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.

Comments

Thunderbird or AlPine

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Re:Thunderbird or AlPine

[Darinbob]

I have thunderbird but don't use it much. I am mostly on webmail for personal mail. Not great but workable.

I just restored files in Thunderbird for my mom's computer (third time hit by IT scam and she still won't believe that people offering to fix her computer for free are the bad guys). It's a pain in the ass because of how it does things. Proprietary file formats, databases, and such. I've got a lot of old email folders back in normal Unix text format, easy enough to copy around. But outside of Unix no one came up with a standardized mail format. So trying to fix things up, not having a nice way to copy over files was annoying, and trying to fix up weird bugs (it would hang for 10 minutes after startup, possibly due to corrupted database file). Then a day later I find that the address book was missing after all my fixes, and so I'm stuck searching the web for which file to restore so that I don't have to restore from an old backup to a new profile just to get the address book to copy to the real profile.

Sure, maybe all the mail programs act this way now. But it would be nice if things were easier to deal with - such as a built-in import/export feature for folders and address books and settings (oddly I saw an export option for some things but not a corresponding import). I'm not happy that all these programs seem designed to lock you in for life unless you're willing to start over from scratch.

Re:Thunderbird or AlPine

[sgage]

I too have used Thunderbird since forever with no problems, and I still do. I have tried them all, but keep coming back.

I will not knowingly have anything to do with Google.

Re:Thunderbird or AlPine

[jrumney]

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.

No web mail

[argee]

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.

for a dedicated client

[FudRucker]

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)

Thunderbird...

[vanyel]

...is the worst one out there, except for all the rest.

Re:Thunderbird...

[vanyel]

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

Mutt!

[dyfet]

Because it doesn't expose my gpg encrypted email by loading messages into a web view...

Outlook desktop client

[DogDude]

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.

Claws Mail

[sombragris]

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.

My setup

[packrat0x]

IMAP server:
dovecot

Clients:
Seamonkey (Linux / Windows boxes)
Outlook (Windows boxes)
Mutt (remote ssh)

Flexible and Reliable.

Personally used TTYs.

[BigBlockMopar]

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

Stay away from Readdle's Spark for iOS!

[koick]

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.

Re:i sense wormsign.

[arth1]

Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.

Yes, but they all lack a decent editor...