LWN: Comments on "The Next Generation of Mail Clients"

How about the code quality?

foom — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 01:36:06 +0000

Well, this article was written back in the Golden Days of software, when it was all completely bug free. :)

How about the code quality?

proski — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 01:21:21 +0000

It's amazing that the words "bug" and "quality" are not present anywhere in the review or in the comments. One would think that bug in mail clients are not an issue anymore, and all features are implemented perfectly. That's very different from my experience.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

catweazle — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 01:35:08 +0000

Nice review. I am glad somebody took the time to compare the different mail clients to each other. I've been using Evolution for years with great success, but have been interested in KMail/Kontact for a while.

I would just emphasize Evolution's ability to handle MASSIVE folders. Unlike Outlook, which gets caught in its own morass, when the folders become large, Evolution seems incredibly scalable. I must have accumulated at least 50k messages, and opening Evolution doesn't take more than a few seconds. Even keyword searches on huge folders happen instantly.

TheBat!

busigia — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 20:26:18 +0000

Having used RITLab's email product TheBat! for a number of years, I have discovered the community of "Bat" users to be quite large - numbering in the millions! With penetration like that, TheBat! should also be considered for inclusion in any future mail client reviews.

TheBat!'s basic version is excellent, and very responsive. It imports the mail from a variety of other clients, and has encryption built-in, as well as the capability to interact with external encryption software, such as PGP, or GPG.

TheBat! also has a corporate version that has a hardware key, without which the message store is unusable. These guys have security pretty well figured out. The software works with LDAP servers well, and the speed with which it handles large mail stores, as well as large address tables is excellent.

TheBat! has an excellent record of being immune to the virus, and trojan hijacks, and other problems so typical of Windows mail applications. It also integrates with a wide variety of virus scanning products, enabling it to be a safe network citizen, for both sending, and recieving.

While theBat is currently only a win32 application, it reportedly works fine with Linux, under the Wine compatability environment.

I too, have experimented with quite a number of mail clients, and most recently, spent a great deal of time focussing on Evolution, which is passable, though the speed with which it operates leaves much to be desired.

If TheBat! had a native *nix, or Linux version, then I would be very happy, but for companies with a predominantly windows deployment, TheBat! is probably the best mailer available, with a near-zero track record of vulnerabilities normally associated with Outlook, or other Windows mail products.

One more feature worth noting - TheBat! is fully capable of operating, and supporting multilingual correspondence. When I last looked, it supported most languages using roman. greek, and even cyrillic alphabets. I am uncertain as to whether it supports Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, or other Asian languages. Nevertheless, TheBat! would be excellent in a personal, or business deployment, for environments in the America's, as well as Europe, and western Asia.

It took a lot of research for me to discover this product a few years back, because I wanted a product that could support multi-lingual, and very secure correspondence, where the encryption, and language support were simple to employ. The many other fine features that I found in TheBat! made it a pleasure to use, for the many years I worked in a Win32 environment, before abandoning MS products.

This product is best known in Europe, and has tremendous penetration in Eastern Europe, with a mammoth market share there. If you have a Microsoft environment, then TheBat! is worthy of consideration - especially to support confidential corporate communications with its built-in PGP capabilities - that can operate almost transparently - once address book entries are marked for encrypted communications preferred.

Check out www.ritlabs.com

Written by an enthusiastic customer.

What about export capabilities?

testerus — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 20:18:11 +0000

You wrote about Mail Import, but what's matters more is how good you can get your data out of the application. You can choose your new eMail application based on import features, but you can not change your current mail programm if you have problems exporting.

Reply quotation on kmail

bilou — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 14:18:23 +0000

> This feature can also be somewhat annoying as I frequently mark some text,
> switch to another window for pasting it (e.g. doing a Google search) and
> then return to reading the mail. When I hit reply only the marked text will
> be quoted.

What would be cool is a "reply with selected text as quote" menu entry in the context menu when you right-click on the selected text.

