Comments on: Mail Readers Still Stink

By: Ahmed Hobaran

Ahmed Hobaran — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:43:15 +0000

Can you provide some more details on this?

By: Joe User

Joe User — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:40:22 +0000

Mulberry is going open source. They need all the support they can get. Please. Help them. There is nothing else like it. I got it for free when I was in school and after that I couldn’t use anything else. I actually paid for it, even for use on linux. It’s the only commercial software I’ve ever purchased for personal use on an open source platform.

There is an SVN repo up now but thus far releases have only been for win32 and mac.

http://trac.mulberrymail.com/mulberry/wiki/opensource

By: Daniel Burrows

Daniel Burrows — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:33:00 +0000

Argh, this was supposed to be a reply to the urlview comment. I find the posting interface lacking in context. :-)

By: Daniel Burrows

Daniel Burrows — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:31:36 +0000

I don’t usually plug my own code, but I wrote urlscan to solve the problems with urlview — including this one. You might want to give it a try.

By: Rich Neswold

Rich Neswold — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:26:05 +0000

To print email from mutt, I first pipe the message through [b]a2ps[/b]. a2ps has an email mode which does a nice job in formatting the message. In my [i].muttrc[/i] file, I have the following command: [code]set print_cmd="a2ps -2 --left-footer='Printed by Mutt' -g -Email -o - | lpr -h -Pps"[/code]

By: Daniel Aleksandersen

Daniel Aleksandersen — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:18:55 +0000

KMail does not have to crash! Just try to limit the sizes of your mailboxes. That normally keeps it from crashing too often.

I think KMail is the best (!) email client available on any platform! (I am able to ignore the crashes though…)

Back when I was using Ubuntu I remember that Evolution crashed at least twice every day. That was one of the things that made me move over to KUbuntu and KMail.

By: Stewart Smith

Stewart Smith — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:07:44 +0000

a big thing for me is speed. Lots of mail folders, lots of messages in some of them (largest is ~200,000 messages IIRC).

Just about everything gets sluggish at some point… Evolution is the only mailer I’ve found that opens the folder in reasonable time.

With my patch to offlineimap (which i’m cleaning up and benchmarking)… it works quite fast for everything…

Although Evolution is the weakest link… it has a tendency to corrupt its indexes and use gobs of memory.

By: Kai Hendry

Kai Hendry — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:09:06 +0000

Gmail is a really good MUA.

Though I need to figure out how to get offlineIMAP running with for email backup. :)

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:08:39 +0000

I have tried urlview, but the problem is that it loses context. In one of these annoying messages from this or that place I bought something from once, I want to pick out the unsubscribe link. Difficult to do in a pageful of 3-line links.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:07:04 +0000

You might try one of the free online IMAP providers, or set yourself up an inexpensive account on some place like dreamhost.

If you have ssh access to a machine, you can install a local imap binary and run it via OfflineIMAP’s preauth tunnel mode.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:04:22 +0000

I was referring to KMail’s disconnected IMAP folder type only.

I haven’t tried it with OfflineIMAP (yet).

I keep trying to get rid of OfflineIMAP, but just can’t quite yet. Sigh.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:02:56 +0000

I tried Claws, but its disconnected support is just not up to snuff on its own. It can display messages offline, but doesn’t cache changes to them (deletes, etc.)

If it could work with Maildirs, it would be great with OfflineIMAP.

(I suppose it could work with OfflineIMAP’s IMAP-to-IMAP support with a local IMAP server)

By: Jan Larres

Jan Larres — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 16:36:15 +0000

For opening urls, you can use urlview:
ftp://ftp.mutt.org/pub/mutt/contrib/urlview-0.9.tar.gz

By: Paul Moore

Paul Moore — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:20:52 +0000

I have the opposite problem – no IMAP service. I really don’t like POP3, as it ties my mail to a single machine. But my ISP oesn’t offer IMAP, and I’ve yet to find a free (or reasonably priced) IMAP provider. Any suggestions? (If I had IMAP, then I could start worrying about which was the best IMAP mail client :-))

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:29:28 +0000

Interesting. I once tried mutt with imap to localhost and found it much slower than direct mailbox/maildir. I don’t recall if I used dovecot or uw-imapd; and also perhaps I didn’t give the imap server the chance to generate its caches.

Currently I’m very happy with offlineimap + mutt (or ssh + mutt). I also use Sylpheed on occasion, when I want to open attached word documents in OpenOffice, and don’t want to wait 3 minutes for offlineimap to sync my imap mailbox to get the new email.

By: Tommi Tervo

Tommi Tervo — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:40:53 +0000

I’d suggest to use kmail 1.9.7 (kde 3.5.7), it won’t crash all the time.

By: Damon Lynch

Damon Lynch — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:34:03 +0000

Regarding offline IMAP folders for Thunderbird other than the Inbox, have you tried right clicking on a mail folder in Thunderbird, clicking properties, and seeing the Offline tab?

