Mail Client of the Year
 

How do you read the LQ Community Bulletin?

--jeremy

Honestly I don't mean to troll but I think plain old webmail would be a strong candidate.

"plain old webmail" isn't a specific application though, and two Open Source webmail implementations are on the list.

--jeremy

Hmm true. This is still not specific but how about "The Web Browser" since this is about applications for gaining access to mail messages. Not sure how many people I speak for here but over the past year I don't recall ever using a conventional mail client to check my email even once.

In that case you probably want to skip voting in this particular poll.

--jeremy

Claws for me.

I just get on the web & go to yahoo or gmail.

Gmail
 

I know it isn't really an app, but I prefer in to anything else listed.

Evolution evolves
 

Apart from concern about NovellSoft, Evolution does everything. It can poll Gmail and others so I only need to open it up and go. Remembers who my friends are and how to find them, too.:)

This year was the first time I tried KMail (instead of Thunderbird) and liked it a lot. Great integration with the desktop and other PIM applications like KOrganizer calendar.

thunderbird forever

claws-mail is just so fast and light.

Thunderbird
 

Well, I do not know about forever, but it is a very solid Email client and it works well for me. Seamonkey works well, too. If I used another Email client, given the environment I am using now, it would probably be KMail as part of the Kontact PIM.

In the past on UNIX systems, I loved to use MH, either with the exmh GUI, with MH commands, with mh-e or gnus inside of Emacs, with mutt as a command line client, or just by accessing the Mail directories with ls to locate the messages and more to read them. Given a GUI world today, Thunderbird has been stable, available on all the platforms I use, and suitable to anything I have needed.

mutt ... just love those shaggy old dogs :}

KMail is fast, light, well-integrated, can poll POP3/IMAP (I've used both), and embeds in Kontact for quick callendar/email-about-it :).

Another vote for Kmail here. Great integration, and its got some neat tricks up its sleeve. I sent a mail yesterday which happened to have the word 'attached' in it, and before sending it, kmail asked me if I forgot to add an attachment since I seemed to have mentioned it in the content. Very thoughtful of it :)

I would like to propose an 'old as hills' tool for reading mail that I'm the last 'real man' to use, but I just slipped my finger over the mouse few times and voted for kmail
:D
I guess it's fair to leave my vote as is.
All in all it's for 2k7's Mail client and not for best ever mail client.
I rest my case.

After using Evolution, Thunderbird and KMail (briefly), I am now hooked on claws-mail. It is a wonderful, light, fast email client with lots of features.

Thunderbird using IMAP with my gmail account. Very nice indeed:-)

While my favorite (KMail) is there, some of my fallbacks aren't --
Roundcube and Mailody are pretty good too

Migrated from KMail to Thunderbird. Thunderbird is good, especially with Add-Ons installed. Miss the integration with Kontact though a bit, and I hope the developers of Thunderbird and Sunbird will work on a suite as well...

Thunderbird for POP and IMAP, using the Enigmail and GnuPG for security. Nice combination!

Um... so does KMail.

for me am receiving thousand emails from routers/servers notifications, am using different browser, including outlook express (hehehe) yeah this really sucks. am using thunderbird for my business emails, kmail for servers/routers notifications and evolution for mailing-lists, all of them have pros and cons. it depends on what really really prefer. i want evolution for its mailing-list features on the filters, kmail for fast downloading since notifications are being sent every minute or two, and thunderbird for better archiving of emails. that's only my experienced. i can't tell other's experienced, maybe they can share theirs so we can have a justification too on this item :)

I just had to vote for Thunderbird. For me, it's fast, and it does everything I expect from an e-mail client. But I will be honest, the only other client I've tried was Evolution. The problems I had may be system-specific, but it was painfully slow, and horrible for dropping attachments (recipients received a blank page) and strange reformatting of text in the main message during 'send'. I wasn't really nuts over the address book 'cards', either. Just my :twocents:

Cheers

gmail
 

I used to use t-bird, but my son got me hooked on gmail. I love the off site storage and access from any computer. Too bad webmail options are not included in the vote.

This was actually a difficult choice. I use Evolution for most of my mail needs but I couldn't do anything if I didn't have pine/alpine.

Thunderbird. Recent convert from evolution, here.

I voted for Thunderbird (Icedove, in my Zenwalk). It's really good and complete, and support gmail too.

Evolution does everything I need...

Hard choice. Tbird, Seamonkey, Opera, and Claws are all great.

For the last several months I've used Opera exclusively. Lately I've been using Claws and liking it.

Depends on one's needs. Each one has something special to offer.

Primarily muttng. When an email is received with lots of pictures, I'll fire up Thunderbird

yeah mutt and pine are great. I have a old computer at home so I don't really like using fancy stuff.
But am I the only one here using Mew? I like emacs and use it quite a lot, so Mew feels right at home... besides the fact it's very fast.

I voted for Evolution because the developers realise that I might actually receive html mail and need to read it easily and perhaps need to quote some parts of it in reply. If the claws devs got real and understood that people do send html mail then maybe I'd use claws, but they decline to offer me even a choice, based on their idea of what is inherently good or bad. I also found that claws couldn't deal with my yahoo pop3 account because yahoo don't implement authentication absolutely exactly perfectly compliantly....so no pop3 access to yahoo for me if I choose claws....thunderbird and evolution and kmail all managed fine with no sulking. And no I don't send people html mail, I send plain text, but I can't control what they send to me. I also use Evolution for some of its positive aspects like 1st class search, easy set up, good address book, good tray notifier, never seems to struggle with big attachments, good layout, integrates well with theme and system (knows when it's off line, plays nicely with Gnome, Mono and GTK applications) and it's very easy to back up/rsync with my other PCs. I don't use half of its features so in theory I'd like to switch to a smaller lighter client but in practise Evolution just does everything I need reliably and stays out of the way in the tray the rest of the time.

alpine, of course.

