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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.
Thunderbird for desktop, Pine/AlPine for shell, K-9 Mail for a phone.
Webmail is for the birds. And I'm not organized or disciplined enough for the "Inbox Zero" cult.
I abhor mail clients that work by publishing your email as web pages (most gMail, Hotmail etc). I also do not like HTML in my mail, nor do I like linked
pictures and graphics. I use Thunderbird for my (Linux) computer, and K9 for Android, although I have also used AquaMail for Android.
Outlook 2013
if you don't know what or why, you won't like it...
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.
Inbox by Gmail Outlook for work (love the focused vs all mail option in mobile) Normal Gmail and outlook are fine as well, but I actually read at least half of my emails from my phone. Desktop is mostly just work email and I have to use Outlook.
I use RoundCube with my own Linux email server.
Web mail is a horrible idea.
Any local mail client is generally tolerable.
Best if it includes PGP support. (And yes I'm aware of the recent headline, and no, it doesn't obsolete or invalidate the desirability of email encryption).
my Office 365 subscription provides a great toolset including an email client with desktop and phone variants. Works great! Especially when backed with an Exchange server.
i use Seamonkey suite, it is a browser & email client, and a basic bare bones WYSIWYG html editor and IRC client, (the emacs of the browser world)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...is the worst one out there, except for all the rest.
Because it doesn't expose my gpg encrypted email by loading messages into a web view...
Kmail. Although, back when I used Windows I really liked The Bat. Among other things, it uninstalled cleanly - very few Windows programs like that. I wonder if they're still around...
At home, Thunderbird with "View Message Body as Plain Text" and Javascript disabled (for messages from asinine senders that can only be viewed as HTML - grrr) to POP mail from ISP and Gmail. Never really been a fan of browser-based email clients, especially having to worry about browser/javascript exploits, etc..., but will periodically log directly into Gmail to permanently delete mail put into in the trash via the POP3 processing -- that should have actually been deleted, also grrr -- (still haven't decided if I'd like using IMAP instead).
At work, MS Outlook on the desktop and "mailx" on Linux/Unix systems (usually for daemon messages I haven't forwarded).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I first started using it on NetBSD but right now my client sits on a Windows 10 machine. It's in pkgsrc and should be available on any freenix.
One of the nice things about Sylpheed is that it nests mail threads properly, so if you subscribe to ant mailing lists the threading flows properly.
I use Thunderbird on my desktop. I used to use Evolution, as at the time it had better Exchange compatibility, which I thought I was going to need, but I got extremely frustrated with it. It was super slow moving messages into large folders (like when I archive my mail instead of deleting it), and it seemed I was always fighting bugs. Thunderbird has been a vastly superior experience.
I will say that I'm not excited about Thunderbird, either. It does the job, but it feels clunky. It would be great to have better Exchange compatibility for the corporate environment.
For my Android phone, I use K-9 mail. Even without the Doctor Who reference, it's a great mobile mail client. I have had trouble with it not noticing new mail and beeping at me like I've told it to--it was flawless until a year or so ago. I wonder if I have a setting wrong?
I don't do a lot of webmail, but sometimes I want to bring something up on my car's browser (Model S). I used to use Squirelmail, which felt like a crude HTML wrapper on a text client, but after the recent browser update, I'm now able to use RoundCube, and it's much better. I haven't played with it too much, but so far it does everything I want.
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.
Loved the integrated M2 client from Opera of yesteryear. Opera has promised to deliver an updated standalone version, but it's been a long time and I've given up hope.
I use gmail, and my own domain on a gmail account. It works for me. It's responsive, the UI doesn't really suck, the search capabilities are great to find an old, obscure email sent years ago. When I change computers, I don't have to worry about where all my email is locally. It's just all there.
I haven't used Thunderbird in at least 5 years, maybe more.
All others are imitations of this best ever email client.
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..."
