Weblog entry #51 for ajt
See all weblog entries made by ajt.
I have a had along history of being unhappy with email clients. I started using email with Pegasus for DOS using Novell email, which was okay but a bit strange.
My next email client was elm/emacs on SunOS - adding attachments was a bit labour intensive, but for email it was fine.
In the US I next used PINE on DEC Unix, which was similar to elm, but better I think. I only used PINE for a few months before I changed sites, and on the new site email was VMS mail or Eudora for Windows/Mac.
For the longest time I used Eudora for Windows, both with POP3 and IMAP servers. It's a bit of an odd application, but I liked it a lot.
Since migrating to Linux, Eudora hasn't been a viable option - it doesn't run reliably enough under Wine to be worth the effort. However now I run my own IMAP server (Dovecot) so it's easy enough to tinker with different email clients to my hearts content.
I'm running mutt/nano which I like a lot, it reminds me of elm/PINE, only it's better. I've run Mozilla Thunderbird for nearly a year, and it's okay, but I still prefer Eudora. Today I tried KMail again, the new version is a lot better than the version that shipped with KDE2, so I'll try this for a while and see if I can get along with it.
Comments on this Entry
I used Kmail for a few months, and had gone back to Evolution.
From time to time I'll use mutt; primarily at home on my desktop machine though.
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mutt is good for sys admin (plain text) mail.
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Outlook:
* Doesn't do threaded display
* Opens multiple windows - I hate that
* Doesn't easily send/display emails as plain text
* Is a pain as it encourages top-posting
* Doesn't quote emails properly
* Is a security nightmare
* Is slow
* Has a clandar and other tools integrated in it - why?
* Doesn't do IMAP/POP/SMTP TLS properly
Mutt is probably my favourite tool, it does eveything I need, it's just sometimes that it's nice to use a point a drool interface sometimes... I'm sure Evolution is probably a lot better than Outlook, it's just the design style I don't like.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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> I also dislike mail clients that try to function like
> Outlook [..] which I why I don't like Evolution...
Then you gave a list of problems with Outlook that implies Evolution has too:
> Outlook:
> * Doesn't do threaded display
Outlook does do threaded display, but admittedly it could be a bit more intelligent.
Evolution's threading is better.
> * Opens multiple windows - I hate that
I guess this is for composing a new message. This is useful for when you need to copy and paste text from multiple e-mails into one message.
Both Evolution and Outlook do this.
> * Doesn't easily send/display emails as plain text
Outlook: Format> Plain text
Evolution: Format> Uncheck "HTML"
> * Is a pain as it encourages top-posting
> * Doesn't quote emails properly
I don't think anything quotes e-mail properly :)
> * Is a security nightmare
> * Is slow
Evolution is faster than evolution with connector.
> * Has a clandar and other tools integrated in it - why?
> * Doesn't do IMAP/POP/SMTP TLS properly
Evolution does.
Evolution has no "undo" support.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
* I din't even know threading was possible, but having found it, I'd have to conclude that Outlook's threading is unusable.
* I can't think of anything nice to say about multiple windows. Tabs within an application I can cope with, multiple windows I hate.
* Plan text doesn't work all the time with Outlook, and you can't force it by default. Your outgoing emails may be plan text, but replies are the same as message they are replies too, and it requires a manual change for EVERY SINGLE EMAIL to override... Evolution may be better in this respect I don't know.
* Reply indenting in Mutt is pretty good, and Eudora, KMail and Thunderbird seem to manage things reasonably well. I assume Evolution isn't bad either.
I've not tried Evolution in anger so I can't really comment about it. Outlook is possibly the worst excuse for an email client I've ever used.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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oh, you gotta get Quote Fix. Must-have for all of us that are forced to use outlook. http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
phil
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--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I'm afraid I'm very unsophisticated when it comes to mail. I just use mutt, and I tend to use it by sshing to the machine which has my mail on it and reading it locally.
(I do have offsite backups!)
I can connect remotely over IMAP to read mail if I need to, but I don't often bother. The only pain is when I want to view an image attached to a mail, since I don't have X/image viewers installed on the remote machine I must save them via mutt, then scp them to my local desktop.
My previous solution to this problem was webmail, but I've become disillusioned about security in things like squirrelmail/imp to the extent I'm no longer willing to take the risk.
I'm thinking of installing some minimal X stuff so I can launch it remotely with display forwarding, but I've not yet done so. I like my servers to have the minimum of software installed.
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my current beast of preference is VM, which runs within an emacs session. This means that not only do my intra-buffer keybindings work (which are hardwired to my fingers at this point) but i can also use my inter-buffer bindings (C-x b, etc) to pop between messages i'm reading, new message compositions, etc.
The main issue with it is that for large mboxes (>4000 messages or so), vm becomes occasionally sluggish on my machine. And since emacs is mammoth single process (Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping, as it were), a sluggish vm means a sluggish emacs session, which is not so fun.
i'd switch to mutt at some point if it could be more cleanly integrated directly into a running emacs session. Which is probably possible, given mutt's insane flexibility, but i haven't figured out how to do it, so i suffer through VM's idiosyncracies for now...
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