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Ask Slashdot: Current State of Linux Email Clients?
mcloaked writes "We get all kinds of news about new developments, but one subject has been lacking for some time and that is email clients for Linux (or Windows for that matter). A number of reviews (mostly not all that recent) have pointed to the main clients as Thunderbird, Evolution, Claws-mail, and Kmail as possibilities. Up to about a year ago, Thunderbird seemed to be 'the' email client with the best mix of positives. However there are no recent reviews that I have seen. In the meantime Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change — and little new development. Thunderbird also won't be significantly altered in the future, if one interprets the available news information. Evolution is reported to be rather prone to bugs, and Kmail even more so. Claws-mail has limitations, as does Kmail. So where is the future of Linux email clients going, absent any real innovation? We need a well maintained and capable mail client, preferably with good calendar integration (webcal/Google calendar), properly supported HTML composing, good maildir format storage for local mail, and good security support (including the capacity to deal with both GPG and S/MIME encryption and signing). It needs a modern UI and good import/export facilities, as well as good integration with its address book, including import/export of addresses. Are we likely to see this kind of package as we move into the future, or will mail clients slowly disappear? At the moment it looks like email client support is dead — Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"
IMO mutt is still king
Yes
Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_%28email_client%29
Thunderbird can sync with Google Calendar, via plugins... Here's How. There is really only so much you can do to an email client before the only updates are security. In my opinion, that is a good thing. You want a good core client that's not over-featured (buggy) and has good security support. Thunderbird fits that bill, and with a huge constellation of plugins I don't see what the fuss is about.
I really haven't used a desktop client for email in years. Where's the gain for the user?
I want my mail and calendar wherever I am. So why keep multiple copies of gigabytes of mail on multiple machines. I just don't see the gain for the average user. I think the lack of demand from users who are moving to webmail is why the Thunderbird is getting less developer attention.
What I'd really like to see is improvement in the webmail interfaces available to us. Gmail is fast, but I find the interface limiting and clunky. The best I have experienced was Zimbra, but it really prefers to be run on a standalone machine and is pretty resource intensive.
I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
Most people I know go the webmail route: Gmail, Hotmail etc. Personally I prefer Thunderbird with IMAP and because I run my own mailserver I also installed Zarafa for use on the road.
title says it all
Thunderbird does a perfectly fine job of handling email for most users. It handles a decade or more of email for me, in a number of imap accounts for different addresses, totalling perhaps 6 to 7 gig of mail, without any problem at all.
What exactly is it about TB that is not capable of handling your need?
If an email client already does what you need, is complaint about slower development valid, or is it just wanting change for change sake.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Improvements are happening to your webmail all the time, it's just they are for the advertisers and buyers of your personal data ;)
What features does a mail client need that the existing ones don't already have?
I'd rather have a relatively lean (read fast) client that performs it's core function very well, rather than a monstrosity that does a thousand things in a kinda half-assed way.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
pacman -S mutt
It works fine for me at least, though it loads a bit slow. Has all the features you describe except calendar integration, but you can get that by using Kontact (which gives access to both Kmail, calendar and contacts in the same interface). Integrates with KDE address book, syncs with Google contacts/Google Calendar, PGP+S/MIME encryption/signing, modern UI, import/export, Sieve rules editor, modern UI (threaded message list, though no Gmail-like threading).
Claws kept losing its configuration on ubuntu so I went back to sylpheed but that integrated badly with unity so now I am using thunderbird but it is full of bugs even after however many years of development. So yeah, pretty crap.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Covers all the request features. However since the move to akonadi it does have a terrible reputation for bugginess, unrelalibility and resource hogging, unfortunately a not undeserved one.
However it has been improving steadly, even drastically since kde 4.7. I've been using it as my primary even despite the problems because when its working :) it is just so good. Fantastic integration with KDE, really good handling of multiple accounts and identities. PGP & SMIME, integration with Google calendar and contact, as well as other 3rd parties. An open plugin system for extending it. And it looks *really* good, the perfect blend of functionality and sexiness - when its working :)
I just upgraded to KDE 4.10 Beta 1 (via Kubuntu raring). There seems to be another qualitive improvement in reliabilty. Akonadi hogging the CPU seems to be fixed. Message searches are working - full text content and attributes.
