Just wondering what was your fave mail program.

Personally, I tried Evolution and am back to Thunderbird. Reasons:

1/. Evolution is slow. Thunderbird is fast.
2. No option to limit downloaded mail size in Evolution, AFAICT.

This being a forum, I will prolly be proved wrong about both in short order...

pine or any other console based mail program works for me.

And evolution doesn't have control over size of downloads, you should leave that up to the MTA itself.

Thunderbird has an option not to download messages larger than some settable size. You can override it on a per-message basis.

Tools->Account Settings->Disk Space.

Inherited from Mozilla Mail. Helps tremendously.

i prefer Thunderbird because i dont need the extra features of evolution, and Thunderbird is not dependant on Gnome, i would like to see Evolution develop a light version that is just GTK dependant and not dependant on Gnome being installed too...

i also have the origional dinosaur installed (Mozilla) because it has the integrated email client so when i need a browser & email client to work together...

since Firefox just released 1.0.3 i would imagine Thunderbird to soon follow suit with a 1.0.3 release# too...

I actually like having a PIM versus just an email client. Computers have lots of disk space, memory, and CPU resources these days, so why not take advantage of them? Having to run multiple programs to read email, check the todo list, and check appointments is inefficient, so I think the Mozilla team should have some central PIM program that handles email, calendar, etc as plugins, and let the user decide which plugins load when the PIM app loads. That way, if you want it all at once, you can have it, if you just want email, you can have that, too. And no need to switch application platforms and migrate data between them to accomplish it.

It seems like an obvious solution for the "bloatware vs thin" problem. So , either I am super smart or doing what I am thinking of is a technological nightmare.

P.S. I am hoping "super smart" is the correct answer, because that means my dream PIM app can be made.

You mean kind of like exactly what KDE has with Kontact?

Incidentally, that's why I use KMail - because it integrates with Kontact. I kind of like having my calendar, address book, RSS aggregator, and current local weather all encapsulated in a single application.

Hmm. I really don't like the appearance of Kmail after firing it up. Also, searching through its help file for "rss" yielded no results. How would you add rss feeds to it?

mutt & kmail

You wouldn't. You would add RSS feeds to Kontact.

Here's the deal. Each of the KDE-PIM packages implements a main KPart, which is KDE's graphical component technology. These encapsulate all the core functionality of the application and can be embedded in other KDE applications. In fact, the stand-alone applications are really little more than wrappers around the KParts, which do most of the actual work.

Kontact is basically a shell program that embedds KParts. It allows you to pick and choose which of the available KParts to embed and then switch between them. In my case, I configured Kontact to embed KMail, Akregator (the KDE RSS reader), KAddressBook, and KOrganizer. Theoretically, you could choose to embed a different mail client or RSS reader. I say "theoretically" because I don't actually know of any other KDE-based mail clients or RSS aggregators, but if someone wrote some as KPart-based applications, Kontact could embed them.

Maybe that's not exactly what you had in mind, but I like it. Then again, I like the integration and consistent look and behaviour between the KDE-PIM applications, so I would probably be using them even if we didn't have Kontact.

I aways use SeaMonkey Mail, mainly because it integrates so well with the SeaMonkey browser.

Thnderbird for speed.

If Thunderbird would become a PIM application and sync with my Treo, I would vote for it too. Just doesn't match my needs. Evolution is missing the RSS feeds, but I can read though in my browser.

Evolution for years, but, recently support for T-Bird was added to Beagle, so I fired off t-bird for a while to test that. I liked t-bird a lot, and made it my default email client. Beagle finding stuff in it works fine. I may change back, but for now, I am enjoying t-bird.

I can't see comparing Thunderbird, which is (an excellent) email program, to Evolution, which is not just email, but also a calendar, task list, etc. Of course Thunderbird is faster & lighter! And if all you want is an email program, there's really no question about it -- Evo is more than you need.

Personally, I really need a calendar & task list. (Can't function without them. I can hardly function with them, sometimes! ) What confuses me the most, though, is where people (i.e., program makin' people) get the idea that my calendar/to-do list needs to be connected to my email program! I mean, I guess I can see it if you're someone who works in an office environment where meeting requests & the like are sent via email. That's useful, there. But really, what percentage of email users is that? Not a very big one, I'd imagine. We really don't all need "groupware"!

I like the idea of the modular KDE program that someone mentioned previously, though I don't know whether it makes sense to install it (& all the required libs) on my Gnome system, to use it exclusively for scheduling. I sure would _love_ to switch to Thunderbird...but not until I can find a nice stand-alone calendaring program -- preferably one that I can use offline; that syncs with palm _and_ G-cal ((dreaming)); and that integrates well into my desktop enviro -- (love clicking the date/time display in Ubuntu & having my calendar/tasks pop up).

Evo seems like the only real solution for me...though I'm open to suggestions!

Shane

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 thunderbird included. 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.