Linux Journal Announces Winners of its 2009 Readers' Choice Awards (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 18:09 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link]

I'm so frustrated with reading email in linux right now.

I set up an imap server on my mail server, so I can use multiple email clients and the email stays on the server.

thunderbird is the best of a bad lot. thunderbird is super-fast and reliable, but provides no offline caching, so if I'm on my laptop and disconnected I can't read old email.

I used to use kmail but the kde4 version of that is a disaster. kmail is very slow, but at least it would cache my messages.

any suggestions? I'm a short step away from falling back to fetchmail, mutt, and maybe a local imap server on my laptop

for a graphical client, I like most of the behavior of mail.app on os x, except that is missing good gpg support and renders html by default (dangerous with spam). but at least mail.app is reasonably fast and supports offline caching of messages.

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 18:24 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

And Evolution seem to be regressing these days as a mail client. The unmatched folder is gone, virtual folders don't show all messages they should, some IMAP folders show incorrect message counts and won't update them unless I put a message there and then drag it back. Yes, I filed bug reports or found the existing ones.

I was considering switching to Thunderburd, but it has a different set of issues. I still don't know a single mail client that can create a virtual folder of all messages that don't come from mailing lists.

I agree that the e-mail support in free software is frustratingly bad.

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 19:19 UTC (Fri) by ESRI (subscriber, #52806) [Link]

Every time I try switching to a Linux GUI mail client, I immediately end up returning to mutt.

Best GUI mail client I've ever used was Pegasus Mail for Windows. :-)

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 19:24 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Mutt's iffy support for multiple IMAP accounts is what made me start using
Kmail in the first place, long ago. And while mutt's IMAP support has
improved since then, I still use Kmail, both in KDE3 and KDE4.

graphical email clients

Posted May 3, 2009 11:45 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I do the same thing going back to pine/alpine ;-)

My dad used pegasus mail for windows, but he finally had to stop using it because it would periodicly randomly grab contents of some e-mail (frequently months old, and in some cases belonging to a different mail folder, not under INBOX) and prepend it to the mail he was sending.

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 19:26 UTC (Fri) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link]

Thunderbird does support offline caching of email. I set it up for my wife's netbook.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to it from here, but I will see if I can post instructions tonight.

I'm still looking for a good offline calendar tool that can sync with google calendar AND allow creation of appointments when offline.

-ben

graphical email clients

Posted May 1, 2009 21:35 UTC (Fri) by amituttam (guest, #55962) [Link]

Have you tried using ClawsMail (http://www.claws-mail.org/). I've been using it for quite some time and it is amazingly powerful. Not sure about offline IMAP caching support but I suggest you check it out.

graphical email clients

Posted May 2, 2009 6:45 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I really wish a graphical equivalent of sup existed:

http://sup.rubyforge.org/

sup sounds like the most useful client-side mail reader that exists, some aspects of it seem better than gmail.

Thunderbird supports offline

Posted May 2, 2009 15:28 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

If Thunderbird is what you liked best then use it. It does support offline messaging. Google results for "thunderbird offline" should provide the guidance you need. Otherwise there are plenty of support forums.

graphical email clients

Posted May 3, 2009 11:47 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

yep, the situation with regard to email apps on the foss desktop currently
sucks. Weird, it used to be pretty reasonable - I used KMail for years
with no problems. Unfortunately the move to KDE 4 took a long time and the
lack of developers means it's still not there yet. Getting closer, but not
there yet. I use KDE trunk and 4.3 will probably be almost good enough for
me - but that's years after the KDE 3 version satisfied me perfectly
fine... :(