What it doesn't do is email across all your devices and it does seem to occasionally lose my email box completely, which is why I'm not using it now, but I'm starting to get the itch to dust it off and try it again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've tried others--Kmail for a couple of years, Evolution before that--and occasionally try new versions of those older favorites but I haven't found any new features and/or behavior that keeps me from going back to T-bird.
I do try and keep my Inbox cleared and everything filed but usually seem to have a few dozen emails that I haven't yet filed away at any given time. I don't do any automatic filing using filters as I find the filters too unreliable. I do an initial scan and drag the easily identifiable junk into my Junk folder where it is scanned and the sender IP addresses used to update my spam filter. Then the remainder gets read and filed according to topic or tossed if it's something I'm not currently interested in, won't be able to attend, etc. Only takes a few minutes on most days. (Ctrl-click, Ctrl-click, drag make short work of most filing.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I use Thunderbird on a Mac. It's allowed me to keep and organize my email locally, and support my previous move from Windows to OS X/MacOS, retaining the UI and metadata (no import with unknown conversion lossage). It's configured to download and delete my email every 10 minutes or so. My smartphone is configured to monitor the server using its built-in email client. So I can deal with important messages quickly on my phone before they move to my Mac, but they're safely off the server relatively quickly. If I need longer email access on my phone, I just shut down my Mac. When I no longer need the longer access, I just restart my Mac and it catches up. Thunderbird's also configured to use my Mac's Contacts, which is synced with my smartphone.
Any such system has compromises; I chose one that prioritizes getting the email off the server and to my backed-up Mac, while secondarily allowing most functions from my phone. MS Office 365's Outlook now offers a cross-platform solution to Thunderbird that would also work for me, but I don't want its bloat; I know how to use it well from work but choose not to at home.
I've got email going back 20 years, a ton of different email accounts, numerous scripts and automation, and damned if I'm going to move all that to another client unless I have to.
On the Windows I use EM Client. Decent interface, much faster than Outlook and doesn't bog down the whole machine. It also supports Caldav and Carddav which my server supports.
On the Mac, it's Airmail.
My favorite client is Gnus. Not only does it handle my email, but also does nntp -- especially awesome when paired with Gmane/Gwene for following mailing lists.
Once it is set up, it's a great way to read, compose, and script email in the environment that you're spending all day in anyway -- Emacs.
I used Eudora forever and even way past when they quit supporting it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Outlook is my primary mail client that I use for the reasons you cite. Mac Mail (on my Airbook) is a second choice when I'm on the road.
Personally, I like being able to send/receive HTML mail - a picture is worth a thousand words and formatting/emphasizing/listing/etc. makes things more readable.
Honestly, I don't love it and I feel like there should be better ones out there but I haven't found them. If I could find a Linux mail client I really liked, I'd probably drop Windows (and Microsoft) all together.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Last I knew, ProtonMail is not set up for access by any desktop client. Other than their webmail, I think the only option is their own mobile app.
After switching to Windows from Lubuntu as my primary OS (it's way more practical to use Windows with my work and school) I also switched to using Outlook and, now that I've gotten used to it, it's hands-down my favorite. I honestly don't think I could go back to anything else.
As for "Inbox Zero," it's a weekly goal that I try to, and usually do, reach by Friday at 6pm when I typically "clock-out" of the work week (as a rule, I don't check email on Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays that I don't work). If I don't hit "Inbox Zero" I feel like I left the week unfinished.
Version 7. It's only 25 years old and my boughten copy has almost paid for itself! It still works and I haven't found anything I like better.
i used it some around the turn of the century then got interested in Linux and Pegasus is a windows app so i forgot about it for years until this email client thread opened up, just did a google search and the last stable release was 4.72 (21 April 2016; 2 years ago)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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IMAP server:
dovecot
Clients:
Seamonkey (Linux / Windows boxes)
Outlook (Windows boxes)
Mutt (remote ssh)
Flexible and Reliable.
227-3517
And why do you want to use Outlook? It's a pretty crappy client with a junk mail filter that's bad.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Thunderbird for desktop, Pine/AlPine for shell, K-9 Mail for a phone.