Key feature: threading

Hawke — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:39:11 +0000

Mozilla can do threading. It's just non-obvious.
In thunderbird it's a bit better...in any case, it's (by default) the leftmost sort column on the message list.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

leonid — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 02:30:48 +0000

I have broadband almost everywhere where I go, but I am still a happy mutt user and no way that this will change in a hundred years to come. ;)

I've built (that's actually a process) a very custmized system with mutt, procmail, vim, spamassassin, perl and exim. It is easy to replicate on other machines that I use, and I really doubt that any other MUA can replace it.

...still I am reading all these reviews looking for new ideas in mail processing. ;)

Polarbar: a good Java based mailer

blaz — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 00:31:56 +0000

"Not at this time" according to one of the developers on the mail list

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

asbjornsabo — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 20:06:22 +0000

Thanks for the review! I have read parts of it, and found it interesting. There is one thing I seem to miss, however (I may have overlooked it, though), and that is information on how (i.e. in which format) mail is stored. This is vitally important, at least to me. I want to have my mail in a format other programs can access. (For the time beeing, maildir is my preferred format.)

I had to use Outlook for some years, and as we know, Outlook stores the mail in a proprietary format, and have very limited (read: practically none) facilities for exporting mail. It is possible to recover mail lost to Outlook, but due to the work and difficulties involved, it is not practical. So I still have 300MB of mail only accessible from Outlook. I do not want to get into that situation again.

Asbj.S.

Mozilla Mail != Thunderbird

mtk — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 12:11:42 +0000

in fact, when used with an IMAP server that supports
body searches, the mozilla email client can even
recursively search the bodies of all messages in
your "folder" tree. on a lightly loaded dual xeon
box with 2G of RAM, you can learn the true meaning
of email bliss :-).

Graphical clients via dialup

djao — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:43:38 +0000

I routinely use graphical clients at dialup speeds and have been doing so for quite some time. The secret is to view your mail using IMAP so that the graphical client runs locally and only the actual mail message data is sent over the network. Many years ago I wrote a Linux Gazette article on this topic, which is still mostly valid today.

The best part about IMAP is that you don't have to give up mutt over ssh! The two can coexist quite happily. I often ssh into the mail machine and run mutt to access the local IMAP mail store. Other times, I use evolution or mozilla mail or pine or even IMP Webmail. All your mail lives in the IMAP repository and you can use any IMAP compatible program to connect to your repository at any time.

Polarbar: a good Java based mailer

brouhaha — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 03:42:52 +0000

Does Polarbar support IMAP over SSL or TLS? I couldn't find any mention of SSL or TLS on the web site.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

jbinpg — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:51:10 +0000

For road warriors who are stuck reading email over 26k dialup connections, GUI mailers are not an option. Mutt over ssh is still the way to go for me and will be until there is broadband everywhere.

Jack

Key feature: threading

stephenjudd — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:32:27 +0000

Evolution can do threading. I personally dislike it though ;)

KMail Anti Spam Wizard

gwittenburg — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:52:16 +0000

For the lack of a spam filter, please see "KMail - Anti Spam Wizard".

From that page: KMail doesn't have a built in spam detection solution. The developers believe using external but specialized tools is the better approach. KMail uses these tools by its flexible filter architecture. The Anti Spam Wizard helps you with the initial filter setup.

Apart from that, thanks for the nice review!

