What is your favorite e-mail client?

[wanchan]

What is your favorite e-mail client?

I know it is old. These days people use a lot more web mail than stand-alone e-mail client program. But as an e-mail junky, I still can't live a life without a reliable and secure e-mail client.

As a primary Microsoft Outlook user, I am looking for an e-mail client completely independent of Microsoft Internet Explorer. I recently tried Becky! Internet Mail and am impressed by it. Onething I don't like Becky however is that it uses IE engine to view HTML e-mail. I also tried the quirky The Bat!. Although I admire its quirkiness, I can't stand some basics Bat after all the years has not ironed out. The Bat can't even word-wrap my e-mail right! Plus horror stories about entire e-mail database corrupted hold me back from The Bat.

So what is your favorite e-mail client right now?

 

[QuixoticOne]

Usually Mozilla's Thunderbird by default since it sort of works for POP3/IMAP and is multi-platform (UNIX/Linux/MS Windows/ probably others).
The add-ons can be nice. Frequently updated versions are nice. Free is nice.

Frankly I think that in some cases relating to fundamental email operations / design though, KMAIL for LINUX/UNIX is much superior.

Evolution (LINUX) shows some promise but isn't ready for my prime time use; so far it is disappointing in stability and functional feature set / design.

Mozilla is also bringing back Eudora mail as a freebie IIRC; I haven't tried the newer versions, though, but it used to be the standard MS Windows email program.

I can't stand webmail for numerous functionality / security / privacy / reliability reasons; I want my mail easily to be LOCALLY accessible in full as files / attachments as well as whatever I keep on the server via POP/IMAP. I don't need a 3rd party web server having access to all my correspondence, even if they do use SSL security which many of them don't well / fully do. I want the richer / more responsive user interface of a local client.

I also can't stand Outlook -- PEM, PAB, blah blah files that are totally non-standard, insanely difficult to actually export into any useful standard / accessible by other programs format, flaky, not very secure, not very feature rich, not even available by default under Windows OS as a free fully functional mail reader (compare to Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail, Gmail, ...), etc.

 

[wanchan]

Isn't the latest Thunderbird sluggish in terms of performance?

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: wanchan
Isn't the latest Thunderbird sluggish in terms of performance?

I don't think so. It works fine on all of my computers, as well as my daughter's EeePC. Thunderbird is the first thing I think of when someone wants an email client.

 

[antskip]

Thunderbird version 3 is much much snappier than the stock version 2. It is still in pre-beta ("Shredder") but I have never had a problem with it in 6 months.

 

[lxskllr]

Another reason I like Thunderbird is it's open source. You'll never be stuck with old mail that you can't read or export. If a newer version breaks compatibility with old mail for any reason, you can recode it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

 

[QuixoticOne]

It is more sluggish than it OUGHT to be, but overall I find it reasonable in comparison to most alternatives. If I run it and a bunch of browsers and so on on my old 1 core 1.5GB RAM system then I can run into serious sluggishness (probably mostly the fault of Firefox and the OS). On newer multi-core systems with 3-4GB+ RAM I tend to have no major performance problems with it or other simultaneous browser / office / etc. applications.

It can be slower than I'd expect / prefer in big sort / search / filter type operations over hundreds or thousands of messages which I do blame on its programming / data storage, but I haven't found that it is TOTALLY unreasonably bad in such cases even with many thousands of messages to go though.

The RSS support is kind of so-so / minimal / basic. The junk detection / filtering is so so / minimal / basic without some additional configuration. Message management / tagging / sorting / folder operations are pretty basic / limited compared to my ideal situation, but it is certainly better than most any web mail or many other MUA client programs.

 

[corkyg]

Got T-Bird, WinMail, OE, and my real favorite workhorse is Eudora Pro. I like the way it manages mail and lets me control it. Syncing mail between computers is simple with Eudora.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Tbird here as well, with IMAP and local server with fetchmail.