I have been using Thunderbird for a long time now, but recently I have stared to become less pleased with it. So, I'm looking for a change and thought I'd come here for some opinions. I have a couple of requirements.

I use IMAP for my server connections (multiple accounts), but probably all clients these days handle that. Also, I will want a painless way to migrate my address book and some 3GB of saved messages spread over many mbox files.

Thanks in advance.

Like you I was a happy TBird user, but, found that the memory requirements were too much for my tastes. I'm currently running claws-mail which supports IMAP. Claws-mail is a very light and fast client. You can get claws-mail from slackbuilds.org.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13...rk/claws-mail/

How tedious was migration from TBird to claws-mail?

Claws-mail found all of my saved messages as I was using IMAP with TBird. I didn't bother with my address book as I primarily use my gmail address book in Fire Fox if I want to send e-mails to my contacts.
Perhaps another claws-mail user can speak to importing the TBird address book. Found this link which may help you:

http://www.claws-mail.org/tools.php

I went in the opposite direction, so to speak.

The first reason for the change was the great majority of the e-mail now received each day is in the html format and KMail still cannot properly forward html mail. Oh, you can forward an html e-mail as an attachment, but you cannot edit it and then forward it.

Then along came, ugh, KDE 4.xx, and all the problems therein. Then the KMail/KDE developers, in all their wisdom, ha, tied KMail to one of the evil triplets, Akonadi, IIRC, so it was bye-bye to KMail.

I tried Claws, Evolution, Opera Mail, another that doesn't come to mind at the moment and finally settled on Thunderbird which has greatly improved with the last few releases.

IMHO, the KMail/KDE developers ruined what was the best e-mail client available, i.e., KMail, by refusing to bring it into the 21st century and give it the ability to properly handle html e-mail, and by tieing it to akonadi.

I switched from Thunderbird to Claws-Mail a while ago. The mailbox conversion script worked successfully. Claws-mail is light and fast. My main reason at the the time was the archive plugin of Claws-mail (I don't know if they've added something similar to Thunderbird recently). I'm quite happy with the result. Actually I found it much better than I expected. It even has a command line option to receive messages, so (with the help of xbindkeys) I can fetch all new messages with a single keyboard shortcut! I disable HTML rendering in my message view so I can't say much about that.

As others, I recommend Claws Mail.
Moving messages from Kmail format was successful.

Still wonder why Kmail developers bound it to akonadi, nepomuk, etc., without any second option.

If you have large IMAP accounts, Claws Mail maybe a little slow. It handles IMAP in a single locking thread. Makes access quite slow, and actually blocks the program during some operations. I have just over 200,000 messages in my IMAP accounts, and Claws is noticeably slower than Seamonkey Mail. Everything else is above and beyond what Seamonkey had to offer. Seamonkey (IMO) is the second best mail client on Linux, much leaner and faster than either KMail or Thunderbird.
http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-...ug.cgi?id=2227

Shouldn't this be moved to another part of the forum. Not really much to do with Slackware.

It's germane to the Slackware forum because the original poster (statguy) is using Slackware. I go for claws-mail myself, but then I don't have 200k messages either (not a lawyer, just a daily user). Just sayin'...

Thanks for the advice all. Yes, I posted to the Slackware forum because I am using Slackware. However, from my experience posting in other areas, the best responses, by far, have always come from the Slackware community.

To make a Slackware specific question about claws, at slackbuilds.org, for the claws build on 12.2, it mentions a dependency on libetpan for IMAP support. Does claws not work with IMAP at all with out this, or does this simply improve the IMAP support?

I don't have 200K messages on my IMAP accounts, they're all local, so the speed might not be a problem. I assume multiple IMAP accounts are possible.

Thanks.

You need libetpan for IMAP to function with claws-mail. Install libetpan first, then install claws-mail. I think you'll like claws-mail.

I've used Kmail sine the 3.x series and still do now under KDE 4.5. I have also tried Claws and found the two of them function pretty much the same from my perspective. Since I'm already running KDE, I just stuck with Kmail. I'd probably make that my suggestion: if you use KDE, try Kmail, if not, then try Claws.

I've jumped between a few email clients lately too. I have a requirement in that I'd like an integrated calendar/organizer and a RSS feed manager. I started off with firefox/thunderbird, then migrated and tried out claws. It was noticeably faster but the calender was mediocre and didn't come with a pre-intalled RSS viewer.

Alpine was a pretty cool mail client, but again didn't have a calender/RSS, so I've finally settled on SeaMonkey for my mail, browsing, chatting and newsreading needs.

After using tbird for many yearss, I decided to try out using gmail via its own web interface. I was rather skeptical at first but it quickly won me over and I've not looked back to Tbird over the last 18 months.