Webmail is for the birds. And I'm not organized or disciplined enough for the "Inbox Zero" cult.
Before DSL and before dial-up PPP connections to the Internet, we used shell connections.
Manually dialing a rotary phone, placing it on the suction cups, and waiting to connect... at 300 baud.
Again, no PPP, so basically all I had was a telnet session that broke whenever my mom tried to make a phone call. I had to read my e-mail and then manually decode my attachments and save them in my home folder before I could view them.
My first Internet connection was though a 300 baud modem and a DEC LA-36BK teletypewriter, my first e-mail address was a .uucp address.
I liked Pine and a little known thing called Bank Street Writer.
1980s.
E-mail was designed to be text-based only.
I still live the old-school text-based e-mail, using alpine on openSUSE. And strangely enough, I never get any Windows viruses.
If you have a problem with that, then you and I will not be doing business.
Pine is amazing. It goes through a lot of teletype paper, so you want a glass terminal. Over 20 years after I first saw it, I'm still using it.
It screws with people when you can reply to your e-mail with a smartphone or a teletype. :)
Lawrence
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Only young people haven't grown up yet.
Don't worry, the rest of us don't. You'll figure it out eventually.
Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.
A step up from mailx.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I still prefer a nice, customized install of Mutt .
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Using Newton, incredibly lightweight for those who donâ(TM)t need all the bells and whistles.
--- Science & Creativity http://simoncorry.com
I really have gotten used to the gmail interface, despite having my feature request to add an "ORDER BY" keyword command for years. I really don't see why Google refuses to implement this?
Enough said!
Claws Mail. http://www.claws-mail.org/
I find Claws to be wonderful. It is fast, easy to use, portable, reliable, extremely configurable, and very flexible. Claws has dozens of nice plugins and addons. Rather than being "pretty" and hiding everything from the user, it takes an older-school approach and gives you everything you need, and where you need it. Plus, you are not FORCED to use a mouse- there are key commands for just about everything and you can customize them to death. Has full scripting, filters, and connections for every type of delivery available out there.
There are a few odd things about it, but of all Email systems and clients I have used, I like it the most. I have hundreds of users using it every day. It is based on Sylpheed, which has been around forever, and development is still going on constantly. Available instantly for every Linux machine and has also been ported to MacOS and MS-Windows.
As for the problems with encrypted Email and HTML- that is completely due to poorly designed clients that render HTML immediately. Claws allows you to control how Email is displayed. For example, Claws will happily-
1) Not display the HTML part at all and just show plain-text (the default).
2) If the Email is in violation of rules and has no plain-text part, it will just invent one out of the HTML body.
3) If you DO want it to display the HTML (with a plugin), then there are settings to disable any external component loading
The one thing you can't do with Claws is COMPOSE html Email in it. And you know what? That is just 100% fine and a nice feature :)
Yeah, this - Thunderbird is old, and 'support' is relative (Zod only knows how much it is keeping up with the Gecko/Quantum html updates from Firefox's team), but it is solid, portable (sorry, Mac Mail), and doesn't suck by using a rendering engine incompatible with most other email systems (hello Outlook, still sitting on a MS Word rendering engine that's 8 years out of date).
I also use Newton on Win10, Mac, and Android, but that's mostly so that I don't have to go and re-enter 9 email accounts/passwords when i just have to enter one. Tbird would be nice if it could do that, have one single login session that shared the other accounts the way Firefox and Chrome do.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
it has an html engine that is based on Word, which means the rendering sucks even worse than IE.
sure, internally it is just fine within your company, but 90% of the world trying to make emails for 90% of the world have to make really crappy emails in order to look even half-way readable on Outlook. their lack of changes in rendering have set the email client world behind just as bad as IE had for 3 Moore's Law generations before Firefox and Chrome finally started moving the web forward again.
The standards for html and css are there, and Outlook has no intention of meeting them.
The rest of the world would like to move forward, thank you very much.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I don't know if it's the best, but it's more than good enough that I never had to search for alternatives.
