I tried to search if this poll has already been around but couldn't find anything. Anyway, I was curious about what kind of mail readers people use and why. I used pine back in school for many years. Back then, that was pretty much the only Unix app that I bothered to learn using. Now that I got reintroduced to Unix/Linux I wondered if there are some "cooler" mail readers out there

I like kmail followed closely by thunderbid.

I prefer Thunderbird. I use it with several accounts, each with several identities (mail addresses).

Yves.

thunderbird while I'm physically at the machine, squirrelmail over https otherwise

i like typing 'mail' on the command prompt :-)

I thought that more people are using terminal based mail readers. Is it convinience or...? It seems like mutt or MH or maybe mush would be cool to play with. Both mutt and MH are able to open html link, why aren't they more widely used?

Use MailX for CLI sending of simple quick e-mails but mostly Kmail for send/receive... Works great with my web based POP accessable clients as well..

KC

Opera and LYNX

Mail progs?

KC

Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird, I dunno how to set up Pine to use my accounts (but then again, I always use X, so I guess I don't need to).

I can't speak for all, yet I suppose my case is representative of many.

I often receive HTML or RTF mails from my employer, and I often want to send mails to my family with inline pictures of my son.

On the technical side, I need to be able to access several IMAP accounts at the same time. And the mail client has to integrate with the desktop to often open PDF, DOC, JPG, MOV... files.

Last but not least, I don't want to have to learn and remember yet another set of keystrokes.

For all those reasons, I use Thunderbird (I formerly used Mozilla-Mail, and Evolution before that).

Yves.

thunderbird and mail (only for system mail)

OK I see what you mean. I don't want to disagree - no point in discussing tastes. But still...
Email client is a something that you mostly use for writing/ typing. When I write or respond to an email in pine, for example (although I've been studying mutt all day today and it seems awesome), I would like to be able to use other person's text, to cut and paste it, to browse through folders, postpone the send, etc...And sometimes it's a long email (like this post for example), I would want to use a text editor.
And it drives me crazy when I have to use mouse for all this things: it's just inefficient.

Take a look at mutt when you have time. The filetypes that you mention (pdf, doc, jpg, mov) are all openable from mutt, as well as HTML links (just put in your .muttrc file what do you want this files to be opened with) and you don't even have to take your hand of the keyboard! You can use any text editor you want. When you want to drop a quick message, you don't have to open the whole thunderbird window - you can do one-liner with mutt from the command line.

I played with mutt all day and I loved it. It might be a bit more memorizing than pine, but it's just as simple to use. Plus memorizing is good for your
brain

i like elm as a command line reader.

just used to it in hp-ux. for system mail though........

As I said, I use thunderbird, and I hardly ever use the mouse when writing, pasting, cutting etc. It's just a matter oflearning to use the keyboard shortcuts and it works great.