There's still progress to be made, but its made huge steps and I finally feel confident in saying Kontact is back and will make it. The developers have the feature sets done and are just focusing on bug fixing now.
I have yet to find a Linux email client that supports it, although my Android phone does it just fine. I tried Evolution once. Initial setup was most interesting. It wanted me to fill out fields with single character labels (???). Googling yielded little more than instructions that were years old and outdated for the newest version. I still don't know what it wanted and it crashed as I was guessing. It was immediately deemed worthless and uninstalled. When I'm using Linux, I'm using Thunderbird, but I can't access my school's email server because Thunderbird can't do Exchange.
About two years ago, I had been stalwarthily been using Eudora, and could not imagine ever changing from a desktop-based client.
But then Eudora started to show its age (specifically, problesm with SSL certificates), and I started to look around for other alternatives, and found none what so ever.
I dug into a webclient, Roundcube, and have never looked back since, and so have a lot of my friends, so yes, i'm definately thinking that the desktop-based client is dying.
I've been using it since KDE 1.1, after all. But I don't know what gives with it any more.
It used to be the compatibility champ -- all of its message stores were open format. Now it's all stashed in a binary database.
It used to be blinding quick. Now it takes minutes to switch between one local folder and another.
It used to update flawlessly, but the last couple of upgrades have hosed the previous mail repositories and anything that wasn't backed up offline was gone.
KMail has some very nice features (including excellent spam filters) but the usability factor is heading for zero real fast. If there were a decent alternative that doesn't have the same problems I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Too arcane to use.
Having tested many, my current vote is for Evolution. Mostly because it can do RPC over HTTPs and talk to Exchange 2003 and later email servers. Which is kind of a big deal.
I hate sigs.
Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change â" and little new development.
You know what else hasn't had much functional change in a while but I still use regularly? Wow, that really sounds like the beginning to a "your mom" joke. But I digress. I'm talking about furniture. Tables, wooden chairs, desks. Bookshelves too. To bring it back around to written communication, my postal mailbox hasn't upgraded in the past T-bird release cycle. When something's not broken, don't fix it.
I'll tell you what, though, kill that entire thread about the company holiday party from one E-Mail in the middle of the thread and you'll realize just how nice good threading features really are. And just how primitive all current mail clients are, comparatively...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.
Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.
Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.
thunderbird has the same problem as firefox, the UI is horribly slow its almost unusable.
I use Thunderbird because its the only real email client in Linux with decent calendar integration that isn't Evolution (which itself has both eaten email and crashed several times to the point where it won't start again without having to clear out all my settings and start fresh).
Thunderbird with IMAP and the lightning extension installed routinely (like 20x per day) locks up for 5-10 seconds and shows wrong messages (or no message) when quickly switching between new emails. If they actually used multiple threads/processes for the UI so it respond to user interaction while doing other things it would be much better.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Works fine for me. But yes, everyone is moving to cloud. I have even considered doing this, and i store my mail locally. Why drag a fat client around with me everywhere?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't be an idiot, KISS. Use mutt.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
So what new, shiny features do you expect an e-mail client to provide? Don't fix it, if it's not broken. Thunderbird, Evolution, claws are all fine. The only differences are the way they will archive, sort or filter mail - and more or fewer things not strictly email-related.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I'm still using mutt here, and vim as my editor plus offlineimap + notmuch (for indexing/searching).
Once you learn the hotkeys it's much more efficient than any GUI MUA, and the notmuch indexing
functionality is worth it's weight in gold to me. I tend to get several hundred emails a day, the bulk of
which are neatly filed into IMAP folders inside offlineimap and nicely indexed by notmuch.
mutt itself is endlessly configurable, for people who are intent on sending HTML email
there are numerous ways to dump it back to TXT (which all email should be in). Say NO to HTML email, people.
http://notmuchmail.org/
http://offlineimap.org/
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
I and my 150 users use Claws-mail at work (for years). Before that, we used Sylpheed (for even more years). Before moving from Sylpheed to Claws, we researched all available options carefully. Just from memory- Thunderbird was hard to customize and clumsy. Evolution was even harder to centrally control, was bloated, and performed horribly. Kmail was too complex and tied too much to KDE (which we were/are not using). Thunderbird was our second choice, but Claws seemed like the best option.
