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Slashdot Asks: Which Is Your Favorite Email Client?
With Google recently rolling out a big revamp of Gmail to mixed reviews, we would like to know which email client you prefer. Are you a firm believe in the "inbox zero" idea -- that is, the approach to email management aimed at keeping the inbox empty, or almost empty, at all times? If you're looking for inspiration, Ars Technica recently published an article highlighting several different email clients used by the editors of the site: Are you the sort of person who needs to read and file every email they get? Or do you delight in seeing an email client icon proudly warning of hundreds or even thousands of unread items? For some, keeping one's email inbox with no unread items is more than just a good idea: it's a way of life, indicating control over the 21st century and its notion of productivity. For others, it's a manifestation of an obsessively compulsive mind. The two camps, and the mindsets behind them, have been a frequent topic of conversation here in the Ars Orbiting HQ. And rather than just argue with each other on Slack, we decided to collate our thoughts about the whole "inbox zero" idea and how, for those who adhere to it, that happens. Some of the clients floated by the editors include: Webmail, Airmail 3, Readdle's Spark, Edison Mail, Sparrow, Inbox by Gmail, and MailSpring.
Over the years, I've used any number of email clients which were everything from POP clients to shell (mutt/pine with procmail) to webmail (tried em all, including my own hosted ones) to GUI (Groupwise/Outlook/Maill.app/etc).
I haven't ever had a favorite, although Groupwise's detailed transparent tracking features were great to CYA, especially in a union environment where everyone was backstabbing one another. I currently use the latest Outlook (Mac) and it works ok enough for the desktop and I use any number of other clients on our Linux VMs for reading through job messages or scripting their sends (mutt, mail, etc).
But the only thing I've ever stuck with is Inbox Zero, which I've been at least since before 2004 (when my GMail archive began). It's so incredibly worth it and doesn't require any special tools or client, only dedication.
Because it doesn't expose my gpg encrypted email by loading messages into a web view...
I haven't found anything that comes close to Outlook (on the desktop... not the web). I use it with Exchange and IMAP accounts at the same time. Lots of features, and even more with Exchange accounts.
I don't respond to AC's.
I use Claws Mail. It's light on resources, fast, stable, and can deal with gigabyte-sized mailboxes without a hiccup. Moreover, it uses the MH mailbox format, where each email message is a single plaintext file so it's very flexible and if necessary it allows for straightforward manipulation directly from the shell. There's even a nice book available on it.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Thunderbird keeps its mail folders in standard mbox format. It also has additional files in its own private format (seems to be some form of XML) for tracking meta information about messages, but other mail clients can easily import or read the mbox files.
Although it's a pretty good app for iOS (iphones and ipads), I just recently learned that Spark has some serious security issues. Not only do they collect statistics and analytics on your usage (pretty typical), no much worse, they "use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device". Before I had installed it, wish I'd seen the warnings on many websites against using it.
You're probably on Linux; I'm on OSX, and
* it frequently deadlocks on a mailbox so when you try to move a message into it, it simply does nothing. When you exit Thunderbird in this state, it hangs and you have to force kill it.
* It occasionally goes into a mode where it's using 100% of the cpu and the user interface goes completely unresponsive (spinning color wheel) for 30seconds to a minute with no indication what it's doing. At other times, rather than being completely unresponsive, typing is echoed out at about 1 character every few seconds.
Those are the main issues I have; the rest are more in line of "would be nice" features