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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.
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/
Is called mutt...
RTFA! They review Outlook.
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.
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.
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
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 problem with Outlook is that it is not an email client, but rather an Exhange client. For example, there are plenty of simple IMAP functions Outlook does not support (at least in Office XP version that I mucked around with) such as saving sent mail to an IMAP folder instead of an Exchange folder (This can be hacked to work using a rule, but Outlook in itself cannot do this out of the box).
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
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.
There is no review of Pegasus or Eudora
"For every email sent, 2 pornographic images are viewed/downloaded"
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
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.
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
it is pretty nice, why did it not get reviewed? Is this site biased or something?
;-)
You must be new around here...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
From the FAQ in the article:
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"
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.)
Well, for one thing, Outlook runs only on Windows and many of us here do not run this OS. If you are on Windows, then feel free to use Outlook, even though personally I can't see why anyone would want to run it unless he has to connect to an Exchange server.
While it's true that Outlook is becoming more secure, having the possibility to script a mail client is not the best of ideas if you ask me. I prefer to stay clear of script-enabled email client since I don't ever need that feature. (I know, it's disabled by default now in Outlook)
Also, outlook isn't free. Which is irrelevant if your boss pays for your software but kinda sucks at home. Unless you copy it of course...
IP Therefore I am.
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.
"This just smacks of zealotry."
Zealotry : Mindlessly supporting a group, company, individual, product, or concept without regard for facts or opposing views.
"With MS's recent drive for security, it's probably significantly more secure and robust too."
Pot meet kettle.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
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!)
"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'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.
:
SIGH. About six comments are moderated 3 or better with this exact same sentiment. So not only did the posters not read the article, neither did the moderators. While you can argue that his logic is flawed or that he could have included Outlook EXPRESS, he specifically states
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.
ALSO note that the author seems to be focusing on Linux mail clients (or at least AVAILABLE for Linux), which Outlook is NOT (AFAIK...).
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.
I use Microsoft Entourage to handle a collection of two IMAP accounts and one POP account. It has a few flaws (randomly stops subscribing to IMAP folders, requires you to download entire messages, including attachments, the address completion seems to include forged spam headers but not half the real senders in my inbox) but on the whole I'm pleased with it. And it's on OS X so there are no worm propblems.
The Linux readers just don't cut it. KMail, which I've used happily with POP accounts, updates IMAP accounts apparently whenever it feels like it. I'll hit the mail check button an 20 minutes later something might happen. Evolution works relatively well for one IMAP account but won't handle the other at all. Neither feels as smooth as Entourage, neither is as feature complete, and surprisingly neither offers transfer progress methods nearly as complete as Entourage's. (Evolution is especially useless for the latter.)
I've barely used Outlook, but Microsoft's Mac unit blows the doors off the Unix competition.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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).
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!
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.
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.
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...
what's wrong with it???
how about the simple fact that it enable's the Dill-weeds in marketing to make a "outlook stationary" that is almost 1 meg in size and causes the email servers to fricking choke as the 1.2 million employees stupidly follow the morons in marketing and use it.
HTML email is the stupidest thing ever created, but how outlook does it by having all the graphics IN the fricking email is a magnitude worse.
There is one reason that 90% of the sysadmins on this planet absolutely and utterly HATE outlook.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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"
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 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.
That said, Eudora seems to run just fine on my Mach kernal, BSD-based system.
It is misleading though: In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla...
As I understand it, the most popular email clients are Outlook, Lotus, and Eudora. He means "the most popular e-mail clients for Linux... oh, and an old version of Outlook for comparison".
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 sad thing is that outlook 2000 compares quite favorably to the rest of the field, even today. Especially if you consider that some of its key features weren't tested because all the other clients wouldn't pass the test.
I use thunderbird on a daily basis but outlook 2k3 is on a different level as far as UI polish and features go. It is a very powerful tool for coordinating large quantities of mail, appointments, contacts etc. The reason I use thunderbird is that outlook is overkill for popping mail once in a while. Additionally, I like some things in thunderbird such as extensions and UI. Also its development status and the ability to influence its development is appealing. I see thunderbird as a nice testbed, a good outlook express replacement but not a corporate mailclient. The only two clients that come close are evolution and kontact. Comparing those two to the full featureset of outlook 2k3 would be an interesting read.
I don't mind people pushing alternative mail clients. What I do mind is this attitude of ignoring features in outlook in order to prove the point that some OSS client is better. If you do a comparison, make it a fair comparison. At least the developers of the mac outlook had the guts to say that thunderbird has a superior mime implementation compared to outlook. This is true and acknowledging it internally allows them to focus on improving this in outlook.
Jilles
Great little tool...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?