Claws is extremely fast, reliable, feature-packed (especially with the plugins), mature, flexible, and performs well on thin clients. On the original poster's list, the only thing it does NOT do is compose HTML Email (at least not that I am aware of) and I consider that inability a feature :) It can, however, display it fine using a plugin. And it will nicely convert them to plain text for normal use. It has a calendar plugin, but we use a web-based calendar instead.
It is not perfect, but nothing I have ever seen or used is. For us, it is the best, overall.
At home, I have used Kmail for many years. At about KDE 4.8 I had lots of issues with them pulling out the communications stuff and setting it up as other "services". It was complex and unreliable. Layered with a bit too much eye candy and frustration and I finally switched home over to Claws too.
T-Bird, MUTT, Kmail, Evolution... interesting choices.
I too made the jump from Pegasus - remember Pegasus! - to Gmail years ago, and have been more or less happy, aside from some oddball missing features like the ability to resend a message in the "Sent" mailbox. But I digress...
I probably access e-mail more from my Android phone than from my desktop machine, but still want to have the same experience on both platforms. That really does seem to limit you to a web-based platform from a mega-corporation. Which means I'm stuck with whatever interface they choose to give me.
I've considered moving back to a desktop client, for all of the usual reasons - security, privacy, local backup of messages - but the last time I looked at Thunderbird it just looked like too much work to try and set up what I already have in Gmail, plus I have to assume that getting archived mail out of Google and into a new client would be a nightmare.
There really is a strong argument for taking e-mail back from the Googles and Microsofts, but in practical terms I just don't know if I'm up to the size of that task, or the restraints it might place on me. (Part of the problem being that the last time I made a radical shift in e-mail I had a back history of a hundred megs. Now Google tells me it's up to 1.5 gigs.)
Is it really practical to develop a standalone e-mail client that works happily in the dual mobile/desktop environemnt?
Three Squirrels
You are right.
Alas, VMware have decided to abandon this. :-(
Their hand was forced - it's a Mozilla prism app. I think that that means it would have been impossible to continue commercial support.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"At the moment it looks like email client support is dead" - Evolution is still actively maintained, there are at least two full-time developers on it that I know of. That's why it has bugs, funnily enough - because it's still getting major updates...
Evo has been pretty heavily touched in the last few release cycles, though most of the changes are 'under the hood' and right now the UI is still rather like a copy of Outlook from a decade ago (which actually suits me fine, but might not be what most people want). But stuff like the calendar backends have had heavy work and the entire IMAP backend was written over the last few versions.
I've always liked Evo, though there certainly was a Thunderbird-trend for a while. I use it with a personal server on a local network, so I wonder if those who have more trouble with it are using remote servers.
The 3.5 builds were _very_ buggy, but most of the mess got shaken out for 3.6.0 and now 3.6.2 is pretty decent for me. It still has a weird bug where it seems to get very sluggish after it's been running for a while (not RAM exhaustion), but that doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, so probably wouldn't affect you.
It has Google calendar integration which works pretty well for me (this is one of the things that was affected by recent rewrites; for a few releases it wasn't working very well at all, but in 3.6 it seems pretty good). It does CalDAV at least in theory, though I haven't tried it out much myself. It has all the other features listed as 'desired'.
I gave up and moved to gmail. Gmail will let you pull in mail from most pop/imap servers.
I honestly have no complaints about the current state of email clients. Maybe I'm not using the current 0.09% of features, but I don't care about them. The current state is fine for me.
2012 and still no platform independence...
Btw, anyone here who knows when iTunes comes to Linux?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Therefore do not 'fix' it.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I switched from Evolution to Thunderbird about two years ago. I liked Evolution, but it was buggy and performed horribly with large folders. Not to mention it was tied in with Gnome, which made configuration painful for a non-Gnome user. Thunderbird is vastly better. It almost never crashes, is much faster, and after finding a few key plugins has every feature I wanted, and a few that I didn't know that I wanted.
The above is based on a fetchmail/IMAP setup with no mail stored locally, using the same setup to read my mail on at least two different systems.
I use thunderbird at home, but to be honest, roundcube does everything I need very well, and actually runs faster than thunderbird.
Since I can't use imap directly from work, I installed roundcube on my home servers. It's very nice. I would assume that you could also just install a local lighty with php and run that as a local web-based solution if you don't have your own web server.
http://roundcube.net/
The Addressbook is being replaced (both back end & front).
