Claws email, like or dislike, tips or tricks?
 

I use mutt and alpine, with t-bird as a sort of 'full featured' alternative. But t-bird has never rung my bell, so I'm curious about Claws.

Mostly in regards to security and performance with multiple (as in 8) accounts (gmail and conventional imap), what's your experience with it?

I used to use it with 5 accounts and performance was great. I dumped it to go to thunderbird as I get MOSTLY html mail and want to read it with it looking like it was intended, and claws has no html capability build in, the dillo plugin is horrible to use IMO (as in getting it to work like I want), and the "fancy" plugin is old and full of security vulnerabilities from what I've read, so it was easier to me to just migrate the t-bird.

I've used Claws in the past. It's a great e-mail program. Lately I've started to move away from gmail as they're making it more and more difficult for third party applications like Claws and TBird to connect to the gmail servers.

I love it. But now that my ISP no longer provides me with a mailbox, there is not much point in it. I use protonmail for my private mailbox and gmail for mailing lists and suchlike and both are accessible through my browser.

Thanks for this point, I did not realize it was missing.

It seems to me that email has gone through generations like so much technology. First generation was company servers pushing mail around the internet using smtp, and mail distribution agents downloading it into employees' mailboxes. Second generation was home users using pop3 to download email from their ISP's pop servers and reading it with programs like Outlook, Thunderbird and Sylpheed/Claws. But now ISPs are no longer providing mailboxes for free, so we have had to move to webmail read through browsers. That's the third generation. And the fourth? Smartphone apps of course! Eventually that will be the only way to receive email, and old codgers like me will just drop off the communication circuits.

My main objection with claws-mail is that if you like to have your email threads in top down order (with the newest topic at the top rather than at the bottom in the message list), then the message lists do not work correctly - deleting an email you have read causes the reader to move to the message before the one deleted rather the message after. I use sylpheed instead, which works correctly.

It is my daily email driver. I began to use it in one of those KDE/Plasma transitions where KMail got somehow upgraded and managed to completely wreck my inbox.
Claws handles a 7 GB mailbox without a hiccup, and it's very stable, quick and snappy. Plus, it compiles fast.

About the HTML mails, it is a limitation by design; claws will not compose nor render any HTML mail by itself. However there's the "fancy" plugin which does a great work of rendering HTML mail. SBo requires the webkitgtk package for it, which is at version 2.4.11. Since it's the latest version, I don't think its security should be that bad (but again, we're talking about HTML mail so...).

So far I have no complaints, and my only wish would be for a Qt version so it could integrate better with KDE Plasma. My verdict: thoroughly recommended.

I've never found a mail client on Linux to match Becky on Windows. Claws will do at a stretch but I can't say I'm fond of it. Too clunky, as with most Gtk applications. Can't say it's terribly fast either: opening a 15k IMAP mailbox takes forever. But it is about the best there is on Linux. I used to like Sylpheed till I realised it stores passwords in plaintext on disk.

Although I played with Sylpheed and Claws in the past and they're both very, very solid mailreaders, to me they occupy this odd middle ground between text-based mailreaders like mutt and alpine, and full-featured GUI mailreaders like T-Bird and Evolution.

Personally I don't really have a use case for these middle-ground GUI mailreaders. For me, when I want something lightweight, I use mutt, and when I want to read and write HTML mail, I use something heavyweight. My preferred heavyweight is Seamonkey Mail, because it pulls in the benefits of Gecko to read and write HTML mail, but unlike T-Bird its GUI isn't constantly changing on me, and it has a more traditional UI with drop-down menus, etc.

It's kind of hard for these middle-ground guys to compete, because nowadays being able to read HTML mail as intended is simply not a light-duty affair. Sure, you can get some rudimentary HTML support using plugins, etc., but if you're just getting bare-bones functionality out of it, you might as well just be using mutt and `links/lynx -dump` or what have you to achieve simple viewing of HTML mail.

Also, I've always found in the past that light- and even middle-weight mailreaders had mediocre-at-best support for IMAP, but I'd imagine that is no longer the case nowadays... Although I still do sometimes feel like I'm trying to jam a round peg into a square hole when using mutt with IMAP.

In recent versions mutt supports IMAP directly, cf.: http://mutt.org/doc/manual/#imap

@Didier

Yes and I do use it as such. Works quite well. But setting it up to switch between multiple accounts has always felt a bit awkward to me. You can set it up using "hooks" but I still haven't quite hit the sweet spot with my config. I'll dust off my rc files again in the near future and try to bang it out....

You could try fleacollar mostly written by my friend Billy Wolfe aka Storm Dragon. It's a bash script, no need to compile anything. Just put it in /usr/bin, make it owned by root and executable. Move or rename your current mutt config, then just start it as regular user. It can set up several IMAP accounts with hooks.

I've used claws-mail for years and the lack of html is one of the features I like. It is very lightweight, easily configurable, stores emails as plain text which can be read without opening claws, very good at archiving emails, handles multiple email accounts with no problem etc... Seems to improve with each new version while still remaining true to its origins. :)

I used sylpheed for many, many years, but sometime around the release of Slackware 14.0 I decided that I couldn't be bothered compiling it any more so I started using Thunderbird because it was there. It works well enough that I've not bothered switching back... I've kept the same profile going across many releases. New versions work without any input from me.