Subject: Re: [Rant] The Endless Search for a Mail Client That Doesn't Suck

From: No Spam <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2016 23:06:16 +0200

Hi,

So it is 12 years later;

has someone found something working?

greets

J

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From: "Byung-Hee HWANG (황병희)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:01:23 +0900

Hellow!

No Spam <[email-masked]> 께서 쓰시길,

> has someone found something working?

For now i use Gnus.
 by the way it is hard to recomend you.
It is not easy to handle. 
The ~/.gnus.el is changed, all the time!

Sincerely,

-- 
^고맙습니다 _地平天成_ 감사합니다_^))//

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 07:22:46 -0400

> has someone found something working?

So, if you expect a helpful answer, you might detail the problems that you 
have with the mail clients you've tried.

I've used kmail for a long time, and though it has some warts, I'm generally 
satisfied.  I use it as a pop3 client, I don't know if I'd have more problems 
as an IMAP client.  Some of my nits (or larger than nits):

   * Doesn't have the focus follows eyes (or thoughts) feature ;-)
   * Sometimes insists that folders are too big to compact
   * Typically (well, until recently) I lost the filters when I moved to a new 
machine--now I know how to deal with that
   * Doesn't automatically compose (appropriate) replies

---

From: Gene Heskett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:31:07 -0400

On Monday 29 August 2016 07:22:46 [email-masked] wrote:

> So, if you expect a helpful answer, you might detail the problems that
> you have with the mail clients you've tried.
>
> I've used kmail for a long time, and though it has some warts, I'm
> generally satisfied.  I use it as a pop3 client, I don't know if I'd
> have more problems as an IMAP client.  Some of my nits (or larger than
> nits):
>

Chuckle, now that would be handier than bottled beer.

>    * Sometimes insists that folders are too big to compact

Trinitys bugfixed kmail 1.9.10 has never done that to me, and I've one 
mailbox thats never expired, a bit north of 4.3 gigs.  Its all maildir, 
and slow to enter those larger folders.

>    * Typically (well, until recently) I lost the filters when I moved
> to a new machine--now I know how to deal with that

Copying kmailrc from the old machine to the new one would have sorted 
that. But duplicate the folder structure first!

>    * Doesn't automatically compose (appropriate) replies

Some of mine could be called NSFW. ;-)

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

---

From: brian <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:59:04 -0400

>has someone found something working?

This will be a recommendation which most likely nobody else will
support, but here we go...

I like having newsgroups and mail in a single program. While there's
nothing outstanding about its e-mail side, it's certainly usable, but
Forte Agent (which runs just fine on Debian via WINE) is head and
shoulders the best news client I have ever found. 

When I switched to Linux on retirement (having previously been paid to
use Windows) I did the rounds of the various mail clients. Kmail,
Claws, Thunderbird, you name it. I detest webmail, largely because,
living where I do, I have no option but satellite internet access, and
that really sucks. 

Whatever I've tried, I've always come back to Forte Agent. Yes, it's
Windows program. Yes, it's closed source, and they WON'T release the
database format. Yes, it costs money ($29 for a new registration). 

Despite all those negatives, I still regard it as the best $29 I ever
spent, and I've been using the program for almost 20 years now. 

>http://www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php

Usual disclaimer applies, no vested interest, just a very happy
customer. 

Brian.

---

From: John Hasler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 07:29:02 -0500

Brian writes:
> I like having newsgroups and mail in a single program.

So do I.  That's one of the reasons I use Gnus,
-- 
John Hasler 
[email-masked]
Elmwood, WI USA

---

From: brian <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 06:15:23 -0400

On Mon, 29 Aug 2016 11:11:51 +0200, you wrote:

>
>On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 04:59:04AM -0400, brian wrote:
>> I like having newsgroups and mail in a single program [...]
>
>Gnu Emacs/Gnus. Runs natively on Windows if need be (and of
>course on whatever *Linux flavours and BSDs out there).
>
>Configurable and tweakable if there was ever one.
>

But will it download from multiple newsfeeds *simultaneously*, and
combine the feeds if you subscribe to the same group from more than
one source? That's Agent's big selling point. I tried using
Thunderbird for news, and the problem was that it did each server
sequentially. When you're on a metered internet connection, with only
a five-hour unmetered window in each 24, then making maximum use of
the unmetered window is important. 

Brian.

---

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:26:34 -0400

> the unmetered window is important.

In such a situation I think you'd want to use something like leafnode
and offlineimap.

        Stefan

---

From: John Hasler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:32:22 -0500

Stefan writes:
> ...offlineimap...