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/
The old archaic design & limitations are being tossed for a more flexible & pluggable design.
I use Thunderbird on Linux with IMAP. Search works fine, if a bit slow.
I recently started using mutt + offlineimap (to have a sync'ed local copy of mail) + davmail (exchange connector) + notmuchmail (indexing and searching)
It runs under a screen/tmux session (I am using tmux panes inside screen) and way much easier to access all mail accounts (and nicer interface than gmail and outlook web exchange). I am usually a couple of keystrokes away to mail windows (and I am using a large monitor for a full screen shell window)
It helps that most of my work is text based (documentation is markdown/wiki type), though I jump into a web browser once in a while
If more people would use mutt, we'd be much further along the road to everyone using encryption by default, because mutt folds gnupg in so transparently and makes it so easy to use. Web browsers & GUI MUAs have wasted more than a decade NOT coming up with equivalent functionality.
We used to joke about GUI Usenet clients which never managed to implement killfile functionality. Same old, same old, ...
mutt rocks and is so damned easy to use, it's ridiculous. It's software that's designed to be trained to do what you want it to do the way you want to do it, and it's not difficult to configure even for mere mortals.
Kaplah!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Mutt isn't easy to use though. It takes a while to learn how to use it compared to (Al)Pine.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I personally use claws for several years (+- 10) and i think its great. the only thing that people might miss is the lack of edit html messages (it can write text only emails), but it can read html emails without any problem. it support calendar and meeting requests, attach remover and various gpg and smime via plugins, so it covers what people need. Its fast and light enough and many keyboard shortcuts when you dont want to use the mouse.
if you have imap, you may want to try the mulberry mail , it have the best imap support i ever used. its now open source, could use a facelift, but is very good.
Higuita
GNUS forever! But I fetch via IMAP from gmail because I just don't want to deal with all the spam locally.
Mutt isn't easy to use though. It takes a while to learn how to use it compared to (Al)Pine.
BS, not true. For simple things, it's drop dead easy. For things not often done regularly, it demands a bit of thought or research. For stuff that happens all the time (handling attachments transparently or using encryption), tell it how once and it'll do it again automatically until the end of time.
There is no better MUA than mutt. It's brilliant software. I wish everything was designed and implemented as well as mutt.
[I tried to include my ~/mutt/mailcap here, but /. objected. Fine. Be that way.]
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '
In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll probably have a short text and a PDF attachment, and just have some script grind it out slowly, sending to 1 email address at a time. I don't care if it takes 48 hours to send them all --I've had enough with snags about how I can't send to all 2000 recipients at a time, and how I have to break it up into 30-50 recipients at a time, keep track of who has been sent what, etc. Not to mention: in the past, Kmail has refused to compose HTML messages, Thunderbird had some funny incompatibility with my email provider (which was also my shell host and web host, but I just didn't have time to go figure out the problem), and installing Evolution completely steamrolled my Kubuntu installation with some GNOME crap (KDE wouldn't unmount devices properly because GNOME thought it would be fun to just automount every single thing I plugged into USB).
Also, I want something command-line for my N900. Enough with interfaces -- I'll let bash talk to my email client. I'll compose my text in Vim and let some script take care of sending. If Mutt is it, then I'll install Mutt.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Maybe you missed the function but AFAICR the function has always been there.
Tools -> Account Settings -> Under Outgoing Server on the left, you can enter all the SMTP servers you need to use. You can select a default one over there.
Then you simply click on any account (click on the HEADER where the name is just above the Server Settings of each account. At the bottom of the window on the right, you will see "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" from which you can leave the default one selected or select a specific one to be used (from the list of SMTP entered above).
That's available through an extension on Thunderbird called "Thunderbird conversations". See here: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/wiki
Seriously? With cell phones becoming so ubiquitous, that I keep hearing how they're going to kill all other gaming consoles, how on earth do you expect to justify to Joe Average user the need for a dedicated E-mail client? IMAP is cool and all but it's not as fast as gmail especially if you go to a not yours computer. As in for instance when you go to give a presentation in class that's stored in your email (saw it 2 weeks ago, such a rare show of technological competence I nearly cried) I have a hard enough time getting people to send me emails instead of facebook messages. The only reason my sister uses Mail.app is because she has a hotmail account, hates the interface, sucks at change, and therefore hates gmail's interface too (it's different it sucks). Nevermind that it solves nearly every issue she has with email she just hates it and she probably read one of those "Google is secretly tracking every email FUD articles" so she got paranoid of google on top of that. I'm half sure the only reason she got on Mail.app in the first place was accidentally clicking it and then filling in the wizard prompts to get rid of the screen. Without a chunk of the average user population, of course email clients are going stale. Unfortunately I don't see any way to get that chunk back. Unless facebook wants to convert their messaging to email boxes and not provide a web (or app) interface. Yeah and maybe Zuckerberg wants to literally piss away a few million bucks.
