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."

Comments

Next killer app?

[teklob]

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.

Re:Next killer app?

[skinny.net]

Email is not the next killer app; it is the killer app. I just emailed by boss and a client about a bad account number. Those people may not be in the office now. I've never met the client and I'm not about to ask for his Yahoo! ID.

I sent new documentation to a dozen of my coworkers yesterday; same story there.

I'm glad IM works exclusively for you. While IM use is growing rapidly, email use is as well.

I get no spam at work after 8 years. I get plenty at home, of course. If my company had it's own internal IM that didn't require public servers out of our control, it may be feasible, but our information will NOT be stored on MSN or Yahoo servers, PERIOD. There is simply no substitute for email. Yet. It will be the client and not the core concept that gets updated.

Re:Next killer app?

[afidel]

God if you think there is no use for active email then you are VERY naive. There are companies with entire vertical apps built around Outlook/Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino. One good example was an insurance company, they had the forms available to the field agents who would fill them out at the scene of an accident or while doing the apraisal. Once they got back to the office they sync their email client and the forms get sent to the server. There some scripts checked things for requirements and spit them back to the agent if they were lacking. Then business logic could decide if they went to accounting for a check to be written or sent to other departments for review, by say fraud investigators, or actuaries, or a VP if the dollar amount was very large, etc. Do I think MS did a terrible job in implementing Outlook, hell yes I do. Do I think their general goal was bad, not at all.

Where's Mail.app

[CmdrChillupa]

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.

Gnus/Emacs

[yoghurt]

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.

The biggest missing feauture is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:outlook 2k3

[cbreaker]

No, you're right about that. Outlook 2003 is a very nice, well organized, fast e-mail client. Great features and less cluttered then previous versions.

I hope that the other mail clients can achieve a similar level of functionality and interface attributes.

Gone are the days where a simple pop client will get the job done for me. I need a more robust package. Outlook certainly fills this position, but it's not cheap and it only runs on Windows.

I'd buy Outlook 2003 if it was available for Linux.