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Next Generation Mail Clients Reviewed
kreide writes "E-mail is the 'killer app' of the Internet; an enormous number of messages are exchanged every day, and while web-based mail has become very popular in recent years, many people still prefer the added speed and flexibility of a mail client application. In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla, and their usability in dealing with large number of messages."
isn't this kind of like reviewing the state of pop music without touching on britney spears, justin timberlake, beyonce, and michelle branch?
I hardly think email is the next 'killer app.' I get about 100 spams a day, and about 1 legitimate message every few weeks. Nowadays, virtually all of my communication is done over IM.
it is pretty nice, why did it not get reviewed? Is this site biased or something?
This just smacks of zealotry.
I'm not a microsoft support but I think it is a little remiss not to include the next generation of Outlook in your review. It seems to be the "most popular" client everywhere I've ever worked.
I would think that including outlook express (even instead of teh full outlook) would've been good. Also, a quick comparison to one of the free webmail systems like the hotmail web interface would've been nice.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
So apparently Outlook Express isn't popular at all. Funny... I guess it's just convinient then...
I hate these biased reviews. Popular would be based on usage wouldn't it???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Exactly. Sad as i am to believe it, a big company (read microsoft) needs to instigate something that is going to change it. Some kind of unique id / trusted system is the answer. And i fear it is going to lead to the commericalisation of email.
This is not a "next-generation" email client review if it does not include Microsoft Outlook 2003. Outlook 2003 boasts a great number of features and usability enhancements over Outlook 2002/XP. By including an older version of Outlook the author is skewing the comparison significantly!
Feel free to mod me down as a troll, but the author isn't being honest with the community. Open-source folks will be better off knowing what's in the current version of commercial products, not the older versions.
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
"Hello, Newman...."
I want the Newman mail client; if you get half your e-mail that's way too much.
At the risk of being unpopular (gulps), I have to put in my say for the new Outlook. I'm surprised Outlook 2003 wasn't included in the review, since it offers significant enhancements over the version in the article. The concept of "search folders" and being able to flag messages for follow-up in many colours is, simply put, invaluable. Mozilla mail doesn't even come close--although it should.
Is called mutt...
I'm offended :( He left out Pegasus mail.
What? According to the overview evolution 1.5.2 doesn't support mail importing. That's a bit odd since my 1.4.5 does support it.
So the obvious question is how are we going to fix it?
I mean both a technical solution and a way of implementing a new standard world wide. Any ideas? Would it be possible to have some sort of backwards compatibility to ease in a transfer?
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
Panther's Mail.app is by far the most usable, configurable mail application I've ever used. It's got all the usability and more of Outlook 2k3 without the high probability of having your computer trashed by virii.
"Next Generation" means GUI based, I assume? Thanks, but I don't see anything that compels me to abandon Mutt anytime soon. Newer != Better, that's the BloatMoat(tm) people tend to fall in.
Trolling is a art,
And not running OWA then you are pretty much buggered.
You'd almost think that was a case of Microsoft using a monopoly position to exclude competition.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I just ditched my email client, I'm 100% on openwebmail now.
I'm a roaming contractor, so the alternative was trying to manage email clients at several locations, and constantly finding that something (address books, mail archives, etc..) was out of sync.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Where's mutt?
Did you notice that the `new mail` icon doesn't always go away when you've read the mail? I'd submit this as a bug except apparantly first I have to trawl through the mozilla bug database (slow), then look through the Thunderbird bug list elsewhere (slow), then post it to some sort of forum. So I can't be arsed. I wonder how many other bugs lie unreported because of this overhead?
I didn't find anything spectacular about any of them that would make them something I could call "next-generation". Perhaps "up-in-coming versions" or something...
E-mail is NOT the killer app of the Internet. I have used plenty of different email clients and they all work the same. It is just as important as any other Internet communication device (IM, IRC, whatever).
In order to get a feel for how each mail client handles daily tasks, I conducted my review by performing a number of tasks:
Download a reasonably large amount of messages, about 2100 in total
This is funny to me. I consider myself a "regular" computer/Internet user. I don't see the need to download 2100 messages as part of my "daily tasks".
Why is new mail notification (on 3 of the 5) "Audio Only"? I much prefer not having sound and just having a popup notification (or a small blurb come up):
[10:08] > From: Kitch@removed.org
[10:08] To: Bill
[10:08] Subject: Re: ok.
I guess I am old fashioned...
I also find it strange that only a single one (KMail) supports Maildir. The rest are mbox. I thought Maildir was the future?
Just my worthless review of a worthless review,
The guy may not have had the hardware, but I don't see it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
What about Apple's Mail.app?
The author gives his justification for not including Outlook 2003 in the FAQ at the end of the aarticle.
The main justification being that:
Outlook 2002 is fully featured enough to compete, and
Most users with windows will be using outlook 2002 so it is a useful reference.
Get down of that high horse buddy and relax a little
Outlook 2002? Outlook 2003 has greatly improved usability over 2002. I still like where Thunderbird and Evolution are going, but OL2003 is my main mail client (and mostly because the company uses exchange server and wants to use all the Exchange 2003 bells and whistles), but I may still get my chance for Thunderbird usage.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Evolution is kind of quiet lately; I haven't seen new versions for some time. Besides, so far, it does not include some of the nifty features, like bayesian spam filtering, other email clients do.
There does not seem to be a roadmap for it, either. Maybe Thunderbird is in the future for me.
It's just a BloJJ
Up until now the viruses and worms have gone for the plebs, people with a Dell they use to surf and mail. 'Knowledgeable' Users could just install a filter, patch thier PC and keep an anti virus and firewall running.
But these methods are now hitting the masses, and virus authors and spammers are going to have to start getting around these standards.
I have never had more than maybe 20 spam mails in my life, with 6 accounts (1 of which is even a yahoo account). This is due to my e-mail being a picture on my website, it never being used for crap, and my machine always being virus free (My PC box, my OSX powerbooks i don't have to worry about)
But this is probably going to change in the next few years, either the spammers get smarter, or perhaps Bill gates will carry out his promise to end spam by next year.
Yeah, all this spam is killing me, that's for sure.
:-D
But having said that, I think email (non-spam, even) probably has been using more bandwidth (speaking globally and through the years) than any other form of internet usage, at least until p2p came along, so I think email has earned its "killer" title.
And now, I'll go read the article!
"Good news, everyone!"
Why doesn't Evolution support importing mailboxes? That seems really weird, not to mention the first feature that will leave an impression on the end-user. If I'm using an email client, and it does a sloppy/nonexistent job of importing my old mail, I'll just stick to whatever I'm using, amazing features or not.
thanks for the flashback of pine (I almost forgot about my "first")
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
There is no review of Pegasus or Eudora
"For every email sent, 2 pornographic images are viewed/downloaded"
what about it? I use Pine myself. I also know that it is outdated, slow, and lacking easy-to-use key features (like modern filtering).
why do you call it next generation if all those still breaks text at 76 columns by default?
:)
They may be next generation "email reader and filter" program, but the mail protocol by itself should be cold dead by now! It simply suck!
And don't came here modding me troll or saying "but it's the most widely used way to exchange messages" because then i will think you consider microsoft windows the best OS in the whole world... and i don't think you mean that
So, stop thinking email is usefull! You're just cheating yourself. Email is a mean necessity in those days of comodism. And those so called "next generation email programs" are just "next generation crapy email protocol workarounds"
The article criticizes outlook for having too many features that people will never use, yet it also considers a lack of support for server side IMAP searches a "con".
Am I crazy, or is it safe to say that most folks have no idea what a server side IMAP search is. I'll bet next to no one will even miss it....
Overall though, not a horrible review. I mean, I was expecting some horribly off kilter "MS suxor" message or something...
Kiss my shiny metal ass
Well, yes, it doesn't support virtual folders in the way that others implement it.
However there is an option called "Current View" (in "View") which allows you to see your inbox in a number of different ways. For example: by sender, by followup flag, by conversation, past seven days.
In addition, you can create and define your own custom views. So if I want to see all messages with the word "fish" in them, with one or more attachements, where I've been cc'ed and posted in the last week, then I can do so.
Which sounds very similar to virtual folders to me.
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PINE, you insensitive clod!
If this is Heaven I'm bailin out! I cant tolerate this ol tin-tub, so fulla trash and rats...
Gnus in emacs is perhaps the most configurable email client ever. For dealing with massive amounts of email it is especially suitable. It treats email like it was news. It basically arranges your email into newsgroups and does things like sorting messages based on headers/content into the right buckets and expire old mails. I do not know how I could receive, e.g., the linux-kernel mailing list without gnus.
Yoghurt
E-mail is the 'killer app' of the Internet
Actually, the internet has had several killer apps that kept the boom going:
a) Communication: This includes IM's and email. In the early days it was mostly email.
b) PR0N: Actually, it's been around since the early days of the internet. Heck, I remember it was a big part of BBS's before I got on the 'net
c) Games: This really hit when TCP/IP games became popular over the internet. Less need to lug your PC over to a friends' for a LAN party, and you mom can play solitaire with your aunt in another country
d) Music: I know a lot of people that subscribed to high speed just to get supposed "free" music.
Email is perhaps, however, one of the "killer apps" that has suffered the most during its time online. Games have their botters/hackers, pr0n has its misleading popups, and music has its Britneys, but by far SPAM has become one of the larger unfixed problems so far (patched, perhaps, but not fixed)
As someone else mentioned, Microsoft's current mail client is not Outlook XP, it's currently Outlook 2003.
There are also several innaccuracies in his review of the product.
1.) Outlook does indeed support emoticons. Use Word as your default text editor in Outlook.
2.)You CAN forward attachments, both in line and otherwise...
3.) Outlook can do key binding... it's under Options, Customize.
4.) I've been creating and managing mail lists in Outlook since Outlook 98...
The ability to filter incoming mail based on the existence (or lack of) of the sender's e-mail address in my Contact database. This applies to both Outlook and Evo.
All belly aching aside, I'm planning on employing a white list of valid e-mailers some time this year. For me at least, the promise of 'anybody' communicating via e-mail is dead.
email used to be the killer app, now because of spam,viruses,worms etc everyone is moving to instant messaging and SMS
perhaps one day email might be the "killer app" again, but as long as people continue to get 200+ exponential v14grA emails a day, business will depend on it less and less, we advise clients to phone us rather than email
i find the exclusion of mail.app preplexing. It is a free unix mail program that is extremely popular and has a very unique and intuitive interface.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
From the article: ...