Just another second banana
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is
The "killer" feature on gmail for many of us is the privacy suicide.
We have several email accounts, all consolidated onto our home mail server. It's secure enough but far from "private", as the emails all pass through multiple domains en route, but at least we've probably reduced the butt-hurt of being profiled for ads based on our email content. Anyway, a lot of our email is in Finnish, so good luck to non-Finns on trying to ascertain useful details from that (do we like product X or hate it - Google translate even gets this wrong often enough). Actually, Google translate on Finnish-English sucks, and I mean sucks really badly - it's little more than a garbage generator.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I drink the energy-saving drink Sleeping Cow while coding.
I think the unflattering image in that Wikipedia article entirely fits the program's slogan.
Claws-mail is the successor of the old Sylpheed-claws. It really is a nice and simple mailclient, which in the meantime does almost everything. Imaps, RSS, filtering, whatever. And with good usability, the buttons are all at the right place.
I even use the Windows version at work.
There are some thing Thunderbird is particularly bad at in my opinion. Like sorting threaded mails. I know there are extensions, but they suck.
I also don't like the autodetection of mailserver settings. You cannot save something in a non-working state, while sometimes I just want to do that.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Not sure if trolling or stupid. It has been possible to configure multiple SMTP servers and choose which one to use per account at least since Thunderbird 2.0.
Whatever became of Eudora? When Qualcomm bailed out of it there was talk of integrating it into one of Mozilla's products -- Thunderbird, I guess -- but I haven't heard much about what came of that. So I'm still Macgyvering Eudora to work on XP.
IBM has been selling and supporting Lotus Notes on Linux since before 2006. Also, Eudora 7.1 reportedly runs pretty well under Wine.
A friend of mine said recently he is looking for a new email client because it seems that Mozilla Foundation doesn't want to improve Thunderbird. I agree with him.
Mozilla Foundation gets something like $100 million per year. Quoting: "Mozilla's consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2010 was $123 million..."
Do you see $100 million of development every year? Where does the money go? Where is the 2011 report?
We often distribute short but complicated business reports to clients by email. The emails must be formatted in HTML or they would be difficult to read.
Things we need in Thunderbird:
A "Get All Mail" button. Getting all email should not require a menu choice.
Better handling of images and other attachments. Sending an image with slightly different text to 10 people should have the option of not requiring storage of 10 copies of that image.
Automatic storage of important emails in both the email database and as separate files. If something corrupts the database, we cannot afford to lose important emails.
nobody has mentioned seamonkey yet...
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/dr_agon-365450/which-mua-for-linux-35190/
mike c
"Sort by --> Threaded" -- Thunderbird has this feature, and it works correctly if you send yourself a copy of all outgoing email.
I use it all the time. Works great. When there's a problem, it seems it's a doozey though. Once you get past it, you're golden again. Not as bad as dealing with a POS like outlook.
___________________ I want to be free()!
I thought I was done with email clients. GMail is just that convenient. Then Google gratitiously changed the interface, horribly, to Google Groups. It was so bad I went back to Thunerbird for Usenet and discovered how refreshingly simple Thunderbird is. I hope it stays that way.
The problem is, mutt doesn't display our reply in thread. We have to open outbox to see our reply.
The problem is, mutt doesn't display our reply in thread. We have to open outbox to see our reply.
"s" to save it to another folder (this encourages you to file things where they can be found again), then "c" to change to that folder. Find that email and now reply. Define "save_hook" entries to tell mutt where you want it to save different stuff. After some text file configuring, mutt'll know what to do, and it'll do it consistently, even if you've now forgotten what you told it to do. The "s" command will be pre-populated with the value you told it to use for that sender so you just hit Enter and it does it.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Since almost all mail lives in the cloud, why even bother with an email client? I'll grant that some people like to use command-line clients simply because they can - more power to them. But there's really no reason to eschew the GUI, and a browser is all the email client you need. Has been for years.
