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In any case, if you like keyboard use, you should try installing Claws as your Email client- it is extremely keyboard friendly (because it is designed that way) and yet works great with a mouse, too. It is nice that there are programs that let you work they way you want to work. https://www.claws-mail.org/

I remember trying out Claws many years ago, I didn't care for it. I've stuck with pine (now alpine) which I've used for... wow, I guess about 20 years now. Over the years I have tried a couple other mail programs, but none have made me even consider switching. I did run Thunderbird and alpine in parallel for a year or so, but I had to ditch Tbird. Alpine combined with fetchmail is just fantastic.

>"If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic."

Well, it is not so fantastic for lots of things. I have used just about every interface- touchscreens, lightpens, digitizer tablets, voice, eye control, alternative keyboards, touchpads, joysticks, trackballs, VR, you name it (and yes, using computers before there were such things a mice). I find a combination of mouse AND keyboard for navigating and control to be the best, over just about any other combination, for the majority of uses. Only one or the only the other, not so much.

In any case, if you like keyboard use, you should try installing Claws as your Email client- it is extremely keyboard friendly (because it is designed that way) and yet works great with a mouse, too. It is nice that there are programs that let you work they way you want to work. https://www.claws-mail.org/

https://www.claws-mail.org/dow...

* Claws Mail - very fast and light-weight GUI client (MUA). ported to many OSes and extended with plug-ins.
* Sylpheed - very light-weight GUI client. Windows/OSX/GTK+(Linux/BSD/etc)
* Mutt - a bit hard-core but runs reasonably well from command-line on Unix-like systems, even usable on OSX. Windows version is weird (PDcurses port looks the best, but has bugs/work-arounds)
* Alpine - that classic PINE feel, but still actively maintained.
* Eudora Open Source Edition - classic e-mail client. OSE is really a fork of Thunderbird. For the real deal you need to port the source yourself. (I'm not sure why you would, beyond nostalgia)
* Mailbird - Windows freeware
* Mail.app - OSX only. older versions significantly better (and faster) than latest.

http://www.claws-mail.org/ based on GTK+, distributed under the GPL.

Claws Mail. http://www.claws-mail.org/

I find Claws to be wonderful. It is fast, easy to use, portable, reliable, extremely configurable, and very flexible. Claws has dozens of nice plugins and addons. Rather than being "pretty" and hiding everything from the user, it takes an older-school approach and gives you everything you need, and where you need it. Plus, you are not FORCED to use a mouse- there are key commands for just about everything and you can customize them to death. Has full scripting, filters, and connections for every type of delivery available out there.

There are a few odd things about it, but of all Email systems and clients I have used, I like it the most. I have hundreds of users using it every day. It is based on Sylpheed, which has been around forever, and development is still going on constantly. Available instantly for every Linux machine and has also been ported to MacOS and MS-Windows.

As for the problems with encrypted Email and HTML- that is completely due to poorly designed clients that render HTML immediately. Claws allows you to control how Email is displayed. For example, Claws will happily-

1) Not display the HTML part at all and just show plain-text (the default).
2) If the Email is in violation of rules and has no plain-text part, it will just invent one out of the HTML body.
3) If you DO want it to display the HTML (with a plugin), then there are settings to disable any external component loading

The one thing you can't do with Claws is COMPOSE html Email in it. And you know what? That is just 100% fine and a nice feature :)

I use Claws Mail. It's light on resources, fast, stable, and can deal with gigabyte-sized mailboxes without a hiccup. Moreover, it uses the MH mailbox format, where each email message is a single plaintext file so it's very flexible and if necessary it allows for straightforward manipulation directly from the shell. There's even a nice book available on it.

I switched from gmail to outlook.com, partly to live a Google-free life, but mostly because the gmail UI kept getting worse and worse.

What is this "Gmail UI" you speak of? My Gmail UI on the desktop looks like this:

http://www.claws-mail.org/scre...

In other words, I have a hard time understanding complaints about the Gmail UI since people DON'T have to use it. That's what IMAP is for, so you can use Gmail with a proper e-mail client.

You also don't see ads that way AND that enables you to archive locally if you want and use your choice of secure e-mail methods (PGP or S/MIME).

My recommendation is Claws-Mail. Not only is it fast and simple to use, but is stable and feature-packed as well as being free, open-source, and multiplatform. http://www.claws-mail.org/

Claws Mail
http://www.claws-mail.org/

Claws Mail is pretty nice. It's still regularly maintained and very fast.

