes minutes to switch between one local folder and another.
It used to update flawlessly, but the last couple of upgrades have hosed the previous mail repositories and anything that wasn't backed up offline was gone.
KMail has some very nice features (i
Evolution. (Score:2)
little functional change (Score:2)
Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change â" and little new development.
You know what else hasn't had much functional change in a while but I still use regularly? Wow, that really sounds like the beginning to a "your mom" joke. But I digress. I'm talking about furniture. Tables, wooden chairs, desks. Bookshelves too. To bring it back around to written communication, my postal mailbox hasn't upgraded in the past T-bird release cycle. When something's not broken, don't fix it.
Still Haven't Found One I Like (Score:2)
thunderbird has the same problem as firefox... (Score:2)
thunderbird has the same problem as firefox, the UI is horribly slow its almost unusable.
I use Thunderbird because its the only real email client in Linux with decent calendar integration that isn't Evolution (which itself has both eaten email and crashed several times to the point where it won't start again without having to clear out all my settings and start fresh).
Thunderbird with IMAP and the lightning extension installed routinely (like 20x per day) locks up for 5-10 seconds and shows wrong messages (
Kmail (Score:2)
Works fine for me. But yes, everyone is moving to cloud. I have even considered doing this, and i store my mail locally. Why drag a fat client around with me everywhere?
All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be an idiot, KISS. Use mutt [wikipedia.org].
Claws (Score:3)
I and my 150 users use Claws-mail at work (for years). Before that, we used Sylpheed (for even more years). Before moving from Sylpheed to Claws, we researched all available options carefully. Just from memory- Thunderbird was hard to customize and clumsy. Evolution was even harder to centrally control, was bloated, and performed horribly. Kmail was too complex and tied too much to KDE (which we were/are not using). Thunderbird was our second choice, but Claws seemed like the best option.
Claws is extremely fast, reliable, feature-packed (especially with the plugins), mature, flexible, and performs well on thin clients. On the original poster's list, the only thing it does NOT do is compose HTML Email (at least not that I am aware of) and I consider that inability a feature :) It can, however, display it fine using a plugin. And it will nicely convert them to plain text for normal use. It has a calendar plugin, but we use a web-based calendar instead.
It is not perfect, but nothing I have ever seen or used is. For us, it is the best, overall.
At home, I have used Kmail for many years. At about KDE 4.8 I had lots of issues with them pulling out the communications stuff and setting it up as other "services". It was complex and unreliable. Layered with a bit too much eye candy and frustration and I finally switched home over to Claws too.
Re: (Score:3)
+1
I use Claws, too. No complaints. I used to use Evolution for many years, but it is too slow. Claws is fast and works.
Claws-mail (Score:4, Informative)
Claws-mail is the successor of the old Sylpheed-claws. It really is a nice and simple mailclient, which in the meantime does almost everything. Imaps, RSS, filtering, whatever. And with good usability, the buttons are all at the right place.
I even use the Windows version at work.
There are some thing Thunderbird is particularly bad at in my opinion. Like sorting threaded mails. I know there are extensions, but they suck.
I also don't like the autodetection of mailserver settings. You cannot save something in a non-working state, while sometimes I just want to do that.
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I recommend realpine.
By the way, I refer to realpine as pine, and I suspect at least some other people do the same. It feels like referring to vim as vi. It's less precise, to be sure, but it doesn't feel wrong.
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Too arcane to use.
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It works fine for me at least, though it loads a bit slow. Has all the features you describe except calendar integration, but you can get that by using Kontact (which gives access to both Kmail, calendar and contacts in the same interface). Integrates with KDE address book, syncs with Google contacts/Google Calendar, PGP+S/MIME encryption/signing, modern UI, import/export, Sieve rules editor, modern UI (threaded message list, though no Gmail-like threading).
KMail developers and maintainers seem hellbent on breaking existing functionality every few versions. And by break, I mean stuff like "delete all your old mail" [kde.org] and "make your mail go away after version upgrade, maybe forever, maybe just a few weeks" [ubuntuforums.org]. If you've avoided these issues in your upgrades, you've been lucky -- so far. Akonadi and Nepomuk, whatever the hell those are, really aren't ready for prime time. As such, KMail has gotten too "alpha quality" to use in such mundane, critical, production work
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, after getting out in (very rough shape) in 4.7, KMail got a new maintainer, and he's been fixing bugs and improving things like crazy (look at the commits by "montel").
Also other people have been working on other parts of the infrastructure and there are more fixes on the way.
Lastly, you're putting together two things unrelated to each other: Akonadi is a local cache for PIM data (contacts, mails, calendars...), while Nepomuk is a framework used to organize data semantically (and used a lot in oth