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Free GUI E-mail Clients For X11?
TheLocustNMI asks: "My question is this: Are there any stable, easy to use GUI e-mail clients out there? I'm in the process of making the switch from Win9x to Linux, and I'm finding it hard to get hold of a decent GUI mail program. Most of the ones I do find are PINE or MUTT, etc. But, coming from Win9x, and as much as it pains me to say so, I liked Outlook. It was easy to use and configure, and wasn't too terribly huge. I've looked into Balsa and Adora, and I've used KMail, but they are either not stable enough (Balsa), not in development anymore (Adora), or just plain clunky (KMail). I would have expected more GUI clients out there, but so far, I've come up with a very short list. Ideas?" Lately, I've been using Pronto, a GTKPerl based email client that supports multiple accounts, filters, MBOX, Maildir and POP3 support. Pronto was originally CSCMail but CSCMail has since moved to C.
Spruce (here) is my preferred email client for UNIX. It's not quite as featureful as other clients, but is fairly stable.
Best of all, it supports GNU Privacy Guard. I've got a couple of minor quibbles with how it does things, but on the whole, it's my preferred email client today.
Never heard of Magellan? Blame slashdot. It's the KDE2 Outlook replacement. Evolution ain't got nothing on the most current Magellan snapshot...
Subject says it all. exmh is a GUI front end to the all-powerful MH messaging system. It's written in Tcl, and has been stable for many years now. More details at http://www.beedub.com/exmh/.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
1) Graphical (sorry)
2) SIMAP (so I can access the server from anywhere and have the data encrypted)
3) GPG support
4) Did I mention stable and reliable IMAP support?
So far, Netscape does it all except GPG, which is a real shame. Hopefully Mozilla will support this. The added benefit to Netscape is the roaming profiles, so I don't have to enter in all my e-mail information each time I install a new OS. Just enter the roaming profile information and go.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
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.)