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The Perfect Email Client?
An anonymous reader sends: "Can those who review also design? Trying to practice what it preaches, CNET published this article, a description of the perfect e-mail client. Next up, apparently: hardware and electronics designs."
for me the bat (www.ritlabs.com) comes close, now if oly they did a version for freebsd, even linux would do)
dave
The other points here are a checklist for current open source email clients (Evolution, KMail, Mozilla Mail, etc) - many of the features are already integrated of course. It is just Outlook that is lacking, and it will remain lacking because Microsoft take ages to upgrade software, and then only add features they think the user needs, not what the user actually needs.
One thing I hear a lot about is the Amiga email program YAM as being extremely good. It is open source as well - a Unix port would be interesting.
I think they've done a pretty good job, actually. I particularly like the integrated encryption and spam-reporting tools. These are widely asked for by those in the business, and yet no mainstream e-mail client seems to provide them. I'm sure more people would use them if they were easily available, rather than something you have to fight for. For example, there is a helpful service for spam complaints, who amongst other things will forward the details to the relevant abuse address, but how many people know that, or where to find it?
That said, I'd settle for just having the colour-coded "new mail" icon with the ability to hover over it and see the sender/title. At the office, where we use Outlook/Exchange Server, one of our guys tried to write a tool that hooked into Outlook and did that a while back. Unfortunately, he found insurmountable problems with the way Outlook's automation and new mail reporting features work. Too bad, as the rest of us were looking forward to him finishing it! That alone, to me, would be a major improvement. Here's hoping some of the guys at MS read the article!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Eudora would be a great email client, if it weren't for a few things. ..won't work." Ok, is it a bad password, bad server naming convention, or a dozen others. I've seen it do this when I know my net connection is down, so its like, WTF!
1. I don't believe it is out for Linux
2. Wierd ass server naming conventiongs. Your server name is usually like, mail.myrealbox.com in netscape, Yet in Eudora it ends up being, Username@imap.myrealbox.com, and sometimes that even doesn't work, its strange.
3. Buggy as crap, and doesn't like alot of servers from what I can figure
4. Ok, joke error messages are funny, if you know what they are supposed to mean. "I sent the password to the server, and said, shhhh, don't tell anyone, and the server said....shhhh....this
Good stuff
1. multiple email boxes/servers/usernames
2. Easy to set rules
3. easy interface
4. tech support is disant from the one time I used it.
5. the only problems with the free one is that there are adds on the bottom left, very small noninvasive adds.
6. you can do cool crap like not only mark an email as read, but mark it with 10 different colors, so you can seperate them between clients/problems or etc.
The BeOS has enabled you to do just this since day one. In Be, every email is just a file. Because of the uberfilesystem BFS (and its file-typing system), you can create lightning-fast queries based on the email headers, achieving exactly the result you describe--no specialized client required.
The Groupwise Client already does this. I agree, it's great!
But why is the rum gone?
KMail allows you to do that:
You can prefer plain-text over HTML, enable HTML but not letting it pull external resources (webbugs, images,...) or just accept it al. You can also enable HTML on a folder basis, wich is nice for some legit HTML newsletters I recieve
If only I could come up with a good sig
I just downloaded it and started setting it up, and found out that there's no imap support (unless it's seriously buried). A 'serious' email client that won't even do imap support? No thanks. There's no way I'm going back to POP3.
If they did support it, I'd certainly consider dumping Netscape/Moz for The Bat.
Maildrop may be a reasonable replacement to the procmail part, since procmail's rather messy and has a filter language that would make Larry Wall blush.
I am surprised to not see Mulberry suggested. It's one of the few email clients (if not the only email client) specifically designed from the ground up for use with IMAP. It's fast, reliable. It doesn't fully support HTML mail (a good thing). It has versions for almost every platform - Win, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris.
I've been using Mulberry for a year and a half now, and there is no way I would go back to Exchange or Eudora (whose crappy behavior started me looking for an alternative).
Forget Outlook. If rules are what you are after, and scoring, and colouring, sylpheed-claws is the answer. These features may end up in the main sylpheed, as well.
When there's something like this in the email:
and your client loads this image, they know someone is reading their spam at your address and they can log that your address is worth spamming, for future spam or selling it to other spammers. So your stolen bandwidth is actually a little problem, automatically rendering html email has much more serious problems than wasting the bandwidth. It's like a return receipt request which you can't ignore. A return receipt which is not sent by email but directly through tcp/ip, so the email sender knows your geographical location, your ISP, etc.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Well, if you're stuck with Exchange, you can still use Linux. ;-)
Just take a look at Evolution
It's as close to Outlook as any application can be, but runs on Linux and now it can act as an Exchange client. Yes, that means you can use Evolution with Exchange for everything: e-mail, calendar, etc., while still being able to use it as a regular POP3/IMAP client if you wish.
Cool, huh?