Mozilla Mail != Thunderbird

pflugstad — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 19:11:28 +0000

It's unclear if you actually reviewed Mozilla Mail 1.6 or Thunderbird, but based on the entries on the table, you may have just done Thunderbird, as a number of the features you list as missing/limited are incorrect for Mozilla Mail 1.6 (on Windows in my case, but I'm pretty sure this all applied to the Linux and other versions as well):

I can have any sound I want associated with new mail notifications. The default is NOT just a beep, but a nice series of tones.
It's unclear what you meant by Follow-Up's but Mozilla has Reply-To and it properly handles message ID's and thread IDs so things get threaded properly.
I don't know precisely what you mean by "full index search", or "Search Folders", but Mozilla 1.6 Mail can do two different kinds of searches:
- a quick search that allows you to just search the subject and other header fields in the currently displayed folder (View->Show/Hide->Search Bar)
- an extensive search dialog that lets you do full searches over a wide range of fields, folders, sub-folders and so on (Tools->Search Messages)
It's unclear what you mean by "Handle mailing list" - do you mean that it can receive a digest and then split out the individual messages? If you mean something other than that, it's unclear. AFAIK, Mozilla Mail can't do this, but there may be a plug-in that does.

As a final note: the next generation "feature" you mention, virtual folders, is something that the Emacs/XEmacs VM mail reader has been doing for at least 8-10 years now. The whole thing is based on the concept of virtual folders. For people who live in Emacs, it's a really good way to do mail.

Pete

How about a few others... like Text User Interface e-mailers?

ronaldcole — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:26:31 +0000

Mustn't leave out VM and GNUS for those of us who hate learning new interfaces and have used the same mail reader (under Emacs) for a decade or better!

Key feature: threading

mmutz — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:10:42 +0000

> kmail tries something like this

Indeed. KMail 1.6 (optionally) uses a threading-by-subject algorithm
similar to mutt's.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

mwalls — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:00:44 +0000

You might note what Mailfolder formats are supported for each client. I prefer mh based folders, which are not as commom as some of the other folder formats.

Key feature: threading

vblum — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:00:17 +0000

kmail tries something like this, if I understand you correctly. In my case (old version, KDE 3.1.5) it does not get the threads quite right, though. I did not delve into the details of this, just considered it a curiosity.

Key feature: threading

vmole — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:50:35 +0000

You left out a key feature: message threading. From the looks of the screenshots, none of the reviewed mailers support this. If you read busy mailling lists, once you get used to it, living w/o it is painful.

How about a few others... like Text User Interface e-mailers?

adastra — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:25:36 +0000

And pine and mutt for those who perfer TUI mailers? Or are they too last generation? I use pine now, but as major distributions are dropping support, I've been thinking about switching to Mutt. I really want something I can use over an SSH terminal login.

Newer version of Outlook

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:51:08 +0000

Your point is also valid, however, the only reason Outlook was even included was to serve as a reference with what is commonly available for the majority of users (which still run Windows unfortunately) today.

Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading is not an option and might not be for some time. After reading the review they can, however, immediately decide it is time to try out one of the alternatives, several of which are multi platform.

How about a few others...

pizza — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:47:00 +0000

It would be nice to throw BALSA and Sylpheed into the review mix. They're both fairly capable and lightweight.

Newer version of Outlook

pointwood — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:36:49 +0000

Your comments are all true, however you do talk about the "next generation" of email clients. In such a comparison, the latest (supposedly much improved) version of Outlook would be interesting. I do understand the reason that Outlook XP/2000 is included. I also understand the lack of interest in paying a lot of money for the latest version of Outlook just to be able to include it in this article ;)

Polarbar: a good Java based mailer

blaz — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:30:28 +0000

We use Polarbar Mailer here. It's a Java based mailer that has had pretty much all the features in your table and more. And has had them for some time. It runs on our Windows and Linux boxes and has a good mailing list where you can talk to the developers. See http://www.polarbar.org/. It's free but not gpl as it apparently still has some copyrighted code from its old origins.

Polarbar's main problem is that it doesn't use swing but the older awt java interface. This means that it looks good on Windows and OS/2 but the fonts and layouts can be really ugly under Linux; dunno why Linux and AWT don't mix well (swing does though), and I haven't been able to fix it, although IBM's Java 1.3 tended to look better than Sun's 1.4.1

So I've been looking for alternatives and so far only Evolution seems to come close. When 1.5.2 moves into Debian Sarge, we may give it a whirl.

