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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.
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 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...
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.
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?
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
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.
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
IMAP server:
dovecot
Clients:
Seamonkey (Linux / Windows boxes)
Outlook (Windows boxes)
Mutt (remote ssh)
Flexible and Reliable.
227-3517
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.
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.........
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 :)
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.
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...
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"...
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.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried not caring about email instead? Just have a casual look once or twice a day, and delete everything unread once a week. It's like getting out of jail.
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.
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
No, I'm not kidding.
Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.
Yes, but they all lack a decent editor...
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 ]