"A big part of Thunderbird is the support for themes and extensions."
"Weather can show local weather conditions. "
Excellent! That is EXACTLY why I use a certain email client...so I can find out the weather.
I also use my toaster to heat my house, my TV to light up my living room, my toilet to wash my dishes, and my fridge to air-condition my house.
C'mon people...can't we get a good SIMPLE client instead of one with everything and the kitchen sink.
TDz.
Sylpheed, judged "not next generation enough" by the reviewer, enables me to compose in a custom konsole/xterm/rxvt in Vim, or Gvim -- a capability that makes it the only usuable GUI client IMHO.
The disclaimer states "In no event will RMS be held liable for omitting obscure and hardly used email clients like the evil Microsoft Outlook client"
Personally I'm a big fan of the email client on the P800. It works, is very simple and has no bells and whistles.
But them I'm a luddite who still uses emacs to read on Usenet because its scoring system is the best thing in the universe.... an email client with that in would be superb.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
For example:
As part of the stat breakdown in the boxed chart in the review (did you read the article? Please read the article..), Outlook is flagged as not having full index searching.
To wit, `full index searching` has a superscript and is described thusly:
This is true but only half accurate -- in an Exchange environment it is completely possible to enable full text indexing of everything on the Exchange server. It just isn't usable on your home system as a standalone internet email client.
Even if you could use full text indexing at home, in a POP3/IMAP environment
Assuming you do IMAP and keep most of your data on the server the argument becomes, `I don't want to have to read/download everything to find a single message`. The counter argument is simply, `Where do you think you're gonna keep your full text index? On your ISP's system?`
Anyway, full text index searching isn't something I see as viable for a home platform -- and if you're talking about in a business or enterprise setting, Outlook does support it - through Exchange Server.
I can understand not including it, as it is closed source (although technically it is available on one UNIX platform... ;), but it is by far the best mail client I've ever used.
Random and weird software I've written.
i use opera every day for my web browsing.
that said i will they would get off their arses and make a 7.23 client for OSX. the only version for MAC is like 2 years old.
as much as i love and use opera i will not pay for it until the MAC client is on par with the Windows Client
Poppycock. The only reason the author didn't include Outlook 2003 was because he didn't have access to it. While this is perfectly acceptable, the little blurb in the FAQ (before the author admits not having access) is pure BS. When writing an article about the "next generation of email clients" there is no justification for comparing the latest version of everything to an old version of Microsoft's product. This is, indeed, unfair and misleading.
The Opera M2 client is what I use every day for newsgroups, mailing lists, pop3 mail, imap mail.
I know it inside out... the review makes two mistakes in the matrix of features.
Firstly Opera does have both audio and visual mail notification.
Secondly Opera Mail does have the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts of your choice.
Thirdly it does support emoicons.
If the reviewer gets so much wrong about Opera then there is no telling how many other mistakes he has made.
Captain: Just that how it did, word you bore!
Engineer: No person it seems that it could set up the explosive according to.
Communication operator: Captain! Communication entered!
Captain: What?
Communication operator: Vision comes to the main screen.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: Don't you think? So busily they are, the ladies and gentlemen.
CATS: With the cooperation of the Federal Government troop, everything CATS received your base.
CATS: Also your warship, gradually probably is end.
Captain: Impossible!!
CATS: You appreciate in your cooperation.
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha...
Communication operator: Captain !!
Captain: In ZIG all machine takeoff order !!
Captain: Already, only you entrust to them.
Captain: Our future desires...
Captain: Godspeed, ZIG!!
don't know if you saw this, but the author addresses this issue:
Q: Why didn't you use the newest version of Microsoft Outlook? This doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
A: The only reason Outlook was even included was to serve as a reference with what is commonly available for the majority of users (which still run Windows unfortunately) today.
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time. After reading the review they can, however, immediately decide it is time to try out one of the alternatives, several of which are multi platform.
Also, I only had Office XP at hand when writing the review, which only helps to better illustrates my point I think.
Mozilla's support for IMAP is OK, but to not see Mulberry on this list is a big shame! It is the best GUI IMAP client currently available. Outlook's IMAP is HORRIBLE & the Kmail & Opera aren't quite there yet either.
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
If you edit a lot of files, it's worth it to learn how to use vi or emacs. Likewise, if you get a lot of email, it's worth it to learn how to use a powerful and effective email client. There's no reason a program should be viewed as limited just because it doesn't require a mouse.
Text-based MUAs such as Mutt are still (IMO) more effective at dealing with large numbers of messages. They do have a learning curve, but you can cut through the masses much more efficiently. External programs are called for HTML, images, encryption, etc. in the Unix tradition (and even Microsoft uses an external HTML viewer). For those of you who edit a lot of text too, Mutt even calls an external editor for composing messages.
No, they're not for everyone, or perhaps even most people. However, my father is an auto mechanic working as a shop supervisor for UMBC. He doesn't like PCs very much, but he asked me to "set up PINE" (meaning an SSH client) on a new machine that the campus IT staff had set up for him with Netscape 7's email client. He's on some high-volume lists, and it's just too slow to use a GUI client.
For the record, I do prefer Mozilla to w3m, because I find it to be faster for most tasks (even for freshmeat work, where I have to edit a lot of text in Mozilla's editor versus the ability to use Vim in w3m). I also use GAIM, and used Pan back when I downloaded large quantities of fansubs. But email is basically dealing with a lot of text which sometimes has other stuff, and for that, I find text-based to be the way to go.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
And Outlook is open source and available for UNIX platforms? Yes, I know that Outlook / OE are popular, but it is kind of a shame that Eudora was omitted, given that the review was to cover the Windows environment. Unlike Outlook, it is possible to configure Eudora to avoid some of the security mis-features of Windows. (For example, you can disable Microsoft's HTML rendering engine.) The reviewer missed an opportunity to provide a little education. (BTW, I am sure that there are other good mail clients; I mention Eudora because I'm familiar with it.)
the most popular e-mail clients
I'm not attempting to attract flames, but I am pretty sure there are more people using Outlook Express than Evolution, KMail, Opera, and Mozilla combined.
When I did Technical support for an ISP, almost every single Mac and Windows user I spoke with used it.
I always liked Eudora Pro and Pegasus.
There's already 4 +3/+4 comments asking why Outlook2003 wasn't reviewed. They're all moderated Insightful/Interesting.
From the article FAQ:
Q: Why didn't you use the newest version of Microsoft Outlook? This doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
A: The only reason Outlook was even included was to serve as a reference with what is commonly available for the majority of users (which still run Windows unfortunately) today.
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time. After reading the review they can, however, immediately decide it is time to try out one of the alternatives, several of which are multi platform.
Also, I only had Office XP at hand when writing the review, which only helps to better illustrates my point I think.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
What do you mean by "modern filtering"? Regex text matches, or something I'm not missing because I've never come across it?
I can't believe people mention Eudora. The focus is clearly on next-generation email clients. Although Eudora, Pegasus, etc. were popular in the 90's, they haven't made any progress the last few years, and are burdened by old code. And we all know old code becomes harder and harder to maintain, until it grinds to a total halt. I would rather use a brand new client, preferably with Linux (java) ports available than stuff that was converted from a windows 3.11 version to a windows 95 version almost 10 years ago.
I'd like to revise this law and phrase it as:
So, the next real "killer" internet application is clearly a mail client which can play MP3 files.
There is a definite lack of predefined fields in the address book - no place to store phone numbers or addresses, for example. It does have a feature that lets you add ad-hoc fields (user attributes) to the contact's record, but there isn't a way to make all the contacts have the same add-on fields without defining them for each individual contact. It is also capable of using vCards, but it only seems to get the name and email address out of them, ignoring all the other info.
If it wasn't for the poor address book, I'd be using it on my Windows box as well as my Linux system.
While looking at your Inbox,
Tools | Options | first tab is Preferences | E-mail Options.
Area called `On Replies and Forwards`. Dropdown list called `When forwarding a message`. Options are:
Strike out `is used` and write in `can be used` -- I routinely disable Word as my email editor because I don't want everything Word can to do happen to my email (such as substituting graphical smileys for the universal
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
While composing an email -
View | BCC Field
Damn, I know that's hard to find.
Unfortunately for the reviewer, I find Outlook remarkably easy to use, and always have. The reviewer's inability to find these simple, basic pre-installed options in Outlook calls into question the thoroughness of the review of any product listed. I'm just catching these because I happen to use Outlook fairly often.
I use pine you insensitive clod!!
X-Spam-Score: 23.7 (23 asterisks go here) CALL_FREE,CHECK_OR_MONEY_ORDER, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
I had to remove the 23 asterisks thanks to Slashdot's fscking lameness filter. I hate that god damn thing.
Seriously, try to conditionally filter on that line. If the score is >=5=10 move it into a Spam folder. Come on. I'd like to see you do it. Every other MUA I tried can do it. Outloook can't. Spam filtering is one of my professions. I have to come up with end to end solutions that include MUA filtering. Outlook can't do this simple thing. Here's another one. Look for a header called Sender and then check to see if its value contains "razor-users-admin@lists.sourceforge.net." That's it. Real simple filter for most MUAs. Outlook can't do it. Best Outlook can do is match the entire string "Sender: razor-users-admin@lists.sourceforge.net" anywhere in the headers, even Subject line.
Outlook has many "pretty" features but the damned thing lacks too many simple features we users of other MUAs take for granted.
Exactly - Outlook 2003 has stolen a good deal of great ideas from M2 (Opera's Mail Client) and is much better for it :)
Under the review for Outlook, the author says, "Blind carbon copy (BCC) does not seem to be supported at all." However, Outlook does
support Bcc. Just like in Evolution, if you go to View->Bcc Field, it will show the Bcc field below the Cc field. If you do not have the Bcc Field present (to conserve screen real estate), when you create a new e-mail, if you click to "To..." button, a "Select Names" window pops up and allows you to enter e-mail addresses in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
Good call, DangerTenor -- as I was noticing in my other post the facts reported about Outlook are, in many places, simply wrong. It calls into question the validity of the entire review.
Did someone just slap this together with the hopes of scoring a frontpage Slashdot article?
