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 I've failed to find any useful comparison information (the UNIX Email Software Survey FAQ is seriously out of date).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.
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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

[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.

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?