That looks like it could be useful.  Thank you.
-- 
John Hasler 
[email-masked]
Elmwood, WI USA

---

From: John Hasler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 07:47:19 -0500

Brian writes:
> But will [Gnus] download from multiple newsfeeds *simultaneously*, and
> one source?

I use Leafnode to transfer news to my machine and then read it locally
with Gnus.
-- 
John Hasler 
[email-masked]
Elmwood, WI USA

---

From: The Wanderer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 07:29:16 -0400

On 2016-08-29 at 07:00, [email-masked] wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
> 
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 06:15:23AM -0400, brian wrote:
> 
> [Gnus]
> 
>> combine the feeds if you subscribe to the same group from more
>> than one source? [...]
> 
> TBH I never tried that, because I separate mail handling from my MUA.
> Fetching, sorting and classifying is left to fetchmail, exim and
> procmail, the "MUA" sees the result locally.
> 
> Much better system behaviour when working offline.
> 
> Didn't yet integrate news into that, since the newsgroups I am 
> interested in are disjoint from my mailboxes.

I've been interested in trying to set up a system like that for some
years, but never had occasion to make a Project out of it, and never
found an obvious place to get started - especially for when migrating
away from a workflow which is already based on having the mail client
configured to contact the remote server directly. (And even more
especially when dealing with an IMAP account, and wanting to be able to
seamlessly affect mail on the IMAP server from the UI, which is provided
by the mail client.)

Could you go into more detail on how you have / got this set up, and/or
point to resources which explain the process (well enough for someone
technically savvy to be able to pick it up)?

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

---

From: Gene Heskett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:08:32 -0400

On Monday 29 August 2016 07:29:16 The Wanderer wrote:

> > TBH I never tried that, because I separate mail handling from my
> > MUA. Fetching, sorting and classifying is left to fetchmail, exim
> > and procmail, the "MUA" sees the result locally.
> >
> especially when dealing with an IMAP account, and wanting to be able
> to seamlessly affect mail on the IMAP server from the UI, which is
> provided by the mail client.)
>
> Could you go into more detail on how you have / got this set up,
> and/or point to resources which explain the process (well enough for
> someone technically savvy to be able to pick it up)?

Its not THAT hard, I've been doing it for quite a few years. I suck using 
fetchmail as a background daemon, waking up every there minutes to go 
tap the pop3 port of my ISP's mail server and pull anything new. When a 
message has been pulled, its handed off to procmail for having it run 
thru clamscan, spamassassin etc, and what survives that gets dumped into 
a mailfile in /var/spool/mail.  Then a bash script I wrote has a 
subdaemon called inotifywait, trained to watch for file closings, and 
when that mailfile has been written to and closed by the writer, it 
sends kmail a message over dbus (or dcop, depending on the system) 
telling kmail to go get the mail from that local mailbox nd sort it thru 
kmails filters and stashed in the appropriate folder. 

The net result is that the pause in everything else that kmail does, is 
only a fraction of a second, most of which is used by its making a noise 
to tell me new mail has arrived.  If kmail was doing its own fetching, 
then the keyboard is dead (the keystrokes entered are saved and 
displayed when it comes back to you, but that dead time could be a 
minute of more when someone sends you a big picture, or an openoffice 
presentation with lengthy video snippets)

With that much background automation, all I have to do is hit the plus 
key to read the next unread email, reply to it if I can, hit ctrl+return 
to send it, and + to read the next one.  Thats it, everything else is 
done for me.  Fetchmail can tap as many pop3 servers as you have access 
rights to, and I have had 3 at one time, but am down to my ISP's server 
now. It does it serially of course.

Late at night, I stop fetchmail long enough to run sa-learn against 
several folders to train spamassassin, that takes 10+ minutes, and 
fetchmail is restarted when thats been done.  Basically I am lazy, and 
bash scripts handle a lot of stuff in the background here. Repetitive 
stuff is soon turned into a script in my crontab.

Biggest PITA? The pop3 server is also an imap server, and because some 
people mix-n-match, the ISP has disabled fetchmails ability to delete a 
mail it has fetched.  So I have to log into the ^%# webmail with a 
browser and clean house, usually daily.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

---

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:39:41 +0100

On Sun, 28 Aug 2016 23:06:16 +0200

> has someone found something working?

Gmail on a web browser not good enough for you?

OK, I'll vote for claws-mail as well, with the same reservation. It has
bugs. But not serious ones, and curiously the Windows port has one less
bug than the Debian package (moving to another email with 'next'
doesn't mark it as read).