#DeleteFacebook
I still miss Eudora.
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.
The last GOOD mail client was Eudora, until Qualcomm abandoned it. Outlook 2010 is OK, but nothing else has come close. Thunderbird was always glitchy. and I've looked at two or three others that weren't TOO bad. Webmail is OK.
Honestly, I feel like the client is a part of the problem, not the solution. Exchange is what makes Outlook really work... but the model is still broken.
(I use Mac Mail... I really need a fscking calendar that actually works, especially when setting up appointments with Apple corporate.)
I need zero spam, zero marketing, zero IEEE (et al) announcements. I need messages that are clear on what is "information only" and what requires action on my part; items that I need to monitor, and what I need to have someone else monitor.
I get about 150 emails per day (after spam/marketing) that require some level of action. It used to be fine while my photographic memory was intact, but now it all just feels like a bunch of garbage.
I want a client that sorts through all the crap for me and identifies what I need to do...
winmail.dat
Sucks having to several times a week copy attachments from users to a Linux machine so I can run tnef to extract their attachments.
I don't understand why google doesn't get the value of the very basic e-mail functionality of forward-as-attachment.
Perhaps it should be called `forward-without-corrupting' and the value might be seen.
This makes it painful to work with someone using gmail even if you don't use it.
I once worked with someone who need to forward me an HTML-formatted email to understand what hundreds of items that need immediate response were. Gmail insisted on formatting the HTML email (i.e. corrupting) when forwarding.
I could not make sense of the mail either. There was no way then to get the original email.. All my associate could do to share the email forward.
It turned out the HTML was invalid and gmail was formatting it in a crazy way. Since this is an AI problem, so I can't fault them for that. However, the lack of them not being able to simply get the email forwared uncorrupted wasted hours.
Solution was to help associated install an imap client.
Want to pass mail off to some more appropriate to respond; best way is `forward-as-attachement'.
Want to help someone with email problems and look at the header; `forward-as-attachement' makes it easy.
seriously? this is MIME 101
It uses Wingdings for emoticons which any standards compliant client renders as simple letters. For a long time I wondered why so many people finished their emails with a "J"...
I started started out using Pine, way way back when, then switched to the email client on my NeXT Color Slab. I replaced the NeXT box with an SGI Indy and used their built in email client. But when that died and I moved over to Linux I tried out Emacs Gnus which was fantastic and used that for 10 years. The only drawback to Gnus is search and I finally bit the bullet and moved from Gnus to Emacs Mu4e. It's not as powerful as Gnus, but it has a powerful index engine Mu that runs outside of Emacs and the Emacs client Mu4e is fast, clean and does pretty much everything that I need in a client. My mail is in a Google Apps account under my own domain so I grab email from Google using IMAP using mbsync, and then Mu indexes and syncs. I run this setup on two different machines, one in the office and one at home. Last year I had to split my time between three job sites and used a laptop as well. These tools allow me to integrate email into my entire workflow, I can link to specific emails in document, my task lists and manage issues on our GitLab server that is integrated with code in my git repos, notes and drafts of papers and blog posts (though I have't blogged in a while)
If I don't have access to any of my boxes running Mu4e I can always slum it and use the Gmail web client, it's not nice, because it isn't a good fit with my tool chain and work flow, but in a pinch it will do if I need to see an email on a mobile phone or someone else's computer.
I have two screens, the big one runs Emacs with two windows side by side, with Mu4e running in one and elfeed (an Emacs RSS reader) in the other. Any links open in Firefox running in the other monitor.
Honorable mentions go to Anything which is another Emacs email client and Mutt.
i used YAHOOpops for the longest time... what that was is a background service that effectively sat on a lan ipaddr and localhost ipaddr, pre-configured to login to your favorite yahoo webmail acct through http port 80 simulated web browsing requests, and then abstracted your webmail as a pop3/smtp host service. it worked awesome until recaptcha would interrupt your session and that means you had to open a browser to re-negotiate your yahoo login to continue your host simulated mail service.
