Development [LWN.net]

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

February 25, 2004

This article was contributed by Kristian Eide

E-mail is the "killer app" of the Internet; an enormous number of messages are exchanged every day, and while web-based mail has become very popular in recent years, many people still prefer the added speed and flexibility of a stand-alone mail client application.

The mail client is in principal a very simple application which allows the user to read and send mail, but all modern mail clients include a host of features to help better manage the ever-increasing number of messages we have to deal with. Graphical mail clients allow for easy sorting of messages into folders, easy searching on a number of criteria, address book management and automatic filtering based on custom-defined rules.

The development of new features does not stop there. The next generation of mail clients include features such as virtual folders (also known as search folders), faster and more flexible searching, easier creation of filters and lots of small things to make common tasks quicker. This review is a comparison of the features available in the next generation of mail clients and their usability in dealing with large numbers of messages.

Reviewed mail clients:
(click on icon to jump directly to review)

	Evolution 1.5.2 (unstable)
	KMail 1.6 (part of KDE 3.2)
	Opera 7.50 (preview 2)
	Mozilla 1.6 / Thunderbird 0.5
	Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-1 (part of Microsoft Office XP)

Except for Evolution (the latest stable version is recommended over the tested development version), all of these mail clients were quite stable. I did not encounter any problems which would preclude me from recommending them for daily use.

Note that Outlook has been included for completeness, both because of its popularity and for use as a reference. I did not include Eudora, even though the latest version does include unique features such as a Content Concentrator, Contextual Filing, MoodWatch and Email Usage Stats. Eudora is both closed source and not available for any UNIX platforms.

Quick overview of supported features:

	Evolution	KMail	Opera	Mozilla	Outlook
Mail import	No	Yes	Only Windows	Only Windows	Only Windows
New mail notification	Only beep	Yes	Only beep	Only beep	Yes
Encryption	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Follow-ups	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Forward attached/Inline	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Only inline
Write HTML mail	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Multiple accounts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Customizable keybindings	No	Yes	No	No	No
Full index search	Yes	Disabled	Yes	No	No
Advanced searching	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
IMAP search	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
Search folders	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Spam filter	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Handle mailing lists	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Do not download mail rules	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Labels for e-mail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create filter from message	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Emoticons	No	No	No	Yes	No
LDAP	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

How I reviewed

In order to get a feel for how each mail client handles daily tasks, I conducted my review by performing a number of tasks:

Download a reasonably large amount of messages, about 2100 in total
Create some additional folders and set up filters for sorting messages to them
Add some contacts to the address book
Perform several searches
Compose and reply to a few messages
Set up some virtual folders (for mail clients which support this)

To provide a way to compare the different mail clients, I then divided the review into the following sections:

Mail import from other mail clients
Account setup
Filters
Address book
Searching
Reading messages
Composing messages
IMAP
Virtual folders
Encryption

Note that I did not actually test the encryption features, and I just comment on whether they are present or not. Also, while several of the mail clients now include integrated support for detecting spam mail, I did not test this feature as I plan to take a closer look at this aspect in a future review, and also perform a comparison with external spam filters such as SpamBayes and POPFile.

Final words

This review is extensive and I might have left out something important from your favorite mail client or have written something in error. I very much appreciate any feedback.

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