In my case, I use an IMAP server, and when away from home, openvpn. For
some reason I haven't understood, the combination of claws on Windows
and openvpn doesn't allow attachments to be sent, so I drop back to
Thunderbird to do that. If I'm only using TCP and don't need local DNS,
I use ssh rather than openvpn, and claws is OK with that.

Mutt on non-GUI machines.

-- 
Joe

---

From: Ben Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 10:38:10 +1000

> So it is 12 years later;

To what event are you referring? Your message's header has no standard
“In-Reply-To” field, so it apparently is not composed as a reply.

> has someone found something working?

I hope you can find an email client that correctly preserves the thread
of discussion :-)

-- 
 \               “… correct code is great, code that crashes could use |
  `\           improvement, but incorrect code that doesn’t crash is a |
_o__)                    horrible nightmare.” —Chris Smith, 2008-08-22 |
Ben Finney

---

From: "Neal P. Murphy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2016 19:50:33 -0400

> has someone found something working?

More years ago, BeOS' email client was perfect for me. It use separate files and made very liberal use of BFS' equivalent of attributes to sort and organize messages. But BeOS development stopped. I briefly (*very* briefly) went back to Windows. Then discovered that Linux was ready for *my* desktop. SuSE worked for a while. Then I think it was etch that pulled me over to Debian. And there I found kmail which worked fine for me for a good number of years. It did everything I wanted and rarely displayed problems.

About the time of squeeze or wheezy, kmail (and KDE for that matter) began slipping over the edge into the abyss. I finally found XFCE which is about as simple and is as useful as KDE3 was. Then I started searching and trying various email clients. I didn't like anything. Then I found claws-mail. It isn't perfect; it has a quirk or three. But, by and large, it's as usable and stable as kmail was lo those many years ago.

But when Haiku (open source remake of BeOS) is ready for prime time, I will probably switch back to it. Especially since I can run most any OS I need in a KVM, and my 500-line KVM bash script lets me configure and fire up a VM in about two minutes.

So yes, I found something: claws-mail.

---

From: deloptes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:16:09 +0200

Neal P. Murphy wrote:

> About the time of squeeze or wheezy, kmail (and KDE for that matter) began
> slipping over the edge into the abyss. I finally found XFCE which is about
> as simple and is as useful as KDE3 was.

KDE3 still lives and KMail is still as usable as before ... even better as
bugs are being fixed. I'm not sure if you know the Trinity Desktop Env
(TDE).

regards

---

From: Gene Heskett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 02:52:11 -0400

On Monday 29 August 2016 02:16:09 deloptes wrote:

> Neal P. Murphy wrote:
> > About the time of squeeze or wheezy, kmail (and KDE for that matter)
> > began slipping over the edge into the abyss. I finally found XFCE
> > which is about as simple and is as useful as KDE3 was.
>
> KDE3 still lives and KMail is still as usable as before ... even
> better as bugs are being fixed. I'm not sure if you know the Trinity
> Desktop Env (TDE).
>
> regards

And TDE is very highly recommended by Grandpa Gene.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

---

From: deloptes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:55:14 +0200

> And TDE is very highly recommended by Grandpa Gene.

We should have added a link to the web site.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

regards

---

From: Gene Heskett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 03:01:40 -0400

On Monday 29 August 2016 02:55:14 deloptes wrote:

> >> > About the time of squeeze or wheezy, kmail (and KDE for that
> >> > matter) began slipping over the edge into the abyss. I finally
> >> > found XFCE which is about as simple and is as useful as KDE3 was.
> >>
> >> better as bugs are being fixed. I'm not sure if you know the
> >> Trinity Desktop Env (TDE).
> >>
> >> regards
> >

True, but there is always google. :)

Cheers, Gene Heskett

---

From: Johann Spies <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:35:12 +0200

I use mutt. From time to time I have experimented with things like kmail,
pine, evolution,
thunderbird (icedove), claws, gnus and maybe some others and every time I
came back to mutt.

Regards
Johann

-- 
Because experiencing your loyal love is better than life itself,
my lips will praise you.  (Psalm 63:3)

---

From: Joel Roth <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 23:11:45 -1000

> thunderbird (icedove), claws, gnus and maybe some others and every time I

I also like mutt. The base mutt has become much more
valuable since I added an indexing utility, mu. I can
actually search through all my old mail now!

-- 
Joel Roth

---

From: Henning Follmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 10:28:40 -0400

> thunderbird (icedove), claws, gnus and maybe some others and every time I

+1 for mutt 

-H

-- 
Henning Follmann           | [email-masked]