I don't know about you guys, but last time I checked not all email clients supported all the AUTH protocols out there.
I know that Kmail does a pretty good job of supporting most of them (PLAIN, LOGIN, GASSPI, KRB5, etc)
Sunny Dubey
The fact that "deleting" does not shield the user from the IMAP concept of marking for deletion. I am unable to move many of my users to an IMAP-based mail implementation because Outlook doesn't correctly use the metaphor!
(Thunderbird, on the other hand, sets up a virtual "trash" folder, which is really just posts that have been marked for deletion-- that's the way it should work!)
How can he justify reviewing an unreleased version of Opera M2, but then review an older version of Outlook because most Windows users don't have it yet?
Opera 7.50 is actually available for Mac and Linux as well (in beta-testing, as with Windows).
Also, as far as I know, pretty much every key can be rebound and configured in Opera.
"Mail import: Evolution can only import from UNIX mbox files and some older versions of Netscape. This makes migration from Windows clients such as Outlook Express problematic to say the least. The easiest solution might in fact be using KMail to migrate the mail to mbox format and then import it into Evolution."
For me the easiest route to getting people out of outlook express and into any open source email client is to open an IMAP email account for them at fastmail.fm or runbox. Then I setup the account under outlook and move all the email to that account. Since IMAP is server-based, they can switch to Linux and all their email is just there.
Then, they can do one of two things. If they are moving permanently to Linux, move all of their emails to the local mbox from the IMAP one and set up their pop service with whoemver they have as their email provider. Or if they are double-booting, continue with the IMAP setup, which allows them to email from both sides of their computing world and makes the transition to full-time Linux user easier.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
I also happen to agree with the author on that point.
It will be, but it isn't yet and won't even be included in the next release of gnome.
That's bull. I can understand using Outlook 2002 as a benchmark or a reference point, but if the article's about reviewing the latest and greatest applications, why not just say "I could not obtain a copy of Outlook 2003?"
The chart in the article shoes mozilla not having visual notifcations of new mail.
I am using thunderbird 0.5 and if you goto
tools/options
and look for show an alert, make sure checked.
ta-da
Well, I'm glad that someone else who knows how to use Outlook saw the flaws in the article.
I e-mailed the author, and pointed out some of the more obvious problems with his review.
Yet another case of the the anti-Microsoft world spreading their own version of FUD. And because they are not part of the legitimate media establishment, they can do a really shoddy job of journalism, and never print a retraction, or correction. In fact, their readership would be disappointed if they ever did correct their mistakes, because their readership does NOT want to hear anything positive about a Microsoft product.
No reason to lie.
I've posted this before, but for me, particularly as i am applying for jobs sending CV's off every five minutes, etc, this shows that it is often the simple things in life that really make a difference. I recently upgraded to KDE 3.2 , and recieved a pop-up dialog that actually made me smile :))
....
Kmail Dialog
(its KDE3.2 with Aqua Icons, Baghira and clever configuration btw)
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I've tried most of the graphical Windows clients and nothing beats The Bat for me. The filters are the real killer, especially filtering on groups into set folders with different notifications for each.
Thunderbird is almost there and I'm guessing sometime in the next year it'll be good enough for me to move to it.
hello, this is time here, just a quick message to say in 2004 we have GUI',scrollwheels, scrollbars, mice, pen tablets, dropdown menus oh and we hate using text editors to make changes to how our computers work.
anyway enjoy 1984 the rest of us won't wait for you
Pegasuck, well, sucks. We hated supporting it as much as we hated supporting SAS and SPSS.
The review claims that BCC is not supported in Outlook. Not true; the field is just not shown by default. You can turn it on under the View menu when composing a message.
The feature list says that Outlook does not support search folders. In Outlook 2003 they are supported. (The review is not technically wrong here, as Outlook 2002 was reviewed. But let's be fair and talk about the latest version of the product.)
I prefer KMail on Linux and Thunderbird on Windows because they do one thing -- handle email. I don't want Calendaring, etc. in my email app I want EMAIL in my email app.
Who am I to blow against the wind? -- Paul Simon
This person has obviously never used Outlook in a corporate environment. At several jobs, I lived in Outlook. All of the features: tasks, calendars, scheduling, even journaling are *EXTREMELY* useful!
That being said, Outlook is NOT a bare bones mail client. If he wanted to compare the MS mail client, that would be Outlook Express.
Also, why didn't he review any good closed source clients? This seems to be a silly OSS vs. MS thing. If it was a real review, he would have at LEAST needed to include Eudora and Pegasus, both of which have been around for ages (much longer than any of the ones he reviewed, in fact).
I run thunderbird on windows. I've had problems with Outlook on IMAP in the past, and it's just easier to trust what's happening with the open source app.
But, the review says that Mozilla only has audio notification of new mail. On my platform, I get a new mail notification in the task tray, plus a slideup when it happens. Since, the first thing I read is the table comparing features, What else is wrong with the review?
as for 'next generation' mail clients, I continue to think web based clients should be considered. why continue to spread the burden of email from server -> client, when a web based client only views mail on the server, and doesn't have to transmit/store it.
with clients such as Squirrelmail and Horde/IMP, it seems that this would be the path more in line with the current thinking. I use Squirrelmail, and it does (almost) everything I want. What it doesn't do can be added via modules, or via coding of your own modules (which I'm working on now).
P
free ipod and free gmail!
The point is that many people do not have access to it and the reviewer is a good example of that. The email clients got reviewed because they were accessible, both to the reviewer and (most of) us.
Ever since my last HD failure (well, not the last one but the one about half a dozen or so back) on my then primary desktop I haven't used a GUI MUA religiously. I use Pine myself. It gets me by. Someday I'll can it and find a good replacement for Claris Emailer (laugh all you want but I loved that app. It worked very well). Until then it's Pine and occasionally SquirrelMail for me.
How is it outdated? Just because it has no GUI? It supports IMAP better than the clients reviewed & understands more mailbox formats too. What can't it do?
How is it slow? It sends and receives a complete message quicker while utilizing fewer resources than the GUI alternatives.
It HAS filters which are very, very powerful.
If this is a next gen review of email clients, well Outlook 2003 is newer significantly different. Just because it comes from Microsoft doesn't mean it should automatically be discounted.
With all respect, I doubt any of these email clients belong to the next generation, they are rather of the current generation. The next generation includes Chandler from the OSA Foundation.
The article says mozilla's new mail notification is audio only. I am using thunderbird on windows, and it often pop's up a little message in the bottom right of the screen.
But he doesn't ultimately recommend one over the others.
Even if you use Gnome you can still you KMail, if you use KDE you can use Evolution. I used to run KMail all the time when I was using Gnome.
Mac OS X comes with Mail.app, haven't seen a better e-mail client yet and I've tried many...
There is a single feature of Outlook 2003 that I fell in love with. I use Pine and SquirrelMail (in that order, depending if ssh is available to me) for my own e-mail, but at work we are on a Windows domain and have an Exchange server.
.pst so they'd have quicker access. The problem is that synchronizing a 100MB .pst with perhaps 3 new messages is both painstakingly slow and unreliable. I fought with this for months.
I am responsible for 3 sites throughout the metropolitan area, and have some users who have to do work from home. Before me, they would connect through the VPN and either use Windows Offline Files or Terminal Services to access their work. Their Outlook 2000 client (2002/XP is no better) would read every message from the server every time it even thought you might want to see that message. The whole thing was horribly slow.
I quickly replaced this situation with Unison to synchronize their My Documents folders, including a
When we opened up our third site in the city, we got new computers that came with Office 2003. I asked myself, "Self, why did Microsoft bring us a new version of Office just a year after the last version was new, with no new features other than the bubblegum interface?" In setting up their e-mail access, however, I stumbled across Outlook 2003's ability to synchronize per-message, and the question then was "Self, why did Microsoft screw me for so many months with previous versions of Outlook, when this is so easy?"
I don't have a lot of pro-Microsoft testimonials to give, and Outlook 2003 has a few really obnoxious features, too, but for its ability to synchronize with an Exchange server, I say "Thank you, Microsoft."
Goto the folder you want and click on the nice big FIND button on the toolbar. There is even an advanced find feature. Any idea why he would say you cant search folders?
Am I the only person still running mh (or nmh)?
Quite possibly the best mail client, hands down. And emacs has a great interface to it (mh-e).
Everything else is just GUI fluff.
1) Opera DOES have a non-audio mail notification. I have sound turned off, and when mail comes in, I get a little box in the bottom left hand corner of the screen that says how many messages have arrived. I'm still using Opera 7.23.
2) Outlook XPs version of 'threading' is kind of crappy, in my opinion.
3) Why do all the open source email clients look exactly like Outlook? I've never particularily liked that view of email. Can't anyone think of anything better?
4) I use mutt, Mail.app (OSX) and Opera as my main mail clients. Mutt is still the most feature-rich mail client that I've ever used, inability to display HTML and images inline notwithstanding (and most of the time, I like it better that way.) Mail.app under OSX is quite nice too, though I don't like the way that it won't check IMAP servers automatically when it checks your main Inbox. I always have to syncronize my folders. Also, it should display the number of new messages that you have in total in all of your folders (excluding the spam folder) if you want it to.
5) I haven't used Outlook 2003 yet, but Outlook XP is excessively annoying. It doesn't do anything the standard way, as near as I can tell. Threading, quoting, replying - it's all terrible. I hate the fact that text email isn't default.
What's so 'next gen' about these clients?
If you really want to try something cool and useful checkout Zoe: http://zoe.nu/
Your mom is also widely accessible, but he failed to include her in the review.
He's asking about Outlook 2003. This is about "next generatoin mail clients."
For what it's worth, the author attempts to give an excuse for not reviewing it. But then you can't really consider it a complete review if you conveniently exclude the newest major version of one of the most widely-used e-mail clients.
it is pretty nice, why did it not get reviewed? Is this site biased or something?
The topic says clearly:
"Mail clients"
The topic does not say:
"Trojans"
That's why.
You missed my point! How can you then call the review "next generation"? He reviews beta versions of other software, but why not of Outlook?
Outlook 2003 has some of the features that are in the other "next generation" clients which are not in Outlook 2002, including virtual folders, bayesian spam filtering to name a few. By leaving these to a mere mention in the FAQ, the author reveals his bias against software you have to pay for.