I need help configuring mine. Mine supports neither UTF-8 nor HTML. I still keep claws mail installed just so I can read the occasional stinky HTML mail I get from my "normal" friends.
The lack of UTF-8 has an advantage, though. One of my mailboxes gets lots of spam that I clean by running capital D then looking for \?\?\?\?. That deletes more than 90% of the junk. Now if those characters ever become real characters... I'll be in trouble.
I loved Kmail until KDE 4 was introduced and I decided I didn't want that bloatware anymore and learned the hard way that:
1) You can't have any KDE app without the whole huge crapload of KDE, so it's a major liability
2) Migrating from Kmail to another email client is not a walk in the park.
My advice: even if you use KDE and love it, get a less compromising email client. If you want to leave one day, you won't have to worry about migrating your email.
Use whatever is best for the job. And who has only one email address these days anyway?
I can fully appreciate and understand the privacy concerns about $webmail_provider putting in advertising and all that stuff, but I still use it anyway -- for non-critical mail (that is to say, mostly newsletters, email digests and whatnot, some of which contain some form of advertising anyway). Why should *I* store the latest copy of an email from CNET or Light Reading or Slashdot or whatever myself when I can let the Google store it? It's non-important and being public information, I couldn't give a toss if Google wants to scan it for advertising.
Gmail's interface is also rather extensible, all things considered (like Thunderbird... how about that?) and I've got all sorts of little helpers installed on mine to make it less clunky and/or a bit more desktop-client-like.
As for *important* (business, mostly) email, the business has it's own server. We run Dovecot for IMAP. POP3 is not allowed. Every client we have (Desktop, Symbian, Android, iOs) all seem to connect to it fine with SSL.
For those in the business who *need* webmail, we have Roundcube with an OWA-like theme, IIRC. Otherwise, the default install is Thunderbird for a few simple reasons:
1. Multiple Identities - we couldn't get this working nicely on Outlook (for those using Windows)... and by nicely, I mean at all... without paying... and why should I pay for something that both Gmail and Thunderbird offer for free (and work on any platform, not just Windows)?
2. Portability - I can move from Windows to Linux to Mac and vice versa and/or upgrade my machine and all I need to do is copy the profile directory from the old machine to the new and voila, I don't have to set anything up - all my accounts, filters, add-ons and everything else are just there, waiting for me. It also makes deploying stuff easier when we get new users because then all we need to change are the mailbox credentials and they're up and running with the same things as everyone else (Same with Firefox, even though most of us use Chrome which Google syncs most of anyway, Firefox portability isn't easy to match from what I can ascertain).
3. I appreciate people who want to use mutt/pine as their email client, but really... it's not the most user-friendly interface unless you're already familiar with a CLI and have SSH access. For joe-blow office drone, mutt and whatnot just isn't practical. If, hypothetically, someone in the organization specifically wanted to use mutt, we wouldn't stop them, but they would have to make a case for wanting SSH access... and someone who wants SSH but who isn't employed as a technical person might have a hard time doing that.
4. It's been a long time since I tried any of the other clients (Kmail, Pegasus, Eudora) but... there's probably a good reason for it. Evolution just didn't do it for me, and that it's the default in many Linux distros annoys me and that getting rid of it basically is impossible without $package_manager wanting to remove Gnome in it's entirety as well (which some of us use).
5. We write our emails in plain-text by default. We have a little html in our signatures but it's just a couple of links.
6. Familiarity. Thunderbird is relatively familiar to even new recruits - it looks a bit like Outlook used to, which may or may not be a good thing, but, in either case, getting new people up to speed doesn't take too much time.
Those are all I can think of at the moment, but basically the moral of the story is, if you separate out your mail sufficiently there's no reason you can't take advantage of webmail providers for newsletters and non-critical stuff, and keep the private mail, well, private, using your client of choice. We like Thunderbird, you might not. It's a matter of taste. But we have managed to keep our systems open (as in with mostly FOSS), relatively secure, relatively extensible and relatively easy to deploy, all without sacrifice (as far as we know, anyway - correct me if I'm wrong).
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)