Comparison between Evolution,Kmail,Thunderbird
 

Hi all,
Which of the three mail clients( Evolution,Kmail,Thunderbird )
is more stable and useful?
And what are the prominent features of each client?

Thanks In Advance,
Sailaja Bhandaru

I don't use Kmail, so can't speak to it, but I have used both Evo and Tbird. Evolution is a large application, with a calendar, appointment reminders, Todo lists, etc, very much like M$ Outlook. Evo also has spam filtering, if you need that. Evo works very well, and I have never had any problems with it, but it is more than I need, so I don't use it. Thunderbird is a great email client and has spam filtering as well. Both of these email clients are too "large" for my tastes, as I prefer small, light email clients, but of the two I mentioned, they work well, and I have never had problems with either, for the short time I used them.

Comparing the three.
 

The question is not naive and I'm surpirsed it did not draw more replies. When starting Linux there's just heaps to learn and you want to get your bearings.

The focus in, "Which e-mail package?" is the same with, "Which car?" It depends on needs. With no special requirements, any one of the three will work and work well. From a Windoze background or with a Gnome driven approach, give Evolution a shot. If you are down the KDE track, KMail fits in nicely. Having said that, you can mix and match - easily. Thunderbird has a nice "feel," it sort of "glides" through the job, vaguely reminding me of that delightful Windoze package, Incredimail. They are all free so try them, one by one. I did that and chose KMail, not because it is "best" but because it "fitted" in easily with a shell script I was writing, it was not too unstable (the odd wee "crash" after years of living a mentally impaired life under Windoze was a trivial inconvenience), it is lean, clean and intuitive for for my wife to drive and it fitted the KDE desktop that in the end we decided to use.

Thunberbird is the best
 

IF you mainly want speed and stability you might try Sylpheed.
You will have to give up html emails and even rtf -- ie no more bold or italics.
But I choose Sylpheed because I used Pegasus in windows and came to rely on the ability to put different mailboxes anywhere I liked on my drives or network. Keeping personal and business mails in separate places is a big issue for me. This is particularly important for my backups.
You can actually do the same thing in Tbird -- but it's no so obvious how to do it. You have to be a bit cunning and learn the details about your user profiles and mail storage etc.
I have also kept my Kmail and Evolution installed because with them and Sylpheed on hand I can import and export from and to just about any email format.

mails formated in outlook's default rtf format are more often correct in evolution
 

In many cases there is no difference in the view of the mail formating between the different Unix-mailers. But sometimes some formating information from outlook, like colors or underlining are lost by the Unix mailers.
!!! This can be very critical if you don' see the red comments from your chief's outlook emails !!!
In this respect evolution does the best job from all the unix-mailers I have used. But I have some critical mails where even evolution fails to see some formating.
Best thing would be to damn the usage of the outlook rtf format at all (it is the worst to migrate) and urge all outlook users to switch to html format. But then they cannot see the attachments inline in the outlook mail text.

Evolution
 

While this thread is very old, Thunderbird 3 just came out recently, so perhaps it is worthwhile looking at this again.

I haven't used KMail for many years, so cannot speak to that. (When I last looked the IMAP broke on my large INBOX - I have no idea what the current status of IMAP support is.) A recent review is here:

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osr...il-Readers.htm

I used Thunderbird for a long time, but then tried Evolution because it came with Ubuntu. I have since tried Thunderbird 3, but I think I will move back to Evolution, for the following reasons:

• You can turn off wordwrap for a part of a message you are composing, and leave it on for the rest. This is very useful if you are including code or log messages in an e-mail.
• Evolution has very well done text-mode bullet lists and numbered lists.
• In Evolution you can easily change between an HTML or a plain-text message (this is possible in Thunderbird, but quite clumsy).
• Evolution lets you spell-check with multiple languages simultaneously. In Thunderbird you must pick one.

Both support powerful searching, PGP, IMAP, and have calendaring (although with a plug-in in Thunderbird).