And the complaint about how expensive it is, and hard to upgrade, is just not true. You can get Outlook 2003 for less than $100.
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
Yeah, the winmail.dat attachment work splendidly. If only I could read it now ...
:wq
Oh, and waaah, I want my karma back! I'm marked as redundant except for the fact that mine was one of the first posts. Lame!
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
Ok, so we could still run it though WINE (like I do) and include it for the test. While not as tightly integrated as Outlook, it's a robust client that should not have been ignored. As for the closed source arguement...well, ok, he's got a point. Moodwatch is a very useful feature to keep from burning your own ass if you're in a bad mood.
Oh, and where the hell is Lotus Notes? I realize that it's not common as a home app, but it's still a major (pain in the ass) mail client. My company (70,000+ across 5 continents) uses it exclusively. He didn't even so much as mention the program's name in the article.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Let's see how the old generation compares:
:-)
New mail notification: Yes.
Encryption: Yes
Follow-ups: Probably not. I have ever used the build-in calendar.
Forward attached/Inline: Yes
Write HTML mail: No
Multiple accounts: Yes
Customizable keybindings: Yes, extremely
Full index search: No, requires an add-on (nnir)
Advanced searching: Yes
IMAP search: Don't know, I don't use IMAP.
Search folders: Yes
Spam filter: No build in spam filter. Good support for external spam filters, and good general filtering ability.
Handle mailing lists: Yes, if I understand it correctly.
Do not download mail rules: Don't know.
Labels for e-mail: No, not if they are talking about RMAIL style labels.
Create filter from message: No
Emoticons: Yes
LDAP: No
Message threading: Yes
Mail storage format: mbox, babyl, mh, usenet, and more...
Actually I agree with the first poster... Outlook 2003 is the first upgrade that was worth it sinc outlook 97.
Not including it was ridiculous as it is way better than the others from a UI perspective, and it boasts much better performance(than 2000).
Is there nobody else out there who uses [n]mh any more? Seriously.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Ok, I can "plug" external spam/virus detection (I use popfile with evolution, 99.8% accuracy with 1500 mails in a week) and protection (where outlook have a big hole in every possible score, even windows versions of the other mail clients don't executes attachments as easily as outlook, nor hides critical details on them) but that will be evaluation of addons (and if we start to put in the mix from sendmail milters to procmail recipes things will be interesting)
... the ability to use vi as my mail editor. This is why I stuck with Mutt. I would love to use a GUI to naviguate my mail, but I spend much more time composing mail so that is what I decided to optimize. I have been told that you can coax Kmail into using the Kvim Kpart for mail composing (this K- naming convention is getting ridiculous ...), but never got around to try it. Well, I guess I could use both a GUI for navigating my mail and Mutt for composition, but that would get cumbersome ...
I also wish somebody would embbed vim in Web browser. Editing in those damn HTML textarea is a fscking pain !
:wq
hrm. os x mail? outlook 2004? eudora? they don't seem to be anywhere to be found in this roundup. i'm no fan of outlook, but my wife uses 2004 and really likes it - it seems to fix quite a few of her email troubles.
/., where's the review of emacs and pine? or elm, for that matter ;)
and, since this is
Anyone heard of Lotus Notes?...
It has also been pointed out that Outlook was just included because it is so popular. Eudora was not included because it is closed source and not available for other platforms. The same goes for Outlook.
(Opera is available for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.)
Clever signature text goes here.
Sorry, but I really don't think that HTML bloated email is next gen.
It pisses me off to waste time understanding how people are quoting emails in order to find what they actually wrote. I especially like people who quote everything and then insert replies with a supposed different color. Very convenient when I answer with mutt.
It pisses me off to fight with Mozilla Thunderbird in order to remove decorative bloat with pictures added to every mail sent by my boss.
It pisses me off to removely download a 10 Mb large email through a 128Kb link just to see that it's a BMP screenshot send through outlook instead of writing text.
It pisses me off to receive mail with no subject. And then people reply to it and the subject becomes "Re: Tr: Tr: Re: Re: Tr:".
It pisses me off to receive mail that was actually a "reply to" a message that was 2 years old and that has nothing to do with the previous thread.
It pisses me off to receive mails whose content is in the subject with an empty body.
It pisses me off to receive fully quoted emails, including attachments (even when it's BMP screenshots) just when the real text added by the sender is "ok".
The next generation email is probably when people will respect the netiquette again.
{{.sig}}
I also agree; this list is "current generation", not "next generation". The IBM/Lotus team has shown some truly innovative work with Remail. Take a look at the screenshots. FOSS email developers should take a look at this instead of Outlook when adding features to their email clients...
Anyway, full text index searching isn't something I see as viable for a home platform
Well, I may not be the typical home user, but full text indexing is something I would not want to live without. You claim that "your email storage files (psts or whatnot) are already a database", isn't true in most cases. At least not a fully indexed keyword database. With a (un?)reasonable amount of email, a local keyword index isn't going to shave 0.3ms off a search, it'll save hours; especially vs. going to the server for every piece of email and searching through each one. If you're keeping a local cache of all the messages, adding 10% for an index is a no-brainer.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
First, you can't sort email from an IMAP mailbox into another folder. Yes, really. POP sorting works well, but if you use IMAP, then you have to manually move your mail or use server-side sorting.
Second, KDE needs a real LDAP backend. Evolution's LDAP client is fine - you can add, edit, and delete entries as your permissions allow. KAddressBook will only let you search for entries. I maintain a small LAN and I would love for all users to be able to sync their Palms with an OpenLDAP addressbook so that we don't have to push changes to each individual user.
If KMail can get these straightened out, I'd almost consider switching from Gnus. Almost.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hey! What about OSX's email client? It rocks! And it does some pretty slick backflips as well.....drag a file to icon, it launches an email, file attached. Select some text, hit reply, up comes reply w/ ONLY that selected text quoted... Plus less of a chance of virus emails, to say the least.... I love my Powerbook... skeezix
--I do what I can, I work in the dark.
With all these folks going on about how great Outlook 2003 is, no one mentions the price.
If you are an academic, you can get Office 2003 fairly cheap, but for the average shmo that has to buy at retail at bestbuy/amazon, $275 to upgrade old version of office, and $430 for a new one.
I can't think of any features in Office 2003 that are so good I'd give up Star Office and Mozilla Mail and pay the Microsoft tax.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Heh, that was a good one.
get a life and try mutt
"powerful" perhaps but "modern"? no. I expect to be able to EASILY filter email and have it show as a NEW message somewhere else w/o having to go into each folder to find it.
In that way it is outdated and not "powerful" enough for me.
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
I second this. I've never been so productive with e-mail as I was with Pine, thanks to simple keyboard shortcuts and an uncluttered text-based interface. It even stored your sent mail into named folders automatically at the end of each month, something that I've yet to see a 'second-generation' mail client do.
As Pine was basically a Unix client, work has been underway to bring it to the PC platform in the form of PC-Pine. However, this never really worked well, integrated horribly with Windows, never supported POP3 without extra add-ons and workarounds, and development seems to have stalled on it.
I think the moral of this story is 'less is more' - apart from good spam filtering, the basically requirements of e-mail haven't changed since 1998. Who needs all gimmicky functionalities these nextgen clients offer? Do Virtual folders, graphical emoticons and a built-in RSS reader really make anybody more productive?
---- scrm
My first thought was "cool! let's see these new email clients!" But was disapointed to find they are calling boring old clients "next gen." I mean, what do these do different? Not much. It is useful to review them for us, yes, but it's not like they're actually next gen.
*shrug*
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I recently tried to use other mail/news clients that don't make people look funny at you, but quite frankly, they all sucked in comparison, and I switched back. Even without the fancy configuration options, I could not find one that was as usable for reading a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups. I could not find one where I can easily sort mailing lists and newsgroups from various servers into subfolders by topic, or where I can set up the default spellchecking language per group, or easily create scoring rules globally or per topic/group, let alone fix up the mess people create with Outlook Express so that I can actually read them without getting a headache. Actually, it is hard to find programms that let you treat mailing lists and newsgroups and other similar things (like slashdot, which Gnus supports) in the same way - as if I would care about the transport method used! Some programms have some of the features I want, but not one of them had them all.
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 :-)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
lesser than pine, lesser than elm, lesser than GNUs and certainly lesser than the stoopid clients compared - Evolution, Kmail, Opera, Mozilla and (hehe) Outlook. Ofcourse, like most other happy mutt users ("happy" is redundant though), I have installed, configured, used and finally uninstalled them all (thanks god its all over). Outlook (hehe) is an exception, it automatically got uninstalled when I deleted windows.
...
Some of the reasons why I hate all the non-mutt clients:
1. WINDOWS BASED: excellent virus support (is that a feature or a bug?) + (correct me if I'm wrong) hardly any fetchmail / procmail / mbox support. BTW, these are not the only reasons for hating (hehe) outlook
2. GUI BASED: 'normally' heavy on system resources + un-necessary dependence on mouse + need to have an Xserver if you wish to check your mails from your colleague's windows machine (who is another building).
3. Text Based: either not as fast or not as configurable as mutt.
- Mutt loads my 9,000 messages (approx.) mbox faster than pine (haven't compared elm/gnus).
- Searching for a particular messages takes me atleast 1/10th the time on mutt because it allows localizing searches and sorting results. Don't ever challenge any mutt user on this one.
- Pine/Elm are not colorful, which is a very usable feature I believe.
- Threading. Don't know if Pine/Elm have it (please correct me if I'm wrong)?
- Mutt allows keybindings for almost everything. So, when I press F7, I see all messages from my friends; Esc F7 -> everything except from my friends; F8 -> Friends + Family; F9 ->
Reasons why I sometimes hate Mutt:
1. doesn't have news support
2. doesn't work if my keyboard is not plugged in (i.e. solely with a mouse)
3. no group object model (yet to be invented)
Someone should do the study again.
v==hal if
I'm surprised that Outlook Express isn't one of the clients that is reviewed.
Yes, Outlook Express is full of problems, and isn't that great at protecting the end user from viruses, BUT, Outlook is used probably more than any of email client.
By reviewing OE, you can show users (of Windows) the faults of OE, that there are better email clients, and they do exist on Linux, which may give the user 1 more reason to end up ditching Windows.
