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Linux does not even have a decent application for reading emails ... and no: Thunderbird does not cut it.
I guess I could find a text only email reader that "just works", though.

Linux have Mutt http://www.mutt.org/ and their motto "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

I guess I could find a text only email reader that "just works", though.

Try mutt

* 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.

And this is what our progressive, forward looking IT expert is giving to all his users:

http://www.mutt.org/relnotes/1...

Welcome to the 1990s everybody!

In my case, $DAYJOB now uses gmail-hosted "G Suite" email, and has configured it to require either the web interface, or OAUTH2-based POP/IMAP/SMTP authentication. No app passwords or other options are available.

As mentioned by others, it generally seems really low security to trust your data to a server not directly under your control, regardless of whatever access controls it supposedly enforces.

It is debatable if all the extra hoops needed for OAUTH2 actually improve or degrade security, especially if you use a strong password (long randomly generated), protect it carefully (e.g. password manager), and also treat recovery questions the same way as the password (long randomly generated, stored securely).

To actually have usable, email, I wrote up some instructions, patches, and scripts to allow me to use any local email client while relaying through google with OAUTH2. In my case, I prefer mutt, but with this infrastructure, I could use any email client I wanted. Perhaps other people might find my instructions useful.

My armchair analysis is rather more cynical.

Microsoft is trying to position itself at the chokepoints of primary office/corporate functions. They already own the document preparation space in the form of Office, and have a huge chunk of the messaging and calendaring space through Outlook/Exchange.

Despite the fact that GMail is vastly superior to Outlook365 -- hell, mutt is better than Outlook -- there's always some so-and-so in the C-suite who's familiar with Outlook and refuses to learn or use anything else. Eventually the impedance mismatch between Outlook/Exchange and the rest of the entire fscking universe forces the company to adopt Office/Outlook/Exchange.

By acquiring LinkedIn, Microsoft can now attempt domination of the HR/recruiting functions as well. Want to apply for a job? Sorry, you'll have to apply through LinkedIn; it's inextricably integrated with the rest of our software. Want to communicate with a candidate? IMAP clients don't preserve the metadata tracking the recruiting process; please use an Outlook client. Want to submit a resume? It better be in .DOC format. Oh, and they'll probably throw in a gratuitous Silverlight dependency just for shits and giggles...

Personally, I can't see how people keep falling for the same sack of crap over and over and over again.

For IMAP, just turn off the cache if you don't want them on your local machine. It is sometimes good to just cache the headers for quicker look, especially if you file commit messages to folders.

Mutt can offload searches to IMAP, and do many wonderful things:

http://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/...

If you want to avoid prefetch, work with =h and =b instead: this leaves the search on the server (if it supports it), but notice that it's literal string only, no regular expression. Note that this feature is not available before version 1.5.11.

I can't stand web-based mail readers, so, yes, I do use a PC email client, and I think many others do for the same reason.
Furthermore, I couldn't stand to have to actively check for new email, so for me it's:

1. postfix with sender-dependent relay hosts and -authentication
2. fetchmail to periodically poll all email addresses i have for new mail, handing it the local postfix for delivery, which then "delivers" it to
3. procmail in order to sort the incoming mail into various maildirs, triggering
4. a script that watches ~/.maildir/new for new files, and if positive, puts a 'new mail' label into my WM's status bar, which causes me to fire up
5. mutt to read the mail. it doesn't even need to be compiled with IMAP/POP3 support this way, which is neat.

Thunderbird is fairly crappy in general, and doesn't even try to conform to basic standards.
While I personally don't like GUI mail programs, i've recently learned that kmail is refreshingly sane (even despite the leading k!).

Of course, the One True Mail Program is mutt

Mutt.
All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

All email clients suck. Mutt just sucks less.

I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).

Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).

I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.

I'm not sure about images, but mutt has a really fantastic auto_view feature...

Whoa, never knew this existed. Thank you sir!

(What do you use to expand Word documents?)

but when you receive mail from business people, it's usually an image embedded in a Word document, or at the very least a pdf. This is where mutt fails.

I'm not sure about images, but mutt has a really fantastic auto_view feature, which will automatically decode HTML email, PDFs, Word documents, etc into text and display it inline in your viewer. When people email me PDFs, I can not only view them without spawning an external viewer, but the PDF/MSWord text gets included in the quoted text when I hit "reply", so I can just reply to their PDF/MSWord text in-line.

Mutt speaks SMTP now: http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#smtp

not everyone has outlook,

So use Thunderbird or Mutt or Mulberry or Evolution or Alpine or hell how about any of the others in this list under freeware or open source.