I use Thunderbird because I like using its Lightning extension to access CalDav calendars, and Claws doesn't have anything like that (or very good calendaring support in general), but I'd probably use Claws if e-mail was the only thing I cared about.

The fork of sylpheed known as Claws-Mail is more well known. Since the Sylpheed community is Japanese-centric, I recommend Claws-Mail over Sylpheed to anyone who isn't Japanese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

http://www.claws-mail.org/feat...

claws-mail

http://www.claws-mail.org/

Nevermind that there are hardly any universally good email clients..... None do encryption well

There are two very good e-mail clients, IMHO:

Thunderbird, which can handle gpg with Enigmail

https://www.enigmail.net/home/...

And Claws-mail, which has gpg and S/MIME support by default:

http://www.claws-mail.org/

OSX users can just install gpgtools and keep on using Mail.

https://gpgtools.org/

When one has hundreds of thousands emails, the Thunderbird just was not able to do its job. If it takes 30-45 minutes (!!) of CPU time to open a mailbox, the email client is useless.

Try Claws-mail: http://www.claws-mail.org/

I switched from thunderbird to Claws because of the degraded Thunderbird performance over time.

Thunderbird is pretty good. There aren't many open-source graphical mail clients out there that work consistently across all platforms.

Actually I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned Claws which is pretty consistent. I wish they had an Android port as well, though.

I'm still with Sylpheed, you forking bastard.

Seriously: http://www.claws-mail.org/

I've been using it for around two years now and am continually amazed at how little press it's gotten compared to Thunderbird. It does everything I've ever wanted Thunderbird to do (and more), and it's much, much faster.

I never tried invitations, but you can try http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/Connecting_to_MS_Exchange

He's insightful because he's correct. The world has had ages to develop a decent mail client and yet this still has not happened. Of the many clients I've used, the least terrible (and thus the one I stick with for now) is Claws. It bites.

I'll point out just one major feature seriously lacking from nearly every client (although Gmail comes close on this one): A decent way to organize your old mail.

The sad thing is that it's starting to look like email will die as a medium before anyone gets it right. I predict it will be replaced by a hybrid stored/IM with tighter sender controls that shall be called "Slow Messaging", and that the clients for this will also suck.

I will not be talking about weather OOo can stand it's own against MS Office - I have a different fish to fry.

Why the hell is THUNDERBIRD peddled as The Best Mail Client Out There?
I say, you want to make an Outlook killer, take something that can really kill. Like Claws Mail, for example. It's SUPER fast, very modular, easily portable to [insert your platform here] and has functionality that other mail clients are only dreaming about.

According to the features list it has full GPG support. In fact, the windows port is actually bundled with the Gpg4win project.

I'm considering moving "my people" to Claws -- Thunderbird at its best is an elegant and powerful creation, but it still hasn't really hit the sweet spot for us because of its various quirks, including difficult address book file format, awkward search interface, lousy wrapping, and reliance on the mbox format for mail storage (which results in the occasional quarantined inbox.) And now with this repeated organization reshuffling and loss of key personnel, I don't believe things will be getting better anytime soon. (Prove me wrong, folks!)

I don't know why this e-mail client doesn't get more attention. I find it similar to Thunderbird but much faster. Also, as far as I remember, included some tools to import from Eudora, which worked very well for me (while Thunderbird didn't).

Claws Mail?
It's much faster and powerful than Thunderbird, and it's multiplatform. I was tempted to swap it with Thunderbird some months ago and went back as soon as I discovered how unstable is Thunderbird when managing a dozen or so accounts.
For the normal user Thunderbird is a good email client, but when you need something fast, powerful and stable, I'd strongly suggest to try Claws Mail.

That's the power of Open Source. Should Thunderbird "die", it would be mantained by someone else in a matter of weeks, but in the very unlikely situation it dissolves without the development being taken over by other developers, we already have a great alternative.

This is Slashdot, so I'm pretty sure it's a conspiracy plot by Microsoft to mislead users who look for an excellent multiplatform mail client alternative, minus all those Outlook bugs and security flaws.

Last I checked Sylphed has support.. http://www.claws-mail.org/features.php?section=gen eral however last time i used it, it didn't support HTML, which is good in my opinion.