Personally this is my problem from switching completely over to Linux, I don't feel like spending all of my time finding and testing out programs that are comparable to what I use on Windows.
He left out a BIG feature to compare: blocking attachments. I'm a Thunderbird user, and this is one thing that T'bird lacks unfortunately.
Scott in NC
I might want to an audio notification--but I might want to first check if (a) I'm sleeping, (b) I'm having a higher priority meeting/phone call, (c) vary the audio notification depending on the email, (d) flash the lights if I'm deaf YIC!, (e) page me, (f) ???
Granted if the program is open source, I can do what I want, but that's frequently too much information. I just want documented hooks, not a whole parts list.
Of course, this was a user review.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What about Spruce? I've been using Spruce for years and it's very light weight and fast. It's not at all bloated like all the mailers reviewed in this article.
Call me old fashioned, but I would assume that a mail check interval of zero seconds meant there was zero delay between each mail check...oh, I see, it *does* mean that.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I know this is a bit off topic, but how do /. user recommend to keep old emails? The answer to this question is a big part fo choosing the mail client (at least for me).
I have a ton of old email I like to keep and so far resides on IMAP server. The trouble is that is approaching my 100MB limit and that's all text emails - no big attachments. Most is standard encoding, but a few use alterantive encodings, though no 2bit characters.
Shame the article does not cover web apps. See Oddpost www.oddpost.com and Convea www.convea.com for two of the best.
Mod this up. It's the funniest comment I've read today! Shame it's AC..
I am running Outlook 2002 at home and there are two things I don't like about it:
1. PST support: The interface for setting up the location of your PST file was more intuitive and straightforward in Outlook 2000. They "softened" the interface up too much making more unecessary steps in saying where you want your PST file to be located if it is stored in a nondefault location.
2. Rules not flexible enough: The biggest annoyance with setting up Rules was that I would set specific rules from specific domains to go to specific folders (i.e delete the files (spam is an example)) but the New Message flag which I like to have for normal messages would not disappear. Without getting into VBA this wasn't possible. I think they need to become more flexible in what you can do with rules.
Now SpamAssasin is the shiznit for identifying Spam but all it would do is mark the email as Spam at that point I would have to use a rule to get rid of it. (Is this better in Outlook 2k3?)
What interest me is an IMAP server which can FTI the mail contained within. IMAP seraches are conducted on the server, not the client so an FTI on the client is not very useful. Any ideas?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I actually kicked Mozilla-based clients to the curb after it completely messed up my IMAP inbox when the connection was severed abnormally (pre-UPS on my main workstation) due to 100 year old wiring in my house. It would essentially hold on to messages marked for deletion, but slap subject lines from un-deleted messages on them. So, when I'd open the inbox, I'd get tons of redundant subject lines and have to open each to see which was the imposter before deleting.
When this happened several times, I, too switched to PINE and all of my fond memories of commandline email came back. I can leave my hands on the keyboard and fly through my email in no time.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Yeah, like sex!
Don't think I'm offended - I'm not - but what is it with you people? If it's not Linux, it has to be - Windows? Just thinking about a product - and a platform - that has several times the market share the penguin has.
A while back there was an article on an email client being developed by MIT. Searching for it was pretty useless, so does anyone have a link to the mit site/slashdot article?
I find Outlook 2003's spam filtering spotty. Sometimes it captures a message, sometimes it doesn't.
Of importance to admins will be the fact that Outlook 2003 does not play well with some LDAP servers, and it can sometimes throw funny "errors" (warnings in reality) on IMAP mailboxes that can worry lusers.
The menu organization for configuration/customization/settings for Outlook 2003 is horrible and after using it for months I still have to click through different button paths to find the right panel.
Outlook is also a huge resource hog, but that goes without saying, given that it is a modern kitchen-sink app.
I use xosd, and use the "pipe message to command", combined with a shell script that does:
Alert "$1: $(sed -n '/^Subject:/{s/Subject://;p;q;}' )"
(Alert is my xosd program that pops up messages onto the terminal)
Give me a pipe and I shall script the world!
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
The key to doing this is to remove all the excess crap (I'm not talking about just the gui) that comes with many email clients. Take evolution, for example, it takes eons to get email on that thing, not to mention the fact that recent versions have been less than sastisfactory. Sylpheed otoh, gets the job done with time to spare, and on dialup too. I'm thinking, who needs all that overhead anyway? _You_install_an_email_client_to_read_email!_ People are so concerned with convergence these days that they forget the basics.
Mozilla mail seems to be a good default choice for modern email clients. The integrated spam filter catches most of the spam. Another great thing compared to other Free applications is the way it can handle non standard ports and logins for mail accounts. I have found that many programs don't support authentication for outgoing email, for instance. Couple of issues that I have found pretty annoying though.
I currently have over 2400 messages in my Inbox and about 10,000 filed away from the last 3 years. Since everything is IMAP-based, I use several e-mail clients ranging from Pine for ssh sessions, Outlook for Windows, and Evolution when at a powerful Linux machine. Most of my messages are legit...my ISP automatically filters viruses. In fact I received my first virus yesterday (the one that sends an encrypted .zip file which seems to defeat the ISP virus scanner). They also have SpamAssassin which automatically puts detected SPAM in my "caughtspam" IMAP folder.
Evolution effectively deals with my massive Inbox. I love the quick-filter feature right above the message list.
I can't sympathize with those who have unmanageable e-mail problems due to spam and viruses. Get a different ISP.
Note that my "ISP" is actually the Computer Science department. They handle over 10,000 accounts (lots of guest accounts), > 2 terrabytes of data, and manage about 500 machines (if not more due to clusters). This is all with less than 6 full-time staff and some part-time students.
I use to think that.
Used pine till about 2 years ago, then mutt.
At work I've been using outlook, and I came to appreciate the ability to open multiple windows at the same time.
This alone made the switch worth it to me.
Throw in easy attachments (double click, drag and drop) and it becomes very persuasive to move to a GUI client.
The only thing I want from evolution now is to be able to edit an email in place.
That is take the reply from someone, cut stuff out and save it back into my inbox.
Mulberry is very good, very capable and compliant with standards. I use it on Windows mostly, and run it on Linux and Solaris sometimes. It's ability to utilize multiple IMAP accounts is unmatched which is great for email junkies. A lot of people will be turned off by its lack of skinning or themes features. Mulberry uses its own private widget set, which usually closely resembles the native widget set of whatever platform Cyrusoft has ported it to.
;)
Of course, Linux doesn't really have a native widget set, and the Motif/Borland-ish buttons and borders will probably throw off your desktop's Fung Shwei, no doubt. Unless somebody comes up with a Mulberry-cum-Motif desktop theme that matches Cyrusoft's look and feel... Tnen you can make everything look that way.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time.
It is $109 here. That's not quite "hundreds of dollars".
Can anyone be pro-Linux and not write such uninformed dribble? Lately, I have really started to notice why a lot of people are just anti-Linux for no good reason. Everything they hear about it comes from maroons like this author.
Believe me, folks. Be responsible when posting to the web. If you act like a zealot, people will automatically and subconciously avoid things you tout on principle.
Outlook 2003 is none of the things claimed...except expensive.
The reviewer's inability to find these simple, basic pre-installed options in Outlook calls into question the usability of Outlook as an email client. Digging 4 levels deep into the configuration dialogs isn't exactly 'simple'.
I think the review says it doesn't import outlook.
I didn't have any trouble importing my email with evolution.
Re: PC-Pine
> integrated horribly with Windows
If you mean 'precisely limited', OK. But PC-Pine knows about attachment types, and happily launches attachments such as pictures. It even lets me edit URLs before launch. It's not too happy with launching executables, though, but that's hardly a bad thing.
> never supported POP3 without extra add-ons
> and workarounds
Current one seems to do this just fine. You just have to tell it that it's a POP mailbox, because it is going to assume it is IMAP.
> and development seems to have stalled on it.
Pine >>> Ver 4.58
PC-Pine >>> Ver 4.58
Check again, please.
This is the MOST configurable, standards-compliant email client out there. Go check it out and be amazed. It offers all the functionality of Outlook with none of the worries. Now it included a Bayseian filter system built right in. This product can't be beat!
-eric
I'm actually struggling with this at the moment because I have a wife with a packrat personality who has been out of town for the last month. She has >66,000 messages, >1.3GB, of new e-mail sitting in her account on my NetBSD box (which fetches her e-mail frequently so she doesn't overflow her limit at the ISP). She also has 15GB of old messages lying about. I have so far been unable to find a client that can deal with her. She runs Windows.
I just switched her to Mozilla after it became clear that Netscape wasn't cutting the mustard. Mozilla isn't doing very well either:
I switched her to Netscape after getting tired of pulling my hair out with Outlook Express, which:
If anyone has suggestions for mail clients that can deal with someone that has a morbidly packrat personality disorder, I'm open to suggestion.
Granted it's not JUST an email client, it's a full client/server setup with groupware and unified messaging, but FirstClass is pretty awesome. If you're using Novell or MS solutions, check out FC. Better by at least an order of magnitude by pretty much any criterion you care to name.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
And the complaint about how expensive it is, and hard to upgrade, is just not true. You can get Outlook 2003 for less than $100.
How expensive $100 is relative. IMO, it's very expensive (compared to what I pay for other hardware and software).
Maybe it should say "free email clients" and compare it with outlook express.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Mutt seems to be the geek favorite of mail clients. I like the sound of its flexibility, except for the fact that it doesn't support the mouse. (Mutt users cry foul at this point) but aren't Vim and Emacs doing fine at this point with mouse support? If you run Emacs from console, you get normal Emacs. If you run it from an xterm, you get XEmacs. Can we not do the same thing with Mutt?
;)
If it's already been done, then after you flame me, tell me where to look for it
The article claims that Evolution supports only mbox format. This is incorrect. I haven't been able to find a way to force maildir as the default format, but you can click on any folder and convert it to maildir format. Importing maildir format is as simple as dragging and dropping the directories into Evolution's directory.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Sigh... back in the day, including an MS product in a slashdot review would have required asbestos gloves. I guess times have changed. ;-)
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
It looks to me like Opera's M2 already does a lot of this. M2 is definitely not current generation, since it completely breaks with traditional folders. It's one of the first to do mfull mail indexing and automatic sorting.
Clever signature text goes here.