Email is based on open standards. There are hundreds of email clients if you are willing to take the time to look for them, and all of them (arguably) are better than Outlook.

And then some old person will implement an email client in C using only the oldest and slimmest of libraries and everybody's heads will explode with shock at the speed of it.

They already have and I use it, it is called mutt.

IOW, you're referencing the Mutt motto: All cellular carriers suck, but, this one (Google) would suck less. --Michael R. Elkins

if you need a mail client with good IMAP support for Windows you know where to find it.

Yes, I do. Use putty to connect to my linux box and fire up mutt

I know when I think of a modern mail client, mutt alays comes to mind

http://www.mutt.org/screenshots/index.gif

And don't forget to use your editor of choice in conjunction with that whole rigamarole ;).

All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists, I could never manage all that traffic with webmail. Instead I use a full-featured MUA called mutt with procmail to sort things out and handle spam with SpamAssassin.

And wherever I am on the Internet, I can always ssh home and grep around all my mail archives to find something back. It's all searchable online, so to speak.

It's more low-level and command-line oriented, while still having a nice graphical (ncurses) user interface. It can:
- Open any mailbox from any user on the server (as root, of course) without having to configure an email account;
- Easily select all emails from a date range with a simple command line (T~d dd/mm/yyyy-dd/mm/yyyy);
- Open and edit any part of the email, including attachments;
- Reply, forward or bounce multiple messages at once.

Also check http://www.mutt.org/#features

Then again, 90% of the world probably couldn't care less if their mail app of choice wasn't cross platform...

Agreed. I'm a mutt user, for example!

It doesn't make sense to have thick clients anymore, when the web apps can do everything that the desktop apps can ...

A bit presumptuous, maybe?

I take for granted the following, and then some: regular expression support; being able to easily read or manage mailboxes that have tens of thousands of messages; a fully customisable and intuitive interface that corresponds with other programs I regularly use; on and off-line access to mail stores and archives; the ability to copy, move, sort, filter, munge, rewrite, extract or otherwise process any and all messages (including headers) using tools I've known for years; privacy and encryption. Should I go on?

Web apps, I think, are fine for novice users, occasional or on-the-road users, or for those with limited requirements. If you exclude certain fundamental issues like privacy and security, for example, you can, I suppose, say they work great. If that's the case, good for you. I don't fit into any of those categories, and flat out reject the premise of most web applications. Hardly a unique opinion.

OfflineIMAP would fix most synchronization problems. Dovecot is a fast IMAP server and Maildrop coupled with your favourite smap filter could take care of the server part. Couple that with a good mail client (mutt) and a way to synchronize contacts. mutt can be customized with own keybindings, so that way one could add support for training the mail filter. I keep my home directory in a darcs repository to keep it in sync between machines. Other people use Subversion.

Just use mutt!

As Pine is not free software, time to move on to mutt or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.

As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".

It's time to upgrade to Mutt.

I suppose part of the blame for my reaction to this article is the title that Slashdot editors gave it "Marrying Gmail and Mutt" which implies complete integration, whereas the original article title is "Fetching email with Mutt" (a much more modest endeavour that is covered fairly well). However the article fails on that foot too by suggesting that there's a need to use an external fetchmail, whereas Mutt can be compiled to have POP support built in and some simple editing of .muttrc will then suffice. (That said it's probably a bit cleaner to have a separate program for downloading the mail and just to let mutt do the job it does best). http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html#ss4.1 0

• Delete Outlook.
• Install Thunderbird.
• Open the Preferences panel.
• Click on the Privacy tab.
• Select the option, "Block loading of external images."
• Select the option, "Block JavaScript."
• Click OK.
• You're done.

Solution #2:

• Delete Outlook.
• Install mutt.
• You're done.

Schwab

well, that would be Mutt. MUA of the gods.

I just realized that I can bind attaching to a screen session running Mutt to a key in Vim. This has great (recursive) potential for rending the fabric of the universe (or at least blowing up the stack in my shell). Why didn't I think of that earlier?

FWIW, I'm with you on just about all that. Only, personally, I prefer Mutt to Pine, since I started w/ dmail and Elm. With appropriate filters, Mutt seems to handle HTML and Word docs acceptably most of the time. (I use elinks and wvText for those two file types.) And then there's GPG for the occasional encrypted email I need to send.

All that said, I still use GMail for my personal mail. I use Mutt for most of my work email.

