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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?"
Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
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.
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.
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I don't want all my emails mined for advertisement or other purposes.
Improvements are happening to your webmail all the time, it's just they are for the advertisers and buyers of your personal data ;)
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen. This is obviously going to get worse and worse. Like Youtube, where ad infestation is nearly intolerable already and rapidly deteriorating. And it is just downright creepy when Google snoops my mail and runs the same pushy, stupid ad in Youtube over and over. Moral: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second Moral: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Third Moral: the writing is on the wall, the way of Google is the way of pain for the average netizen. Something needs to be done. Not sure what. Google is rapidly becoming what Microsoft always wanted to be: proprietor of the internet. We're probably saved from a worse fate if Microsoft or horrors, Apple managed to secure that position, but it's still bad. This kind of infrastructure needs to be a kind of commons like the highways, power grid, sewage system and so on. A life under the gaze of Google, dancing on Google's string, is just not a life I can accept, and by now it is abundantly clear, that is just where this is all heading, veneer of benevolence notwithstanding.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yeah go Mutt! Year of the Desktop for Linux? Hey everyone, use a ASCII based e-mail client! We're rockin it like it's 1950 baby!
but when you receive mail from business people, it's usually an image embedded in a Word document, or at the very least a pdf. This is where mutt fails.
I'm not sure about images, but mutt has a really fantastic auto_view feature, which will automatically decode HTML email, PDFs, Word documents, etc into text and display it inline in your viewer. When people email me PDFs, I can not only view them without spawning an external viewer, but the PDF/MSWord text gets included in the quoted text when I hit "reply", so I can just reply to their PDF/MSWord text in-line.
Threading, meaningful subject lines, and proper message references in replies is a lost art. They all require an attention-span long enough to grasp contextual communication.
Today's email user cannot even remember their correspondents' email address nor figure out how to use a contact list, so they just reply willy-nilly to any other message they find from that person in their inbox, or grieve their lost friend if no such message exists. The lure of social networking is that they don't even have to think about whom they are addressing anymore. The future is full of psychotic people wandering about, issuing forth monologues and an intelligent messaging system beaming these selectively into the heads of other psychotics wandering half way around the world.
on thunderbird:
edit > account settings > [account in question] > copies & folders > tick "place replies in the folder of the message being replied to"
admittedly a few more steps than "click on 'conversation view'" .. but it is there .. and i love it so much
suchetha
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