...and they tested Outlook XP when Outlook 2003 is already out and sp1 for the suite is expected by May? This isn't a comparison of the next generation of e-mail clients, it's a comparison of current e-mail clients and even that claim is suspect.
Mozilla does more than "Audio only" - it will also pop up a small systray window at you.
It's annoying, and one of the first things that I turn off.
Edit -> Preferences -> Mail & Newsgroups -> Notifications. It's right there.. even in Moz 1.5
After having used Outlook for quite a while, I've gone through the same thing with Thunderbird. In fact, I still can't seem to switch between HTML and plaintext email composition without changing my overall composition preferences, which is buried at least four or five clicks away from the composition window.
I'm not sure if it's a config design issue as much as it is a familiarity issue. I dumped Outlook because of the unease I had with its security, and Outlook 2002's spotty compatibility with Windows XP. Thunderbird is better in some ways, but it definitely has its downsides, not the least of which is the painful configuration of multiple accounts and general preferences.
-Greg
The author numerous times describes M2 as being for those who "want to take advantage of advanced features, but without the hassle of configuration". However, he fails to mention two words, which seem to have a special magic here at Slashdot:
it Just Works.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
> ...requires you to download entire messages...
Sounds like something else is screwy on either the server or client side. I've used Entourage since it was first released, and it has never required me to download entire messages via IMAP. Not only do I routinely receive just the headers of my IMAP messages, but I've not experienced any other related IMAP weirdness whatsoever.
That isn't to suggest that Entourage's IMAP implementation is flawless -- it's not. When Entourage is revved this spring along with Office/Mac 2004, hopefully IMAP protocol handling will be among the improvements.
This guy that wrote this article doesn't really have any clue. He said he is looking at the Next Generation of E-mail clients yet he is a version behind with Outlook. Also many of the things he said wasn't included in Outlook have been included in Outlook since Outlook 97. He probably didn't even look, but I don't know how you couldn't have seen them because they are right on the title bar or in the admin options.
:: Yes :: Tools > Options > E-mail Options > When Forwarding a Message > ** :: Yes :: Right Click Toolbar > Commands > Keyboard Button :: Yes :: Mailboxes are automatically indexed, as searches are done :: Yes :: It does have this I actually did it a few mins ago :: Yes :: It definitly searchs folders, but if he means a predefined pattern search Outlook 2003 does that too :: Yes :: Right click in XP and greater on a message and press create rule automatically :: No :: Okay so he got 1 out of 6 not bad.
Forward attached/Inline
Customizable keybindings
Full index search
IMAP search
Search folders
Handle mailing lists
Emoticons
All of these are based on my Outlook 2000 version so unless they removed features in a new version, which I doubt, this guy didn't put much work into this article.
He has lost all credibility with me.
C'mon. Real men use vi on /var/mail/user
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Even though I don't have to defend him, it is extremely easy to do so: Eudora was excluded because it is closed-source and Win32 only. Outlook is closed-source and Win32 only. So it could have been excluded only on that basis.
But since it is the most widely used, he chose to include it.
HOWEVER: It is not the latest version which is the most widely used. So he included the most widely used version. The fact is that Outlook is extremely expensive, so people won't be upgrading any time soon.
To sum up, he excluded the latest version of Outlook because it is closed-source and Win32 only. He only included the most widely used version to compare it to the competition.
I don't understand what you Microsoft fanboys are crying "foul, foul" for. His decision not to include the latest version of Outlook can easily be justified when you look at what kind of clients he included in the review.
There is no FUD here. There is no hypocrisy. There may be bias, but at least he's clear on what he does and why he does it.
That cannot be said of Microsoft fanboys.
Clever signature text goes here.
Our firm is discussing the possibility of setting up a "caller ID" type of system.
Then your firm is trying to re-invent the wheel.
This idea is not new and has been around for a while. It's called "challenge/response" and has already been implemented by ISPs, corporations, and individuals. There are a number of freely available packaged solutions that are much more robust than anything a single IT department is likely to produce. But if you're intent on rolling your own, you should probably read:
Proper principles for Challenge/Response anti-spam systems.
Handles logging onto secure servers, enough commands to run your own automatic mail list with subscribe/unsubscribe etc, multiple accounts AND automatic mail runs every X seconds for us busy pr0n list subscribers!
Bought it. Worth it.
http://www.pmmail2000.com/
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
In fact, I still can't seem to switch between HTML and plaintext email composition without changing my overall composition preferences, which is buried at least four or five clicks away from the composition window.
That's funny....when I want compose a message in HTML in Outlook XP, I simply click Format->HTML in the command menu of the message...
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
I am sorry for any and all mistakes made in the article, as I also said under the "Final words" section. I will naturally correct them based on feedback (of which I have received plenty).
shift click on the compose button. if your settings are plain text then you'll compose in html. and vice versa
Great little tool...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have tried a few mail programs, and I am forced to use Outlook at work. It is actually handy there, simply because of the scheduling aspect.
But at home, it is pine all the way. I am about speed and function. I can ssh into the box from anywhere and run the mail client locally. I don't have to wait to download any messages. The only caveat is attachments. But if I need to view them, I can save them off and download them. I would rather choose when to download something than wait for everything to download.
So my emails exist in two places - on my ISPs mail server, and on my home machine. If for some reason I can't access pine, I have webmail via my ISP. I not only have one interface, I have the same interface, and I know that there aren't various copies of my emails floating around. If I have net access, I can get PuTTY very quickly and be into my server in minutes. From anywhere. It is sweeeet.
People have laughed at me for still using Pine, but email is email. HTML in email is evil. Viruses don't harm me, I don't get flashing banners and crap. I haven't seen anything in another email client to cause me to even think about switching.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Did I trip over a spacetime anomoly on the way to their site and fall into 1993?
Seriously, those icons look like they're straight out of Windows 3.1. It's a slight visual improvement over Pine, but they're certainle not going to make anyone want to give up evolution or mozilla mail.
Nothing you do is going to be fast when your mail database is that big. But the most efficient mail program I know of is the (now ancient) MH mail system. You could probably get it to run under cygwin. The problem with all other mail systems is that they're database systems, and you've got a database several orders of magnitude larger than what they're designed to work with. MH just deals in files and directories, so you get whatever the OS can do, performance-wise.
I guess that reviewing a beta version of Evolution counts as cutting edge, but it's sort of an apples and oranges comparison with stable releases of other products. The current (stable) version supports importing mailboxes as well as emoticons (for what they're worth).
And, as mentioned elsewhere, calling Outlook 2002 a cutting edge mail client isn't very accurate. Outlook 2003 is a much better program.
-h-
I would like to have seen either a grade for each app or ranking them from 1 - 5, best to last overall... btw, thunderbird rules :)
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
What there is active?
Active mail would be mail that has the program in it. It doesn't involve servers validating/processing messages, but messages doing stuff to clients.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
In that case- I grossly under-estimated the legitimacy of the author, and his intentions.
No reason to lie.
I'm amazed that no one has pointed this out yet, but the real killer app of the Internet is the World Wide Web. Before the Web, the Internet was a backwater (even though e-mail had been around for years). Once the web came along, the Internet exploded.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Were you paying attention? View|BCC. That's not exactly four levels deep.
I deal with inboxes with 5,000-7,000 messages - not immense by today's standards (still boggled by the guy whose wife has 66,000 pending inbox messages) but large enough.
George Santayana keeps invading my consciousness. Most of today's mail readers are blindly taking the road that I abandoned 25 years ago. I don't want to read my mail using a database system. I want my mail to be a full-fledged member of UNIX society, not locked up inside a single application.
At RAND, we had a homebrew mail system that worked about like today's readers: mail was kept in a file, with a sidebar index file for quickly locating individual messages. It fell out of sync regularly, but on those dog-slow machines, rebuilding the index file was a coffee-break operation.
Norm Shapiro should be credited with the insight that UNIX already provided the cleanest solution to mail storage: messages are files, folders are directories. He and Bruce Borden hammered things out over about six months of conversations, then Bruce wrote the first version of the MH system over a weekend.
MH is ancient. There is no doubt about this. The original MH is as dead as T. Rex; people use NMH now. It's almost all text-only. It does have a MIME wart on the side, but just barely. If you want to use mice, scroll wheels, and other "modern" goodies you need to use a front end like EXMH.
BUT: 99.95% of all the legit email I get is text-only. "showproc" can deal with MIME mail that just asks for a different font, and EXMH does understand basic HTML. You can create MIME attachments if you need to.
And it's the skip-loader of email systems. It doesn't care if there are 8,000 messages in a folder. It just works. And it's fast.
On the Mac I use Mail.app. It does work (mostly, except when Apple is having one of its periodic days where WebDAV doesn't work, and they're in denial [nothing wrong here, move along please]). It has nice filtering features. It has threading.
It also feels like a toy. I get the feeling that if I pointed it at an 8,000-message inbox, it'd fold like a cheap suit. Certainly it'd be tough to deal with that many messages through that interface.
For the big time mail flows, I'm sticking with MH. Thanks again, Norm and Bruce.
Hey, the author knows his stuff. Didn't you see his other review where he showed Linux's 2.6 kernal blows DOS 3.0 out of the water in multitasking ability?
Gnus is the way of the future! If it ain't got fill-paragraph-or-region, it ain't worth using!
(What I really want is a "modern" email client with an elisp engine so I can add my emacs hooks. Until then, gnus lives on in my little world)
I think using filters in pine is fairly easy. It is a little intimidating, because you set everything at once (rather than having, say, a drop-down box to say which part of the header you're filtering on or which flag you're setting).
I have setup filters that retain the new/read/deleted/etc. tags & keep them in my inbox, but will colorcode the subject line differently based on whether the person is in my addressbook or is using my mailserver or if it is from a mailing list I'm on. This sounds similar to what you want to do. I could've just as easily sent them to a different box & set pine to alert me when new messages were in a given folder.
I didn't have to use any esoteric tricks to do this. It just WORKS.
Pegasus has been around for MORE than a dozen years and has most of the features in the 'review'. For a long time it probably was the most widely used Windows email client.
If he didn't know about it, then that tells me his knowledge of the subject is sufficiently limted as to disregard his opinions. In other words, however well intentioned, he didn't know what he was talking about.
You id say you did not mind being moded down as a troll right?
just kidding, i did moderate it as interesting.