Does claws-mail works with exchange server ?

I voted for Thunderbird because it does everything I ask off it.

Ignorants... Mutt is the best! (let the flames begin!!)

It is missing Gnus and MH-E and rmail :)

tried thunderbird, kmail, claws but evolution the best ! easy setup, rss feeds, speedy fast, good|save handling for html-mails, encrypting|gnupgp works well (a pain with thunderbird) I got my 2000 mails easy from kmail to evolution. kmail hangs|crashed after a while (I using gnome)

I've recently moved to Ubuntu from Slackware, then after about 10days on to Kubuntu (ie from Gnome to KDE, I loved the look of Gnome but can't get work done with it - ditto compiz!).

Anyhow, was using Kmail - but it lacks workable html email composition so was running Seamonkey alongside.

Tried Evolution, which again I liked and was close to settling for except the one feature - workable html email composition.

So I'm now back to Thunderbird which I find a bit clunky and poorly integrated with Lightning (calendar plugin favoured by Mozilla group). But at least Thunderbird handles html email composition.

Now plaintext fanboys, I'm not making complex emails just really need a template with properly positioned clickable images for company logo's. Seems that's too much to ask of most mua [haven't retried Opera recently though].

So whilst I don't really like Thunderbird that much it seems I'm stuck with it.

Oh, I also use Horde for webmail FWIW.

I am using GNU Emacs integrated MUA -i.e. rmail. I love it, it's fully customisable, reliable and really stable. I am an anti-HTML mail fanboy, anti-attachment fanboy (inline is ok though if it is purely text) and anti-useless feature fanboy. rmail is ok for all of this. All HTML is simply trashed, the rest can hit my inbox without problem ;) Hopefully, one day, HTML fanboy will realize how bad practice it is to send HTML mails...

Doesn't Emacs make things too easy, why not just use fetchmail and less.

Images help in the fast and unrestrained interpretation of complex data ;). Brand livery is a fast method of identifying the source and hence context of a message.

This is why we have favicons on tabs in GUI based web browsers, you don't have to read 20 tabs to see which is the one you want, you have instant recognition of certain images.

With one of the businesses I co-run we deal a lot with artistically inclined individuals. Many customers, because we're a small business don't know our name, but the logo is a hook to ensure that the reader of (for example) an email reply is brought into the correct context to understand the mail's content. Imagine your desktop (no I guess you don't use a DE/WM) with no images!

I'm more than happy for you to reject all html email, presumably you'd reject email from me even though I also send plaintext wherever possible. Text works well sometimes but you know a lot of people that use computers like images too - we have this thing now called a GUI which uses quite a lot of them.

I guess you'll also refuse to read this as I included a smiley .... oh well. Oh and I look forward to reading about why LQ shouldn't use icons for illustrating which are their RSS feeds.

I'll stop there I think. Before I get on to questioning how I send screenshot previews for proposed websites or describe pottery forms without an inline image.

Icedove and GMAIL for me. Voted TBird of course, but you know what I mean.

Because fetchmail sucks ? :)

Right. I live in the linux console (oh sometimes I run X for browsing bad designed website into opera).

I have no problem with that. What I am saying is just as simple as: e-mails have not beed created to share latest picture of our dog. If I want to "send a picture" to someone, I just put a link to a WWW resource where it can effectively be viewed. If I want to share a document (a PDF for example) with some people at work, I just put it on a sharable space (a NAS, a SAN, SMB...) where it can effectively be viewed, ... The worst thing with HTML e-mail is that any MUA editor is using its "own HTML". I can't for example, force a HTML e-mail to be displayed according to my tastes -i.e. with my own CSS (thus I am imposed to see that "beautiful" background image with all these blinking multi color letters, ...) I just do not want this ! Pure text is enough. I am not even speaking of the overload of a HTML message compared to its pure-text version. I do heavy use of a portable device (a Treo) and loading all this HTML e-mails costs me really too much.

THat's my opinion and that's how I manage e-mails. But feel free to keep on exchanging HTML e-mails as long as you do not with me :)

Huh, you mean choice as in
- display html as plain text,
- or http://www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=dillo ,
- or http://www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=gtkhtml2 ?

yes I tried the them, the second one kind of works. I'd rather just have the email displayed in the way the author intended without me having to jump through a couple more hoops (open the seperate viewer and then load the images). It wasn't a satisfactory solution, more a work around. edit: it also didn't do a good job of displayinh text and related images coherently...was a mess. /edit. Other clients display the same mails without any fuss. I just need to be able to read the stuff people send me and I don't feel html in emails is a big deal, though I don't send it myself (can't think why I'd want to) and I appreciate that people using pay per kb services accessing mail via their mobile phone providers have a good reason to object to even receiving it. Imo if you're a desktop user and your mail client is any good at all it's a non-issue whether people send you plain text or html or big attachments etc. Basically I just want to read the stuff and perhaps reply; if a mail client makes this difficult, inconvenient or impossible it's not the right one for me.

So I have a private image of my son to send my parents, do I drag and drop onto an email, enter the address and title and click ctrl-enter.

Or do I upload to a "private" image server and force my parents to work out how to subscribe to a website?

I'll bet more than 95% of users send images as attachments every month and probably 99.9% within a year. But lets leave it there.

member
 

Evolution Mail is without a doubt the most improved mail client of the year!

I use both Thunderbird and pine, but I votred for pine - lightweight and simple (once you get used to it :))