Email client that doesn't completely suck?

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 10:59 am

Mutt. There is no substitute. It never crashes, ever.
The mutt motto is:

All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

I agree. If you're afraid of the command line you might want to stay away. Between mutt, procmail, fetchmail and sendmail, my computer pretty much takes care of mail for me.

I'm sure fetchmail has no problems with multiple IMAP accounts. I'm currently getting mail out of 3 POP3 servers, and it's dead simple to set up. I'm sure you could also use fetchmail to get your mail and dump it to folders, then use whatever mail client you want as a frontend.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:10 pm

I may look into that -- how does mutt handle html email? Nearly everything I get is html or worse. I have no fear of the command line, but I'm not sure that modern email is really appropriate for it. Elm is a godsend when managing mail queues for 17k people, but I wouldn't want to use it to read all of my inboxen.

I'm giving up on kmail for now - I got it to the point where I could display only subscribed folders, but now it hangs for flippin' ever when accessing imap folders while another is being accessed. Too many problems for me to fsck with.

I'm still not wild about thunderbird, but it does dock nicely (I built kdock last night - made my first pkgbuild - yay!). I may bang on evolution a little more before giving up on it entirely.

shopRatt · Post by **shopRatt** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:48 pm

I like seeing Tsuroerusu talk up Suse. I am using KMail 1.8 KDE 3.4. and Suse 9.3.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Jan 06, 2006 8:35 am

shopRatt wrote:I like seeing Tsuroerusu talk up Suse.

Well thank you, I talk as much about SUSE as Pat talks about Arch and Kanotix.

shopRatt wrote:I am using KMail 1.8 KDE 3.4. and Suse 9.3.

You've got a good taste there dude

By the way, if you ever feel like 9.3 is slow, upgrade to 10.0, it will blow you away (Yeah that it probably will too, no, just kidding) when compared to 9.3.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Fri Jan 06, 2006 10:14 am

Snarkout wrote:I may look into that -- how does mutt handle html email? Nearly everything I get is html or worse. I have no fear of the command line, but I'm not sure that modern email is really appropriate for it. Elm is a godsend when managing mail queues for 17k people, but I wouldn't want to use it to read all of my inboxen.

Mutt displays HTML mail as text only, with the HTML available as an attachment. This is the CORRECT(tm) way because HTML mail usually is text with the HTML as a MIME attachment. If you want to view an HTML version, it will spawn links or Firefox or whatever you prefer. At least that's how I have it set up. It can also spawn a picture viewer to view images, etc.

I read all my mail as text because I don't like encouraging SPAMmers and it's a lot easier to spot phishing scams that way. I imagine it's possible to have mutt view as HTML by default, but I haven't tried.

It might be worthwile to have fetchmail download your mail and manage it for you, then use Thunderbird or whatever to read. That way you avoid the frustration of dealing with IMAP. Of course you lose the IMAP functionality of keeping your mail on the server, but I'd rather have my mail on my system. I do 'fetchmail -d 1000', which starts in daemon mode and hits the servers every 1000 seconds. Since I'm on some high traffic mailing lists this keeps the server from filling up even when I'm unable to read mail.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Jan 06, 2006 11:05 am

Thanks for the info - I read around on the mutt site a little yesterday too. I may check it out!

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Fri Jan 06, 2006 11:34 am

Mutt rocks.

Some good sample muttrc files are here:

http://dotfiles.com/index.php3?app_id=27

no1important · Post by **no1important** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:37 am

Actually I had some problems with K-Mail myself, like I was able to recieve e mails but when I sent them they were saying they were being delivered but no one was getting them. Then I installed Thunderbird and have never ever had a problem, and I rather like it.

K-mail seems to work good now, so maybe it was a bug or glitch but after updating it it seems fine, but I am still using Thunderbird, I am happy so need to change.

It is strange though how some programs seem to work better on some machines than others.......

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 2:49 am

For now I've settled with thunderbird and gkrellm mail-notifier. I can't say I'm happy with this setup, but it's functional. I'll give thunderbird this - it's much snappier than it's been in the past, and it's far more stable than any other client I've been faffing with recently. This is possibly an Arch thing, but still, opening thunderbird from scratch takes only a little longer than undocking evolution or kmail.

My synopsis as a KDE user:

Kmail -
It would be great if it weren't so damned buggy - I have tried several times with several distros on several boxen to get it to work, and it just doesn't. At least not for me. Pity - I really *do* want to like it.

Evolution -
I'd be far more inclined to use it if I used it's calendar or exchange software, but I haven't really got a use for either. It's slow, and like a lot of gnome apps, it is really slim on config options. Bottom line - there's really no compelling reason for me to use it.

Thunderbird -
Not my ideal mail client, but it's fast, and in general very stable. I'd really like it if they could get away from aping OE. Every time I use it, I get a vaguely unsettling feeling, and that's not something I prize in linux (or any) software.

Cmd Line apps -
I don't think these are for me. I've tried messing with them, but I have a hard time managing all of the lists/boxes/etc I have to deal with when just using the command line. They have their place - I'd have a much harder time at work w/o them, but I just can't imagine doing them full time.

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 1:27 pm

I guess I just haven't had the problems that you've had, Snark. Been using Kontact (K-mail) for a couple years now. It's always performed fine for me.

I use it to poll together my service provider e-mail and a few Yahoo! accounts I have .... works fine.

Oh well. I'll just count myself lucky on this one.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 1:41 pm

Judland wrote:I guess I just haven't had the problems that you've had, Snark. Been using Kontact (K-mail) for a couple years now. It's always performed fine for me.

I use it to poll together my service provider e-mail and a few Yahoo! accounts I have .... works fine.

Oh well. I'll just count myself lucky on this one.

Yeah same here, I've been using Kontact for about a year now and it works fine, I've had it running for over a week now, and not a single crash, rock solid.