This has to be the most horrible setup possible, short of using Lotus Notes
lucm, indeed.
The standards for html and css are there, and Outlook has no intention of meeting them.
It's even worse than most people would assume. Outlook is probably the last place on earth where HTML tables are still the only way to have some kind of control over the layout. You can have a team of designers creating a single web page that works well in all browsers on all major o/s, but they're still going to need a different, retarded design for Outlook.
I don't understand how anyone at Microsoft can sleep at night knowing that they sell this piece of shit. HTML is a solved problem, there's at least 4 or 5 engines they could use if they don't want to port the one they have for edge, there's just no excuses for this laziness and nonchalance.
lucm, indeed.
But it’s totally unusable now, with Unicode and whatnot.
I deal with a guy who still uses Eurora, and his emails are a royal pain in the butt. Plus he often can’t see attachments
The main bug in Thunderbird is that it supports HTML-Mail.
Looking though the linked article, I can say for sure that none of the GUIs in the screenshots would do it for me, as they apparently all support HTML.
I used Eudora for years.
Then I switched to PostBox.
Unfortunately, PostBox as of PostBox 6 no longer supports Add-Ons, saying:
I guess these means Add-Ons go away in Thunderbird, as well?
I only have two Add-Ons, but I can't live without them:
- SpamSieve
- Markdown Here
Suggestions?
Why would I want to use Outlook? To get away from the google. I'd prefer weak, old evil to the strong and fresh stuff. Microsoft actually has the resources to offer a superior email client--but they don't and I suppose they never will.
Upon reflection, I now feel like the Ask Slashdot question is ill formed. I am not one to have favorites, but there are definitely good and bad features of some email programs, and I could list a number of important features that I've been wanting and even advocating for over the years. Still waiting.
By the way, regarding the comments about filtering, these days my Gmail false positive rate is running around 10%, though the false negatives are still near the usual 1%. There are REAL solutions to the spam problems, but filtering is proven to be a minor annoyance to the spammers. Hint: Where is your pump-and-dump stock scam spam?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
http://www.claws-mail.org/ based on GTK+, distributed under the GPL.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It runs under OS/2. It is one step above pine. It does not do html, scripts, etc. Not subject to virii. Is stores notes in extended attributes, which makes it useful for spam tracking.
It has bugs and tends to go west when dealing with hundreds of e-mails at a time. It is limited to pop3.
Fight Spammers!
I can't believe I haven't seen it mentioned.
lightweight, easy-to-use with a very nice set of features.
I've been using it for quite a while now and I'm really happy with it.
Absolute statements are never true
1. For writing simple mail : thunderbird
2. For reading recent mail : thunderbird
3. For writing complex mail : compose in emacs org-mode , export to HTML, and use thunderbird's Stationery add-on to send mail.
4. For searching old mail - mbsync, notmuch and its emacs client.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
everything, the UI is a disaster.
Claris Emailer on desktop was the first client I ever really liked. PowerMail was a good substitute, but my Mac days are behind me, so I had to leave that behind too.
Mailbox on mobile was probably my favorite client of all time, though. Probably the only time I was ever really good at e-mail, and then Dropbox went and killed it.
Mail.app for images/attachments and Mutt for everything else.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, I'm not kidding.
Last I knew, ProtonMail is not set up for access by any desktop client. Other than their webmail, I think the only option is their own mobile app.
This is necessary because of their end to end encryption. Mail is encrypted and decrypted in the browser via JavaScript or in their own app. Using a third-party client wouldn't support this.
I've just read, paid-for accounts can use a bridge to decrypt/encrypt protonmail locally and access it via SMTP and/or IMAP.
Download and install the ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP Bridge to use your encrypted email account with any email client. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
RainLoop works very well as (self-hosted) web-based IMAP client. The mobile client (via browser) works perhaps even better, and installation is very simple.
The Slashdot community are nerds.
Aging tech community sticking to our habits and beliefs - "google is evil", "rich e-mail is bad".
We are outliers as far as email goes.
Our choices do not matter, as we do not represent the general user in any way.