So there are such huge leaps in 2003 that 2002 is not good enough...seems like I should just wait to buy till 2004, or even 2005.
I want to know how Pine stands up!
sylpheed, I think it is on par with eudora..
That would be bug 140800 ("switch for plain text/html in compose window"). You'll need to copy-n-paste the URL as Bugzilla doesn't accept referrers from Slashdot.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I never understood why the Netscape/Mozilla mail clients have tried to push a user with multiple accounts to share a common smtp server.
Also, in the Thunderbird, why can't filters and junkmail rules easily be shared between multiple accounts?
The above two issues keep pushing me back to older mail clients. I've never been able to figure out the motivation behind these design choices, any it continually irks me beyond what would be considered to be a rational level of anger over such a simple issue.
- Devios
Outlook 98 was a joy compared to Outlook 97... at least from a developers perspective (creating _functional_ VB-based MAPI Forms instead of having to build COM based ones)... But you're right, from a user perspective 98 was no improvement...
Let's keep those Frogs off our American site. Filthy English need to go back to Scotland.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Irrelevant and not funny.
1. Ease of use should not impede functionality, it should enhance functionality.
2. Development environments and user environments are not comparable. No wonder linux isn't #1 on the desktop when most Linux and Windows nerds (can there be a Windows nerd?) can't grasp such a simple concept, which the Mac and NeXT guys have understood since the beginning.
Here's a gun. Now, the man who blocked your hat did a bad job --- Quick! Shoot yourself!!! It's your hat, so it's YOUR FAULT!
For chrissakes there are plenty of things to complain about in Pegasus (David Harris's attitude for one) without blaming the app for your own inability to read and your colleagues' incompetence at configuration.
All these new fangled email clients just dont cut it. I want a client that will automatically open and run attached scripts in html emails and allow them full access to all the mailing and address book functions. I want a client that will let the true url in a link be hidden so i can be tricked into clicking on it and entering personal information, but most importantly, i want the company who makes this software to never be mentioned in any bad way, because i want to buy stock in them and i dont want it going down!
So any suggestions?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I still use it every day- it does everything I need in an emacsy sort of a way (which those of us working mostly from a command line like- we like a lot!!!)
I've gone through the same thing with Thunderbird. In fact, I still can't seem to switch between HTML and plaintext email composition without changing my overall composition preferences, which is buried at least four or five clicks away from the composition window.
Thanks, for the update on Outlook. I've only got Outlook 2000 here at work and that is why I wasn't aware of this feature in 2002+.
;-). And also for someone (Did I just volunteer?) to add a similar filter to Evolution for my home use.
Now all I need is for the powers that be to upgrade the company off of Windows 2000 to the latest and greatest
You forgot webbrowser.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I would have to disagree.. Are you saying that pine supports IMAP better than mulberry? Mulberry supports everything except IMAP IDLE pretty much. Plus it supports other cool things like IMSP, ACAP and SIEVE.. What I hate about most IMAP clients (GUI ones anyway) is the fact that it still performs local searching instead of doing a search through the IMAP server (where all your messages are anyway).. This means that in order to do a full text search of all of my messages, I have to download the full bodies of every message to the local machine. Kind of defeats the purpose of IMAP..
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
On the other hand, html mail (when sent to strangers) is already considered impolite according to netiquette, since it wastes bandwidth and is unreadable for a considerable part of email users.
RTF mail, viewed from that angle, is the email equivalent of walking up to someone and slapping them in the face.
I like Evolution. But it has proven unstable, at least when using the MS/exchange plug-in (which
my employer has licensed). So we tried to get
support...
Ximian says, in effect, that you have to stop
updating your system from your distro (RedHat,
SuSE, etc.) and instead use their distribution
of gnome and other libraries exclusively.
What they actually say is that they only support
Evolution if you also Ximian Desktop, or at
least their home-brewed versions gnome, glib2, etc. available on their server (e.g., using
red-carpet). The catch: This causes massive
RPM version conflicts because their versions
use different version number/names,
and the auto-update tools provided by RedHat
or SuSE don't work any longer.
I understand their problem: They have to assume
certain updates & features in external libraries
and can't test with all possible combinations.
So they say "get everything from us". Of course,
if another application vendor did the same thing
it would be impossible to use both applications!
What do other app vendors do (e.g., in the Sun
world)? They spell out which patches or updated
library versions *from the OS vendor* must be
installed to have a supported system. I wish
Ximian did that for Evolution!
mail.app for the Mac OS X has the capability of connecting directly to an Exchange server---how come there aren't any programs out there that can do this as seamlessly as mail.app does? Actually, come to think of it what other third party app can fetch MS Exchange mail?
Now I still have to deal with each piece of spam individually (although via an intermediary), and to get the email I WANT, I have to interact with the computer TWICE. Thanks for the time savings.
Sean
Unfortunately, I've got Outlook 2000 and the closest I can get to that is to manually specify all of the names in my Contacts addressbook. I'm glad to hear that this feature has been added to later versions though.
"This is not a "next-generation" email client review if it does not include Microsoft Outlook 2003"
Okay, KDE, Ximian, and Mozilla each offered the reviewer a free copy of their email programs, so that he could write the review. I don't know about Opera, but I'm guessing the cost is minimal for a copy of the program.
Now, unless Microsoft offered him a copy of Outlook2003 free for review, then why should that be included? Do any of the hardware sites pay full-price to review things? Would they buy a product that they disliked, just to put a review on their website?
If someone charges $88 for their email program, it's not going to get reviewed as often as someone who gives away free copies. Simple as that.
The article says mozilla's new mail notification is audio only. I am using thunderbird on windows, and it often pop's up a little message in the bottom right of the screen.
ONLY on windows, sadly. The audio doesn't even work for me on linux any more.
I'd like to hear from someone that has switched over to GNUMail, the open source Mail.app workalike. Is it stable? How does it stack up to other open source mail readers?
shift click on the compose button
Gee, why didn't I think of that?
On the webmail front Ilohamail rocks! Being that it is webmail it of course doesn't have all the features of something like KMail but it has the important ones (or they're in the works). One important one that I know a lot of slashdotters need is spell check.
I still use Outlook at work because everyone else does and I need to share calendars, public folders, etc. but I use Ilohamail everywhere else. With technology like PHP look to see some webmail apps begin to close the gap in functionality.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I spent a couple days trying to make Mail work on my Father's computer. Everytime it was launched it hung (and had to be killed).
The Apple support forums are FULL of people with similar problems. I was truly amazed at the number of people having serious problems (ie hangs and freezes everytime they try to use Mail).
Finally I just installed Thunderbird (which my father seems happy with.
Looks like the site is down due to slashdotting already. Is it mirrored somewhere?
Evolution supports a variety of formats as a local message store, but defaults to mbox.
I think you are disagreeing with my comment on Pine being even better than Mulberry. They are both excellent at IMAP. I just like some things that Pine does better.
I didn't make this page, but I agree with most of what Nancy has to say.
As far as I know, we *do* support users running Evolution on systems not running XD2. I don't know where you got the idea that we didn't. (of course, I'm *just* a developer, so what do I know?)
The other option is to build from source... or get an Evolution package from your distro vendor.
Functional? The form enviornment in Outlook 98 & 2000 was a buggy, crippled piece of crap.
Trolls! Thousand's of 'em!
"the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla"
Exactly what percentage of the population uses one of these for e-mail? 2%? 5%? I'm willing to put money on less than 10%. Outlook/Exchange and Notes/Domino are extremely popular in corporate settings, and I dare say that most home users probably use Webmail, Outlook Express, Eudora, or Mail.app.
"The only reason Outlook was even included was to serve as a reference with what is commonly available for the majority of users (which still run Windows unfortunately) today.
Using the latest Office 2003 would not have done most of them any good, as upgrading can cost hundreds of dollars (or more!), and might not be an option for some time. After reading the review they can, however, immediately decide it is time to try out one of the alternatives, several of which are multi platform.
Also, I only had Office XP at hand when writing the review, which only helps to better illustrates my point I think."
WTF Batman!? How can you possibly compare a version of Thunderbird released in the last few months against a version of Outlook that was released in MAY OF 2001? That was almost THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO. If you can't foot the bill to upgrade, then maybe you shouldn't be doing the review. I mean jeezus, maybe I should start comparing Windows XP to Redhat 5.0 in terms of usability. That'd be a fair comparison! It's not like XP is newer than RH 5 or anything.
The big hole in the list is sylpheed-claws - it is the best Mail client for IMPA IMHO.
The Bat! , is the best e-mail client out there, period, try it and you will see why. /Happy user
I exclusively use mutt for my email on Windows XP. The cygwin port is excellent. It's not even necessary to run it off of the bash shell. I created a cmd.exe batch file and modified /etc/muttrc to find the help file. Using mutt that way is much faster than running it through bash.
People should give Stat Labs Bloomba a try, it has amazing search capabilities and their new version 2.0 looks to be coming out soon with some nice enhancements.
Bloomba
Bloomba 2.0 Features
So you're saying email won't be good until everyone does it the same way you do it.
Many people view the things you complain about as perfectly acceptable ways to do email. Other things you just complain about are just nitpicky. I mean, I'm supposed to take the time to remove "Re:" stuff just so you don't have to glance ay it and ignore it?
Actually, it's an un-press-released public beta. They had a bad experience with the 7.00 public betas, so they don't advertise betas anymore.;)
Windows
*nix
They are announced on the forums and in the opera.beta newsgroup.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
All true, but this still doesn't change the fact that formatting in email is occaisionally handy. Just don't give your secretary enough spare time to devise her own neat little coloring scheme. She puts every line in a different color and font, and I'm the one who gets 3 years probation for hitting her with a keyboard.
"Note that Outlook has been included for completeness, both because of its popularity and for use as a reference. I did not include Eudora, even though the latest version does include unique features such as a Content Concentrator, Contextual Filing, MoodWatch and Email Usage Stats, as it is both closed source and not available for any UNIX platforms."
From the very beginning he makes it clear that Outlook is just there for one reason - because it's the most popular/widely used client. At the same time he explains that Eudora is not included because it is closed-source and not available for any UNIX. The same goes for Outlook. It is Win32 only, and not available for UNIX.
Again, he only included it as a reference. He included what most people are using, and then listed the e-mail clients that were actually the focus of the review/overview.