By: Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:42:33 +0000

I used Thunderbird for a year or so recently, and it synced other folders just fine (ok, they were INBOX subfolders, but that’s enough for server-side filtering).

By: theefer

theefer — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 04:53:17 +0000

I’m also a very happy user of wanderlust (after having used mutt for years). What prompted me to switch was folder list, highly customizable, integrated in emacs (which I used from mutt anyway), and loads, loads of other features, plugins, etc.

I’d also point it that it solves most issues the original author mentioned in mutt: #1 (folder list), #2 (HTML email, wl can use w3m, although mutt can be configured to use an external program too), #3 (click can open url in a browser), #4 (pretty good imap support), #5 (acceptable printing, in mutt try muttprint).

I don’t find wl too sluggish on large mailbox, unless you use Maildir/mbox’s directly. Don’t. Use some local IMAP server to access it (I use dovecot).

wanderlust is really wonderful, as long as you like (or don’t hate) emacs. I haven’t found anything better yet, so I highly recommend trying it.

By: Anselm Lingnau

Anselm Lingnau — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:25:45 +0000

Does KMail work now with OfflineIMAP, or do your comments refer to the »disconnected IMAP« mode only? I seem to remember that KMail had problems with OfflineIMAP’s syncing to Maildirs, so you had to use a local IMAP server instead. (This setup is what I use here, but I wouldn’t mind getting rid of the local IMAP server.)

By: Ramzi

Ramzi — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:03:00 +0000

I use Sylpheed. there’s a nice review here : http://www.zedshaw.com/tips/sylpheed.html

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:41:32 +0000

Mail.app is the only mail reader I’ve ever really liked. Alas, it’s non-free and its OS is annoying.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:38:30 +0000

Yes, mutt supports IMAP, but it doesn’t support it *well*, and it doesn’t let me work with my IMAP mailboxes when the ‘net is down.

By: Brendan Cully

Brendan Cully — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:25 +0000

by the way, mutt does do IMAP header and body caching. see $header_cache and $message_cachedir. It does not have a true offline mode, but it’s fairly speedy with the caches.

By: Enrico Zini

Enrico Zini — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:15:54 +0000

wrt sidebars for mutt, I’m quite happy with buffy, packaged in Debian. It shows all sort of statistics for mail folders, allows you to sort the list by various criteria and it runs mutt on the folder when double clicking on it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:02:17 +0000

You’re right, most e-mail clients suck. Just wanted to say thanks though, OfflineIMAP is great, even though I just use it for mail backup.

Keep up the good work!

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:57:21 +0000

Why dont you include just mutt without OfflineIMAP in your comarison? It supports IMAP now …

By: Jeremy Shaw

Jeremy Shaw — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:51:53 +0000

I have been using wanderlust for emacs for a few years now. It suppports:

+ disconnect operation
+ mouse-free operation
+ In debian (wl and wl-beta)
+ very configurable

The lame parts are:

+ a bit sluggish on large inboxes
+ emacs is single threaded, so you can’t do anything else while mail is synchronizing
+ configuring it requires a lot of looking things up in the manual

Anyway, it stinks, but maybe it stinks less:

http://www.gohome.org/wl/

By: Gour

Gour — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:15:27 +0000

Hi!

I tried few of mail readers starting with pine, next to Kmail, mutt, Evolution, but none of them satisfied me as much as Claws-mail. It is much more stable than Evolution and can handle without out any problem my old mail archive :-)

Highly recommended ;)

Sincerely,
Gour

By: sjs

sjs — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:09:30 +0000

After using Evolution I went to mutt, to Thunderbird (terrible), to Gmail. (Excluding a brief fling with Mail.app on OS X)

I would call mutt the best of the whole rotten bunch, though I don’t hate Gmail or Mail.app. Mail clients seem to be very hard to get right for some reason. That or we geeks are just far too picky.

By: Tyler Trafford

Tyler Trafford — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:45:37 +0000

You can use:

set nomarkers

-to make those ‘+’ go away.

By: anon

anon — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:29:36 +0000

OfflineIMAP (remote->local maildir) + dovecot (local maildir->local imap) + gnus (with nnimap running dovecot from a command line). Rocks for me. Well, mostly. The article counts are approximate. And expiration is tricky to wrap your head around. Performace? Well, on a fast enough machine… But the agent/offline reading is great for news and remote imap servers. Good spam filter integration.

Plus, your wonderful OfflineIMAP lets me transparently mirror my mailstore between three different places. No single point of failure. Wonderful.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:12:19 +0000

I have trouble with URLs that are longer than a line; mutt puts a + in them and they get messed up.

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:53:56 +0000

I find that the support in gnome-terminal and/or KDE’s kicker applet deal very well with URLs in mutt.