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 :)