He clearly states his intentions before the review begins. Did you even bother to read the review - even the introduction - before shouting about FUD or hypocrisy?
Clever signature text goes here.
Mutt is better than any of these.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
First, go get antiword and elinks .mailcap file and put .muttrc file.
To read HTML under mutt put something like
text/html; elinks -dump-charset 8859-1 -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
inside your
auto_view text/html
inside your
To read word attachments from inside mutt put
application/msword; antiword -m 8859-1.txt '%s'; copiousoutput; description=3D"Microsoft Word Text"; nametemplate=3D%s.doc
and
auto_view application/msword
respectively.
Note that you can even change the default charset in the commands and it works perfectly!!!
In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla, and their usability in dealing with large number of messages.
Although the world would be a better place if nobody did use Outlook, unfortunately, it is by far the most popular client.
I've been using The Bat for years and can't imagine something else as flexible while easy to use.
Since he didn't include it, I will. I won't do one for Pine or mutt, because they aren't GUI, which was one of his criteria.
n t/save/view/speak a message or toggle an alert.
/ spell check a selection. Sends rich/plain/html mail. Plain by default!!!!
MULBERRY:
YES Mail import
YES New mail notification
Yes Encryption
No Follow-ups
Yes Forward attached/Inline
Yes Write HTML mail
Yes Multiple accounts
No Customizable keybindings
Yes Full index search
Yes Advanced searching
Yes IMAP search
Yes Search folders
No4 Spam filter
Yes Handle mailing lists
Yes Do not download mail rules
Yes Labels for e-mail
Yes Create filter from message
No Emoticons
Yes LDAP
Yes Message threading
mbx Mail storage format
"Mulberry is a high-performance, scalable, and graphically groovy internet mail client. It uses the IMAP (IMAP4rev1, IMAP4, and IMAP2bis) protocol for accessing mail messages on a server, the standard SMTP protocol for sending messages, and does lots and lots of things with MIME parts for mixed text and "attachments" of many different types of files and data. Version 3 introduces support for a new optional 3-pane window mode, a spell-as-you-type capability, as well as many other features, enhancements and fixes!"
It handles IMAP better than the alternatives that are reviews & also does POP3. It can communicate over SSL or TLS. It has NTLM and MD5 authentication. It can use LDAP, but also the wonderful IMSP or ACAP for storing user settings and addressbooks on a remote server. It has a PGP+SMIME plugin
It is available for a nominal fee for Mac, Win, Linux, and Solaris.
Mail import:It can import mbx formatted local mail.
Account setup: It has both simple and advance setips of multiple accounts that can be stored in identities.
Filters: By clicking on Make Rule, you can make a filter for ANY header field, the size of the message, flags, or the body based on if they contain or don't contain certain text, if they are greater or less than a certain size, or if flags are set or unset. Filters can set flags, move/copy/forward/reply/bounce/reject/expunge/pri
Address book: The addressbook can automatically save adresses as you send or receive messages. It can also import addressbooks. The IMSP/ACAP support is great.
Searching: Multiple rules can be applied and multiple boxes (local or remote) can be searched.
Reading messages: Optional columns include: to/from/reply to/sender/cc/subject/thread/date sent/date received/size/flags/number/smart address/attachments/parts/matching/disconnected. It can be sorted on any of these.
The preview pane is normally used to read messages, but double-clicking on a message brings it up in its own window. HTML/text/rich mail can be viewed as formatted/plaintext/source. The Raw message can also be viewed. Quoted text is colored by default. This is configurable.
No calendar integration--This is EMAIL, not groupware.
No usenet--this is EMAIL, not NNTP
No AIM/ICQ--This is EMAIL, not IM
Composing messages: Replying is great--reply to sender/all/reply-to/none. It lists all email addresses in Reply-to/sender/to/cc tags & lets you individually modify all of these. Quote a selection or the whole message or none of it. The composer lets you see To/cc/bcc/subject/parts (including attachments/copy to/the identity you're using. I actually wish it wold let you see a few more header fields. Add signature to all emails or click on a button to add it. You can request a receipt. You can postpone a message. On-the-fly spell checking. Paste, paste as quote. Quote/unquote/requote/wrap/unwrap/cut/copy/delete
IMAP: IMAP is better than any of the other products. It was built as an IMAP client first.
Encryption: Plugin for PGP, GPG, and S/MIME. The integration of this plugin is great. I think it is only a plugin because of export restrictions & the fact that many don't need this feature.
If someone charges $88 for their email program, it's not going to get reviewed as often as someone who gives away free copies. Simple as that.
Actually, I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that in one year's time, the total number of reviews for Outlook 2003 will far outnumber the combined number of reviews for KDE, Ximian, Mozilla and whatever other poorly named e-mail toys the open source crowd is playing with. Face it -- when it comes to market share, MS is the player on the block and to simply ignore it shows an intellectual laziness that calls into question his whole review...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
And here I am with no mod points... *sigh*
Emerald Astrology
I'd guess that if he asked Microsoft, they would've sent him a copy to review.
He could've also used Microsoft's Trial CD. $8 shipping is all it takes.
You're old fashioned. :-) I can see it going both ways but I've almost always seen it used to negate something. Like in SpamAssassin, the way to negate the checking of a particular rule is to set it's score to 0. Anyhow, I really thought that was odd. I couldn't believe it when I saw it.
Lotus Notes is an application platform. The insurance agents would have have local copies ("replicas") of the application that includes business logic. The data is synched ("replicated") with the corporate servers whenever the PC is connected to the intranet. The application could easily mail notifications to the office workers who process the claims, but that does not require the mail client to be overloaded (or even using Notes for email.) Lotus Notes started as a secure application platform, then added email as another application with some special code to handle routing.
MS needed something that could claim to compete with Lotus Notes for the rich thin-client marketspace. Where Lotus Notes added email as another application on a secure platform, MS overloaded their email platform with an application platform. This small difference in philosophy has allowed MSOutlook to become the Virus Distribution System we all know and hate. The insurance agents use MSOutlook to create messages using Forms, and the client could synch with the corporate servers. The MSOutlook Forms are very limited when compared to what is possible with Lotus Notes. MS "synchronization" is like overwriting a file; Lotus Notes Replication is very like merging patches in CVS: only the changed fields are updated, so there is no conflict if 2 people change different fields on the same record.
MS's marketing machine has made the products seem to have similar capabilities, but the development effort is much greater and the applications have less functionality when using the MS platform.
- Every Lotus Notes application starts as a database with integrated security. Every MSOutlook application starts as secure as internet email.
- The business logic is updated every time Lotus Notes replicates. How do you update the MSOutlook clients?
- The Lotus Notes address book requires a password from every program before granting access. How many viruses and other programs read the MSOutlook address book?
- Lotus Notes asks for verification that you want to allow some code to read the file system. MSOutlook viruses email random files from your PC to your friends.
The philosophy behind these systems is so different that it is difficult to remember that they are trying to solve similar issues.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
while SquirrellMail wins hands-down every time, it does not even come close to giving the power and flexibility of a dedicated email client
Web mail is slow and that is a problem. But there is nothing about the medium that prevents the creation of a powerful mail client.
My mail usage is about 70% SquirrelMail and 30% Mutt. I put up with slugishness in SquirrelMail becuase of one important *feature*.
SquirrelMail gives me continueously updated unread and total message counts for all 40 of my active mail folders. No other mail client, web mail or gui seems to do this. I have heard that Mutt can be made to do this in the status line, but no status line is big enough for 40 mail folders.
Being able to tell where all my unread mail is is a huge advantage. I bounce out to Mutt for a couple of features that aren't often found in dedicated mail clients either.
1) Mutt allows me to type in an arbitrary value in the From: line. It is irritating that a majority of gui mail clients forbid this.
2) Mutt allows me to define "self" as a pattern. Every other mail client I have tried, including SquirrelMail, has required me to enter each every possible address seperately. That's ok for a static list of 3 or 4 but I have over 200 and with my tagging system, I invent a new one every few days.
Hi,
;-)
2 29 2004.tar.bz2
I'm the guy who erm... "ported" all those Aqua icons to KDE. Basically I scoured the Web for months collecting the icons, and fitted them where they would appropriately belong in a KDE theme, named them properly and packaged them up. This was a LOT of work.
But I'm still working on it. Since I've recently acquired my own Mac (15" PowerBook, pure sex) I'm converting more icons than ever before.
Is it a blatant violation of Apple's copyrights? Yep. Did using an Aqua theme for a few months convince me that Apple knows about good design and lead to my own decision to purchase one of their $2000 laptops? Yep.
I think I'm helping them advertise in a way. Besides, they are using KHTML, so KDE users can enjoy their art too, eh?
Anyway, the most recent updated package is here. Enjoy. (take out the space that slashcode inserts)
http://seraphim.ecsis.net/~gregday/AQUA-ICONS-0
I didn't see anyone post about outlook's threading, or lack thereof. I read a bunch of news groups and I cannot stand mails sent by outlook/outlook Express users. MS still has not gotten it right in outlook 2003. I sent a few test emails to the lists I subscribe to with outlook 2003 and the messages show up all over the place. Threading is a very usefull feature. I don't think outlook 2003 is that bad overall, though maybe overkill for a home user. However, its threading makes me want to throw it out a window.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You're missing nothing: MSN is a piece of shit. The fact that so many people use it is excellent evidence of Microsoft's monopolistic practices. If it weren't bundled with XP, everyone would choose a better client. :(
For me, this is the killer feature for my email client.
I don't read my email on my Palm, but having to only write down email addresses in one place would be, to say the least, a Good Thing.
I guess I'm surprised this is not a more common feature people look for.
And no, I won't use Outlook. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
[I]n one year's time, the total number of reviews for Outlook 2003 will far outnumber the combined number of reviews for KDE, Ximian, Mozilla
So you're saying it'll be OK to review a 2-year old email client in 2005?
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
it just strikes me as odd that everyone always rehashes the same old ideas about email and quibble over meaningless details. could we please stop thinking in terms of folders?
b .html
your email in a database, all folders are virtual folders, i.e. views on the whole email database, more details at:
http://furius.ca/techdoc/projects/email-as-d
Get Mozex at http://mozex.mozdev.org/ and you can use Vim to edit Textareas ... the basic html component for contributing to blogs, etc.
More fun than winning arguments...