Mail User Agent Comparisons?

tjgoodwin asks: "I'm the SysAdmin in an astronomy department. Our currently supported mail user agent is pine ^[?] , but I'm looking at alternatives. I'm particularly interested in strong support for qmail's maildirs. I need to support at least one text-based UA: mutt ^[?] does what I need with maildirs, but is it really suitable for a user base, many of whom are new to Unix? I'm also considering graphical UAs, preferably gnome-based. I've failed to find any useful comparison information (the UNIX Email Software Survey FAQ is seriously out of date). Any pointers?"

Comments

One word.

[Sick Boy]

Outlook. Not only does the glossy brochure indicate that it has all the features you could possibly want or need, it also comes FULLY SCRIPTABLE! Imagine the fun you can have sending little programs back and forth to your friends! Can't do that with mutt, pine OR /bin/mail.
--

Re:One word.

[redtux]

Joke I assume

Re:One word.

[Eil]

Yes, it would seem so, wouldn't it?

Separate implementation from interface

[Bruce Perens]

Maildirs should be served up via IMAP. Then, you need a mail user agent that talks IMAP. That separates the implementation of your mail file from the interface.

Most web browsers provide a direct means of reading IMAP mail. Certainly Netscape Navigator does, and the Open Source version "Mozilla" does. By allowing them to read mail through the browser, your users have one less program to learn.

Bruce

Re:Separate implementation from interface

[Plagued by Penguins]

Where is the simap (secure SSL imap) support for pine though? Netscape has it... and it's dead easy to implement at the sever end with SSLeay or OpenSSL. The text-based clients are lacking though! :-/

Re:Separate implementation from interface

[thomasd]

According to the release notes, Mutt 1.2 supports this (along with many other improvements to the IMAP support). I'm not using IMAP on my current machines so I haven't tested this, but it's certainly worth a try if you need it.

Re:Separate implementation from interface

[toh]

IMAP is certainly the way to go, but I'll disagree with the note that telling users to read their mail through Communicator - or more specifically, the Messenger component - saves them any pain. The problem is that Messenger isn't a very good MUA (or news reader, another function which it halfheartedly attempts to confuse with mail), and neither is it really an application they're already familiar with (it's really quite different from the Navigator component). Most users, including those of the naïve variety, are perfectly ok learning a set of well-designed apps and well-bounded applications for functions that are fairly distinct, like email and web browsing. Perhaps HTML mail messages will blur that boundary, but not in the way that either Communicator or Outlook have tried so far.

What I hope to see from this thread is a clean, simple, IMAP (or POP, sigh) based GUI email client for X.

But there is a patch!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is ironic to find out that in the link provided next to mutt (on the everything2 site). It says that a patch for pine exists to provide the functionality the user wanted (supporting qmail maildir).

So what's wrong with pine then?

btw, you can also directly access you're inbox with "pine -i".

Re:But there is a patch!

[Garpenlov]

It's not GPL? You can only redistribute patches? It doesn't support MAILUSER? I use it anyway?

Re:Separate implementation from interface - text?

[RalfM]

Are there any text based mail readers, as per the initial question, that understand imap though?

Ralf
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Re:Separate implementation from interface - text?

[dead_penguin]

Are there any text based mail readers, as per the initial question, that understand imap though?

Pine can do IMAP. I think it may be a compile-time option to de/enable it, though.

Re:Separate implementation from interface - text?

[Matthew Weigel]

PINE is something of a 'reference implementation' of an IMAP-capable mailreader, I think it was the first. Mutt may 'support' IMAP, but everything I read suggested it supported it somewhat.

However, virtually every non-UNIX GUI mail client nowadays supports IMAP -- Outlook, Mulberry, Eudora, Netscape Messenger (PMMail for Windows and OS/2 does not sigh). Virtually every X-based mail client is 'working on it.'

S/MIME Too!

[winterstorm]

And where is Pine's support for S/MIME? While I think Netscape Communicator is an underpowered MUA it has the minimum features I require:

• SSL IMAP
• S/MIME
• Runs on Linux, Solaris, Mac, and MS-Windows

Is there any other MUA with these three features?

Mutt

[thomasd]

Yes, mutt does support IMAP these days -- has done for a couple of years now. It used to be a bit flakey, but I think it's starting to shake down okay in the 1.2.x releases.

IMAP is a very nice technology, especially since you can put clever backends behind it (mail in a proper database has always struck me as a Good Thing), but it's generally received quite a cool reception in the UNIX world. That's changing now, but a lot of admins still aren't quite happy with it. *sigh*.