Go ask someone else.
And why do you want to use Outlook? It's a pretty crappy client with a junk mail filter that's bad.
Yeah, come on, why was the guy using Outlook? Was that a joke where the humour didn't come through?
I'm more of a hardware guy than a coder. I have been offered precisely one software development job, in the late 1990s.
My programming style is so much brute force and ignorance that Microsoft once offered me a job. On the Outlook development team.
I use bubble sorts, for Christ's sake. You cannot make this shit up.
Don't blame me for Outlook: I laughed at their HR, knew I'd be a bad fit for an employer I didn't respect, knew my programming skills and style tend toward the assembler and the soldering iron. I politely declined the offer. And then I went back to playing with the flight simulator Easter Egg hidden in Microsoft Excel.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Mutt. It worked in 1997, and it still works today. Sure, it has more features, but it's the same basic mail client that worked over dial up with a Pentium 100 box with 8 megs of RAM, and now on my 100Mb net connection with my dual-Xeon workstation with 16 gigs of RAM.
Life is short; think quickly.
Ok, it was a mess. Bugs, poor performance, but to this day I am still looking for a mail client that will let me create projects the way it did and let me link documents and create folders, route, provide custom calendar views.
It performed terribly, but I can't find anything to replace it.
Every message is a file
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/nmh
Were that I say, pancakes?
Don't believe the hype. They won't take paid signups over Tor with Monero - you can't get an account there without deanonymizing yourself. They want to be able to track you.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The best of the worst. It has its flaws and yet it's still far above all the others: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/pro...
I use GMail, because it's portable between all of my devices. Work laptop, home laptop, home desktop, smartphone... same inbox, no software install needed.
I'm one of those guys who tries to read every e-mail, and unsubscribes from every marketing list I get myself on. My wife on the other hand, doesn't unsubscribe from anything and probably has 200,000 unread junk e-mails in her inbox by now. Just looking at the screen when she's checking her e-mail drives me batty.
On the computer: Thunderbird. I know it's the "cool" thing on Slashdot to bash Thunderbird and Mozilla in general, but truthfully there is no better, full-featured, actively-maintained cross-platform email client.
On Android, I currently use AquaMail but there are a number of good options there and it's mostly a matter of taste.
Used in both Windows and Mac OS.
Even supported the failed efforts to save it.
Still miss it.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Sorry, now at 47,369. (I do occasionally trim that, but normally I'm too lazy to do that.)
I have no idea how many read e-mails the inbox has, but I long gone are the days when I sorted stuff in any way.
Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.
Yes, but they all lack a decent editor...
being using for a while very good compatibility with gmail + good organizer.
It is getting a bit long in the tooth but I still prefer to use Eudora (version 7.1.0.9 on Windows). I have been using this program forever and like it since it is highly portable if I need to upgrade computers. The program contains itself to one folder and to backup/restore you just need to copy the folder from one computer then paste it to a new computer. Make a shortcut to the exe and you are set to go. No need to install or track down the actual data files.
"Yes, but they all lack a decent editor..."
ROF, LLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
And some of us would argue the only thing Outlook does well, maybe, is integrate with Exchange for calendaring and email. In every other way it's a substandard client running on a substandard OS (marketshare is meaningless from a technical assessment) And to state that Outlook has less bloat than something else makes me question the quality of that something else more than anything else.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Another important question regarding gmail is: Do you want Google reading your mail? I am slowly migrating to ProtonMail (protonmail.com) because I find Google's reading and archiving my email to be disturbing, perhaps in response to the recent Facebook revelations. Regarding email clients, I am quite happy with Thunderbird because it just makes sense for me and I don't have much use for bells and whistles.
Well stated and I actually agree with you. The challenge is just in getting people up to speed.
...with Eudora?
You need an email address for all ecommerce or any online account. There are better ways for that? What are they?
A completly different direction for a suggestion, but...
Have you tough about setting up some server ? /. geek you have on of those. Just hoping that your basement and your mom's house have a good connection).