For light users, I would recommend esmtp + fetchmail + mutt/thunderbird/evolution or simply esmtp + mutt. esmtp is so easy to configure with several lines of code and supports features like TLS. Neat and simple. Mutt supports mbox, pop3 and imap. Exchange is so bloated for personal use. And sorry, the nice things like esmtp are not available under Windows.

Real men use mutt.

Mutt :)

[ Amendment IV ]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.

Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/


DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages

!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org

and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt

to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)

SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR

[ Amendment IV ]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.

Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/


DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages

!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org

and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt

to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)

SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR

Agreed.

I use mutt and vim for email. Other than emacs, it doesn't get more powerful than that.

I think they probably meant easy-to-use.

is mutt or, better yet, mutt-ng if you're using IMAP.
No, really.

• ion | ratpoision; Pane-based (v. window-based) window managers. Little to no wasted screen real estate. Significantly reduced mouse usage.
• emacs: Wickedly powerful text editor/operating environment.
  • WhizzyTeX: Updates DVI in another window as you edit TeX/LaTeX.
  • AUCTeX: Very powerful emacs extensions for TeX/LaTeX.
• fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.
• bash completions: Quasi-telepathic tab completion.
• Firefox
  • Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.
• screen: Among many other abilities, screen+ssh can provide VNC-like capabilities for your terminal sessions.

I prefer MUTT http://www.mutt.org/
And I use Zoe to search through my mail (not that it happens that often), all I need is Zoe inside my MUTT

Try mutt. Yes, it's a text-mode client, and yes, it will take some getting used to, but it's quite addictive once you do get used to it.

If you're on windows, then you can probably run it in Cygwin - I haven't tried that, but I doubt there'll be much problems.

Try ssmtp. I use it when running mutt on Win32 under Cygwin.

# .muttrc
set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp -audUserName@domain -apSecretPassword"

Why not? I use it all the time for small to medium size files

Ever tried using it for large files? It's not so much that you annoy your administrator if you do this, it's more that the actual software out there is just lousy at supporting these types of actions. It does work fine for small and medium files, but unless it works well for all files, it can't really be called a good file transfer mechanism.

It's the most convenient way for me to send someone one or more files

That's part of my point - there's no reason you should use something other than email to do this. It is the most convenient way to do it. It's just that the current software sucks to support that. You can't so much as tag a description of an attached file when you do attach something. You have to describe in the body of the email what r4242_b233.pdf actually is.

With the right email client, the plots get displayed with the message

With the right email client. I use Mutt, maybe you use Outlook, maybe the third person uses Eudora. Are we all going to see it?

I'm sure there is some system administrator at the receiving end who is unhappy about his email system getting clogged up with attached files. I don't care, and he better get used to it. The email system was installed to meet the needs of the users, not the system administrator.

Again I agree. The point I was trying to make is that the protocols, standards, software, and hardware aren't behind email to make it possible for him to support some types of usage efficiently. The course of action I'd suggest is not to fire the sysadmin or give up your hopes of doing things conveniently, but rather to revamp the idea of email a bit so you could continue doing the same reasonable things, only have them well supported and reliable.

I don't understand why managing email should be linked with a calendar. I beleive they are two separate functions. If you try to do both at the same time you loose productivity. Try using mutt versus any other MUA. I've found nothing faster for managing large amounts of email. Now if only I could find a calendar system that is just as efficient.

I end up with layouts that are cross platform compatible, bandwidth efficient, easy to maintain, and don't look ugly.

How do you ensure MSIE compatibility without testing your [X]HTML/CSS on an MSIE rendering engine?

BTW: Is that new IE renderer also available on Linux, or just on Windows?

Quick poll: does anyone besides me still use mozilla mail, or has everyone moved to Thunderbird or web-based email?

I'm using Mutt to access my IMAP server, with esmtp for sending mails through Postfix. Switched from GNU Emacs RMAIL. Thunderbird is nice, but a bit too slow on the machines I'm reading mail on.

Word!

Drawer on the right and also by default hidden. That was the cool thing about Mail.app in Panther, when you start dragging a mail, the drawer automagically opens und you can drop the mail into a folder. Which works with Mail.app 2 as well, but when the folders appear the mail window shrinks, d'uh! That seriously sucks.

On the other hand I set up a couple of smart folders, like unread, new from today, new from this week and so on. So I'm using the folders much more.

I guess, i actually miss mutt. Now that was a great mail program. Ah, the times.

Also the white space on the top right. Two fixed spaces. What a hack!

[ Amendment IV ]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.

Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/


DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages

!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with

$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org

and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email

$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt

to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)

SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR KEY ON YOUR WEBSITE (or try using http://biglumber.com/ instead to host your key and help c