Or maybe by then polarbar will have migrated to swing.

Bruce

Newer version of Outlook

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:28:08 +0000

I'm not sure I agree. Most people will still be using Office 2000/XP and some even older versions, and upgrading costs hundreds of dollars (or more!). All the other mail clients, however, you can download and use today at no cost.

Also, I only had Office XP at hand when writing the review, which only helps to better illustrates my point I think.

Reply quotation on kmail

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:22:35 +0000

This feature can also be somewhat annoying as I frequently mark some text, switch to another window for pasting it (e.g. doing a Google search) and then return to reading the mail. When I hit reply only the marked text will be quoted. This is a small annoyance, however, and I agree it deserves mention.

Groupware functionality

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:16:04 +0000

Since I was reviewing the mail client functionality in this review, I did not put a great emphasis on groupware functionality. However, I should mention that KOrganizer also supports viewing your appointments, and todo-items, in its different calendar views (day, week, month etc.).

Kopete (KDE IM client) also already uses the address book in KDE and KWallet for managing passwords.

Evolution mail import

louie — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 13:39:44 +0000

1.5 does import as well; I just used it last night :) It also has limited emoticon support, but you have to turn it on in the prefs. Otherwise a generally nice review. One other thing you may want to consider is that evolution supports MS Exchange (via a proprietary plugin) and in the next release Novell's Groupwise server (code in gnome cvs.) Additionally, in 1.5/1.6, evolution is becoming a desktop-wide calendaring and addressbook server, so that, for example, your panel calendar can view your appointments or gaim can use the same addressbook as evo. It's going to be very cool.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

pointwood — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:43:19 +0000

When you do include Outlook, it could seem a but unfair not to use the latest version which AFAIK (I haven't used it) is much improved over previous versions.

Imports from Eudora

tsr2 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:02:43 +0000

Importing HTML email into Mozilla from Eudora is a problem, as Eudora discards the content-type header. I have edited mailboxes by hand to reintroduce this header, but if it had been a large amount of data I would probably have written a Perl script for it.

As the problem is in the Eudora mailbox format, I guess other mail clients that import from Eudora would also be affected.

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

a_hippie — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:20:44 +0000

Greetings Kristian:

The review so far is good. I liked the table you set up to quickly see what each client
sports. I'll be looking forward to your next review, Especially encryption tools and spam
filtering. These two elements of Email are, imo, paramount to secure communications in
todays spam riddled world.

Thanks!

Wishing you well.

Reply quotation on kmail

xyz — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 09:47:11 +0000

One interesting feature in kmail is the ability to select only some text
you want to quote.
You select it in the original message and then ask for
a reply. Presto, only the selected text is quoted.

Links

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:13:08 +0000

My e-mail: kreide@online.no
My homepage: http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/

Evolution mail import

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:10:58 +0000

Thank you for the comment; I only considered the 1.5 version in my review, and I'm sure the stable 1.6 version will have better mail import. I will add this to my notes section.

Kristian Eide

Do not hesitate to send any comments!

kreide — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:03:38 +0000

Please do not hesitate to send an e-mail to kreide@online.no if you have any comments to my article!

My homepage is here:

http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/

Enjoy the review!

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

stephenjudd — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 07:25:11 +0000

Why do you say Evolution does not import? I am looking at the import dialogue right now, and it supports both mbox files (which most clients can export) and Oulook Express mbx files.

I fear your unstable version must have been broken. Evolution 1.4.5 certainly can import. (And stores in your choice of mbox, mh or maildir).

The Next Generation of Mail Clients

vblum — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 05:31:01 +0000

Very nice review, so far as I've read it yet. Also, very good idea to include Outlook in my
eyes. It _is_ the reference point that most users know, after all, and just because we (well, I)
prefer anything Linux-based, that does not mean that we have to close our eyes and ignore
what the rest of the world does. Also, it is reassuring to see that free software is really on
par with it ...