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If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH, which allows you to do anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages, have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell or Perl scripts.

The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands) are mh-e , an Emacs interface, and exmh , a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly book dedicated to them?)

Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and gnus, which is primarily a newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like it does for newsgroups.)

Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt) support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.

If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best bet is to do a search on freshmeat and try all the mail clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail spool before you start messing around with it!

My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook, Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all frustrating in one way or another.

My current setup uses nmh as the base system; exmh as my main reader; and mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail to download my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN) to filter it, catching most spam and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH folders.

(To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting. Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)

So it's a copy of Magellan for KDE?

If you want to think of it that way, go ahead. :^) I can assure you that the Evolution developers are thinking of it as a substitute for Outlook, not Magellan. But since they all seem to be in about the same application space, it doesn't really matter.

If you want a free software IMAP reader, and you're adventurous, you could always try Mutt or GNUS in the meantime. :^)

:) Pack the bowie knife and listen up, it's in the Latest release of GNUs (5.8.2 I believe).

Errr, I'd check but at the moment, the gnus homepage appears to be replaced with a list of RFC's...

The newsreader you're looking for, I think, is GNUS. Pgnus, the current version, is pretty good and has the features you want. The difficulty is in the massive amount of keyboard commands and initial configurations. The learning curve is about what you'd expect with an (x)emacs mode capable of dealing with serious networking, but I personally think it's worth it. It's very modular and can be extended fairly easily if you know emacs-lisp.

Mutt seems to me to have the nicest of the text interfaces; it is somewhat unfortunate that it doesn't have huge support for the multiplicity of folders that a MH user grows to. (I've got 350 mail folders and 179MB of archived email, for instance.) For managing that, the user interface of EXMH combined with a variety of shell scripts are pretty much necessary.

> That said, mutt is the most flexible,
> usable mailer I know.

Most useable I can agree with. For the most flexible one, you might want to check out Gnus. You should like Emacs or XEmacs for that one though.

> That said, mutt is the most flexible,
> usable mailer I know.

Most useable I can agree with. For the most flexible one, you might want to check out Gnus. You should have an affinity for Emacs or XEmacs though.

A flurry of 2.0.x kernels came out. Finally, 2.0.18, the "last" stable kernel was released. No, wait, there was 2.0.19. Then 2.0.29. And so on, up to 2.0.37. Which we think is stable.

Consider, for a moment, the system used by Gnus, the singing, dancing mail and news reader for Emacs. Gnus has alpha releases with names ("September", "Red", "Quassia", "Pterodactyl"). These aren't announced to the general public, though they are discussed on a mailing list. These are essentially analagous to the a.n.x Linux kernel releases, for odd n. Then there are beta releases, which have version numbers like a.n.x for even n. These are probably stable enough to use, but if you care a lot about your mail you'll wait. Finally, there is a single final release with a version number of the form a.n for odd n (5.3, 5.5, 5.7).

The problem with the Linux kernel development model is that it has lots of "alpha" and "beta" releases, but no "final" release. So there's really no way to tell if a particular even-numbered kernel release is "stable" or not, aside from by reputation. At some point there needs to be a "final" we've-done-all-the-testing-we-can-possibly-think-o f-and-fixed-every-single-bug-which-is-wh y-we're-working-on-the-next-version release.

[...] the only thing holding me back from being 100% Linux/X is a good newsreader [...]

Gnus. The king of newsreaders.