(On you own home server. I'm sure as a
Some Dovecot or Courrier-Imap to hold the her e-mail folders ?
- Migrating is basically just drag-droping the local folders into the imap server's folder ?
- In case of Thunderbird going berzerk you can still re-download everything from the Imap server.
- In case of something that your mom ends up liking more than Thunderbird, it's basically just about pointing that tool to the same home imap server.
- The above use Maildir, which a lot simpler to backup/restore than mbox. and are lot less corruption sensitive (as they are 1 file per mail, 1 directory per folder. instead of 1 file per folder)
Drawbacks : whenever network drops between your mom's apartment and the your basement's server, she only get the latest pre-failure snapshot.
---
And on a un-related note, Mozilla are considering making a plug-in based mail storage, which could make using Maildir directly in Thunderbird possible (once all the remaining bugs are closed).
That would also make her mails better to backup and less corruption prone, and also a tiny bit easier to move across different maildir-based clients.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Storing mail in its own mbox format is a weakness. Calling it standard mbox is still wrong.
Eventually, Maildir will be coming to Thunderbird.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just curious, why do you need Thunderbird?
I use Alpine on the desktop and K-9 on my phone.
I can use a webmail client for gmail or my hosted domain mail, but don't even remember when I last needed to do that.
I don't get the point of "inbox zero". I archive by month (e.g. 2017-02 for Feb 2017) Right now I have March, April, and May in my inbox and I have about 300 emails. I can launch alpine and it opens in less than a second. And with fetchmail I can aggregate several emails into one account.
I have tried other clients, but none of them have come close to being as useful as alpine for me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Good that you managed to solve the base Thunderbird problem !
(POP3 ought to be abandoned !)
No server. I just have one computer. She's got slow internet. She's not nearby so I only visit every few months.
Then setting up a *local* server ?
Like a low-power single-board computer (you could go to a Raspberry Pi for the popular solution, though beware of later models requiring good supplies in order to not trigger under-voltage CPU throttling).
If you go for a slightly more expensive solution (something that has directly SATA port(s), or at least support good transfer speed over USB3) you could also plugin a disk and install a file server for backups (e.g.: her photo collection, her documents).
(With snapshotting cronjobs on the linux side of things, only accessible over SSH. Samba/CIFS only see the topmost snapshot.
If mom's laptop ever catches a Ransomware with networking abilities, the virus will only be able to fuck up the latest backup over CIFS, not the older time-line over SSH-only)
Do not try to save money by picking up an excessively cheap SD boot card.
Decent UPS solution for SBC boil down usually to a small daughter board with a smartphone's battery management chip and some relatively cheap LiFePo battery plugged to it.
If you're not much into funny home brewed solutions, you could go for a Synology server box which could let you settup most of the above (mail server, backups).
Plus the existence of a linux machine within her network that you can SSH into could let you do some minimal remote admin.
(restrict SSH access to public-keys only, no password allowed. optionally install fail2ban)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was a long-term user of KMail (since at least 2001) on my home computer. When KMail2 came out, I held off on upgrading because of several showstopping bugs I read about on the KDE Bugzilla. Years and years passed and these bugs didn't get fixed; meanwhile I was stuck using an increasingly antiquated operating system (openSUSE 11.4, from 2012) since all newer versions of it packaged only KMail2. Last year I finally broke down and upgraded the OS to the most recent version.
Predictably, KMail2 turned out to be a nightmare. Converting my old mail folders was fraught with problems. When I finally got that sorted out, I was bitten by the infamous message duplication bug wherein extra copies of messages would appear whenever the filters were run. None of the workarounds from the dozen or so bug reports worked for me. I had no choice but to switch to another mail client. Though I use Thunderbird at work, its filtering system is underpowered and buggy. Claws Mail seemed to be the only other option.
In KMail2, as in KMail, my mail was stored in maildir folders, so the easiest migration path to Claws Mail was to set up a local IMAP server -- Dovecot -- and copy over my maildir folders. I then set up an IMAP account in Claws Mail pointing at the local IMAP server.
