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• A free email service. GMail offers free mail forwarding and I presume some other services do so as well.
  
• A university alumni address. There's a good chance your alma mater offers one. Universities benefit because they get to stay in contact with potential alumni donors. Institutions of higher education are more stable than almost any other entity in society, so the odds joe@alumni.example.edu will still work 50 years from now are as high as you can hope for.
  
• A for-pay forwarding service. Pobox has been around since 1995 and I've been a customer since 1996. The current price is $20 a year for three pobox.com addresses and some other features like spam filtering. As for whether customers can rely on any one company to stick around, Pobox's current FAQs have long since been "corporatized" but a rough paraphrase of a question in an earlier version went something like this:

  Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?
  
  A: Will you? (Ha! Didn't think of that, did you?)

  
  I prefer my pobox.com address over my university's alumni address because the latter assigns a letter-and-number userid I've never liked. I could always start using my gmail.com address instead, under the presumably-safe assumption Google and GMail will be around for a long time, but as a firm believer in TANSTAAFL I can't believe that GMail and/or forwarding mail to another address will remain free forever. Meanwhile, Pobox has a more than ten-year history and counting with better than 99.44% uptime. Even were I to switch to GMail for my day-to-day email access as opposed to the Emacs-based mailer I've been using for more than a decade, I suspect I'd still give out my pobox.com address instead of the gmail.com one.
  
  If you prefer gaining a permanent address by supporting a worthy nonprofit, two possibilities are IEEE and the Free Software Foundation. Each costs annually considerably more than $20, of course; if FSF would offer some sort of lifetime membership for a reasonable sum I'd probably do it, though.

Or emacs vm mode which I found a bit less scary than gnus. Under X11 it's a dream to use (multiple virtual folders, unfinished replies etc), and for remote access without X11 it's absolutely fine. I've used it for probably 10 years now (although I use Gmail every day for non-work stuff!). It's almost certainly only of interest to the seasoned emacs user though.

VM.

No powerful email clients for Linux? I use VM (http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/), which runs in Emacs. That means there is an entire Lisp environment available for customization and extension. How much more power do these freaks need?

I used to use emacs SPOOK , mostly as a lark, in all my email. In particular, there was a spookmime hack for Xemacs VM that put Spook words into the MIME boundary lines of every email so that it would be unobtrusive to email users, but, supposedly, trigger NSA keyword sieves. I stopped after 2001-Sep-11, but if I were living in Canada again, I'd definitely consider using Spook again... though I'd probably have to write a plugin for Thunderbird to do it.

If every ISP found that a significant minority of all of their users always had Spook keywords embedded in all of their email and lots of other traffic, that the system would be rendered useless. This would be an effective means of peaceful protest. Ref: CSIS.

When you switch mail clients (you allways do in a few years)

VM for XEmacs/Emacs has hierarchal filters that can be applied and nested arbitrarily. I miss this when view a large folder, for example, to find oversized mails and then want to zoom in on the surrounding thread of a certain message without losing my original place. It supports a variety of message stores, including plain mbox-format files and IMAP.

Of course, it's written in Lisp, so it's infinitely extensible.

VM does.

You can add and filter on any number of arbitrary tags. Compatible with several different local mail storage formats and runs on many platforms.

This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway :-)

The problem with Gnus is that the defaults are not very good, so there is no easy way to get started with it. I have had much better luck with VM, it behaves more like your typical email client, but has the additional power of lisp too.

Tell me what my mail client should be written in? Java? C#?

Wrong.

My preferred mail client used to be vm. This is a mail client written in Lisp. I loved it because it was extremely easy to hack - almost anything you would want to change not only had a setting, but most things had various callbacks, hooks, etc., so you would plug in your code to modify its behaviour. If you found something that didn't have a hook, it was trivial to figure out where the function was defined (C-h f) and change it on-the-fly.

The problem was that it was too slow. Reading a 1M+ mailbox would take up to a minute on my workstation. I have lots of those.

I'm now using mutt because it's fast. It only takes maybe two seconds to parse a 10M+ mailbox ("parse" = look for mbox boundries, set up an index in memory so you can jump to any message instantly).

I'm sure you'll reply that vm needed to do something more "clever" to be faster - like keeping around indeces on disk or using a mailbox format other than mbox. The problem is that us Unix folks do things with mail outside of the MUA. Like edit it directly or run it through perl scripts or use multiple MUAs. This becomes a PITA if you don't use mbox and persistent indexing is pointless since the index would have to be rebuilt any time I did something to the mailbox (which is often enough that indexing wouldn't help).

The basic problem was that file i/o is slow in Emacs Lisp. VM was absolutely high-quality code and you can't disagree with that until you've studied the code.

What MUA do you use? Are you willing to eat your own dog food? If your MUA is written in C, are you willing to write one in some HLL? What about your web browser? Are you willing and able to write a web browser in a HLL, complete with asynchronous DNS, plugins and multiple language encodings?

You mean here.

VM does this www.wonderworks.com/vm. It's very powerful as you can use all kinds of lisp-ish things to define a virtual folder. Virtual folders are not very useful unless you have some sort of programming language that allows you to define them (eg, everything whose date is less than X and greater than Y which has been filed into the 'work' folder and contains joe@bar.com in any of the headers). Granted, this particular example could be done with a nice little gui virtual-folder builder, but there will always be examples where it doesn't work (eg, dynamic virtual folders, where the contents of virtual folder X depend on the date, timezone and phase of the moon). Having a real programming language to define these really helps.

But the basic idea (virtual folders) is a really good one, I'd say go for it.

Basically, exmh rocks.

More:

I waver yet, wondering if I'll keep using exmh, or to consider VM inside emacs. I've tried netscape's mail interface and, despite many good features, I dislike not being able to use emacs as my text editor.

I nominated Sawmill, and then stopped to think a little longer and realized how much GnuPG has improved lately. Especially for those interested in using open-source cryptography that's easy to set up and use.

I haven't followed the development very closely, but I think it's tough for even the mildest crypto-geeks to avoid noticing how so many folks have given up their old PGP keys and switched to GPG in the last year. This is a Good Thing, in my opinion. PGP was confusing. There seemed to be several concurrent versions being released at the same time, and you couldn't use some of them if you were outside the USA, couldn't use some of them if you were inside the USA, and some of them just didn't work. Finally, GnuPG stepped forward and started clearing the path, and now I'm using Mailcrypt with VM again! GnuPG kicks some serious ass!