I couldn't find any way of easily and accurately migrating my KMail(2) filters, so I manually recreated them all in Claws Mail. It took me a while to get the hang of Claws Mail's filters and actions.
The only thing that I haven't been able to migrate to my satisfaction is the address book. KMail2 gets the address book from KAddressbook, which uses vCards. But Claws Mail supports neither vCards nor CalDAV servers -- at least not very well. I did manage to export the KAddressbook entries and import them into Claws Mail, but almost all the fields other than the name and e-mail address were lost.
At this point, I'm waiting either for better vCard/CalDAV support in Claws Mail (in which case I'll consider my migration to Claws Mail complete), or for KMail2 to fix their mail duplication bug, in which case I might switch back to KMail2.
Amen to that!
Why UNIX?
mutt is my choice. Use it continually. One of the best days of my life was when I found header caching.
Why UNIX?
Please tell me Pico is not your favorite editor?
Same as my operating system.
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I have been using AltaMail on my iPhone for years. It had a rough beginning but has turned into a vital business tool with many customizable rules, actions and layout options. The latest office hours restrictions for viewing emails and sending time windows makes it more useful for keeping my work out of my head when I am enjoying time with my family https://mobile.eurosmartz.com/...
I tried it recently in the last month or so and found something that stopped me in my tracks. Can't remember exactly what it was, as I tried quite a few email clients in a short time.
Two of the things that usually got me to stop were:
Can't change the sort order in the inbox. I want latest at the bottom.
Can't re-order the row in the mailbox. I want the sender before the subject.
Until I find something better, I have Thunderbird, mutt, and K-9.
technoid_
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Pine. Okay, fine. AlPine.
Good luck trying to exploit it with a poisoned SVG file or malicious Javascript.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
My intro to email was on DTSS back in '88.
Later on I used pine in an xterm before moving to exmh. It was MH with a GUI wrapper written in Tcl/Tk. For both of them I used procmail to redirect my incoming email into folders.
exmh had lots of feature I miss. Someone wrote an addon I used in '99 that would learn how you moved mail between folders and would start doing it for you. Kinda what gmail's revamp is trying to do 18 years later.
I even ran a mail server at home and had squirrelmail as a front end. As ISPs started blocking SMTP in and out, I finally got a gmail invite for my home email and haven't looked back.
At work, it's mostly Outlook/Exchange after the days of Netscape.
Thunderbird.
Still nobody can challenge MS Exchange on the back end with Outlook as the client for productivity.
How easy can it be? It's right there on the web, the tablet, the phone, the kindle, and the Chromebook. Set it and forget it. The new GM is better than ever but needs a few tweaks. Re-sizable sidebar, make that horrible dialogue box lower left smaller and then auto dissolve in five seconds, show GHMini reminders in Calendar sidebar.
With a lot of personalization. It just works. No reason to change. I'd like to be able to import my pine mail files from the early 90s into TB, but not enough to actually attempt to do it.
Blue Mail on Android; I only want to 'sync' when I'm away from my real computer for more than a day (rarely), and I couldn't get K-9 to do that reliably when I tried it several years ago.
Pegasus or Eudora.
load "linux",8,1
eM Client lets me set up Gmail as my primary account and basically acts as a shell over Gmail. I can even edit email Subject lines for those nonsensical Subject lines that make no contextual sense.
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
Thunderbird because it supports my Add-ons and all 12 mail accounts + IRC.I like organizing my emails in folders, and my Add-on QuickFolders helps with that.
Bin using Evolution for years,,, now I'm too lazy to change. For the most part I does what I want it to and backups and restorations are a breeze. I will change when I have to... *** OFF TOPIC*** Thank you very much Baby Lock for not making manuals available at your website except for the models you are currently selling. Your forebears are spinning in their graves you twaddling nitwits. Sheesh! How disrespectful can a corporation get???
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
Brutal. Even on the slashdotometer scale.
i have 4929 email, 2137 are unread. i'm at 18% capacity...