KMail vs. Evolution vs. Thunderbird? 115
Deemo asks: "I use Mozilla Thunderbird on the Windows machine. Recently I installed kUbuntu, on a separate computer. Since I'm using KDE, the obvious choice is to use KMail as my default mail application. However, I tend to like Evolution's interface better, and I like Thunderbird in general from extensive use of the Windows version. I was wondering what the advantages/disadvantages are of each, and which one Slashdot users recommend for everyday use."
In all honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a thunderbird user. Not because it's better or cooler, it's the one I'm used to using and I like it.
If you like Evolution, good for you. If you like Kmail, good for you. If you like Outlook, gasp, good for you!
I use KMail (Score:2)
Thunderbird kept crashing on me and losing mail, I couldn't get evolution to work the way I want. KMail Just Works (most of the time).
I haven't found a perfect mua but KMail comes closer than most for my purposes.
I like the idea of thunderbird but I'll wait for it to be developed further, but if kmail continues advancing I may not bother again.
Why not try all three - set up two of them not to delete mail from the server (esp. if not running your own) and try t
reasons I like kmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:reasons I like kmail (Score:2)
Re:reasons I like kmail (Score:2)
The fact Kmail use mail dir format, as mutt, let me also check my mail from a remote ssh session.
Some people might want to have a look to AMaVIS [amavis.org] or check SWiK about
- emails [swik.net]
- fetchmail [swik.net]
- procmail [swik.net]
- ClamAV [swik.net]
- SpamAssassin [swik.net]
- KMail [swik.net] (nothing really here)
- mutt [swik.net]
Re:reasons I like kmail (Score:2)
Is there some other way? Like launching a bunch of random apps, and killing the ones that were wrong?
Re:reasons I like kmail (Score:1)
Re:reasons I don't like kmail (Score:3, Interesting)
Email "disappears" from my inbox when using IMAP. If I delete an email, or move it to a different folder, about 50% of the time Kmail will appear to delete the email that immediately follows it. It also happens (about 25% of the time) if I simply select a message. If I quit Kmail and restart it, the "disappeared" email returns, but the fact that it happens at all is annoying as hell.
It's been like this since the days of KDE 3.0,
Re:reasons I don't like kmail (Score:2)
I love Kmail, but it has one showstopping bug that makes it unusable for me. Email "disappears" from my inbox when using IMAP.
I wonder what's different between your usage and mine, because I've never seen this problem. I mostly use the "disconnected IMAP" mode, but I occasionally use the regular IMAP mode as well. I don't see this problem with either.
I searched the KDE bug database and this [kde.org] looks like your bug, but the bug report says it was resolved in KMail 1.6, which is in KDE 3.2. If you still
Re:reasons I don't like kmail (Score:2)
Thanks for the links, but it's not the same problem. For me, the message gets moved, but the one immediately following disappears. Occasionally selecting a message will cause it to disappear. Restarting Kmail always brings them back. I don't see the same problem with Thunderbird.
The last time I tried it was with KDE 3.4.2 (the packages from Slackware 10.2), but it's been there since 3.1.4 (which is when I started using IMAP.) I haven't submitt
Re:reasons I don't like kmail (Score:2)
I think the problem could be timing-related, as it happens much more frequently at work (100Mbs connection to the mail server, vs 500Kbps from home.)
Could be, but there must be another factor as well. I use mine via dialup, various network connections from hotels around the world (widely varying bandwidth, latency and reliability) and from my home office, where I have a Gig-E connection to the mail server.
Since there don't seem to be any bug reports about it, your problem must be fairly unique. I sup
Re:reasons I don't like kmail (Score:1)
It's been like this since the days of KDE 3.0, and each time a new version of KDE comes out, I check to see if they've fixed it. As of the most recent version, no dice. I'm currently stuck with Thunderbird until they fix it.
I've been using KDE since 3.0 and while I have had various problems over the years I've never run across this particular problem before. My IMAP server is Courier-IMAP... not sure if that makes any difference.
Also, have you posted a bug to bugs.kde.org about this? I imagine a bug
Re:reasons I like kmail (Score:1)
Are you speaking about the KMail(Kontact) that is part of KDE?
Bug 104956: dimap: sudden mail loss [kde.org]
Bug 87163: kaddressbook empties resource on some conditions (data lost) [kde.org]
It's very simple (Score:4, Informative)
Evolution requires that you install a mess of stuff for GNOME.
Thunderbird requires that you install libc, gtk, and X11. If you prefer a stripped-down desktop, KMail and Evolution are non-starters.
Re:It's very simple (Score:2)
KMail requires that you install a mess of stuff for KDE.
Nope. Just kdelibs.
Re:It's very simple (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's very simple (Score:1)
Re:It's very simple (Score:1)
Plus perhaps I'm shorting KDE for what GNOME does, but...
I have one GNOME application installed, gnucash, and I've minimized the GNOME stuff I installed just to get that. (With USE flags, which gives away my distro.) At one point, I made the mistake of clicking the "Help" menu, and my simple, lightweight icewm desktop turned into GNOME. It took over my desktop in order to bring up Mozilla to show me help. Nor did it give it back, when I was done browsin
Re:It's very simple (Score:2)
the only gripe i have found against KDE is its insane memory usage, but for the most part it's well behaved.
i've had the same experience as you with gnome, taking over the desktop and never giving it back, leaving crap laying around in memory after you close your app, and a botched reimplementation of microsoft's worst idea: the registry. that just makes gnome a big no no.
I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:3, Interesting)
YMMV of course.
Re:I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:2)
Re:I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:2)
So I do reply to all but I have to do some editing to the addresses before I can send the message.
Re:I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:2)
> I miss the 'reply to list' option
The 'reply to list' functionnality is still available, albeit not in the context menu. It is now only available using the 'CTRL-L' keyboard combination. I also miss its presence in the context menu, but I'm now used to call it from the keyboard.
Re:I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:2)
Now I'm really confused. CTRL + L is forward on my v1.0.7 copy of TBird. Not only that but it _is_ in the context menu.
Re:I recently switched from Evo to TBird (Score:2)
> CTRL + L is forward on my v1.0.7 copy of TBird.
> Not only that but it _is_ in the context menu.
I was talking about Evolution.
custom headers and accurate message format control (Score:2)
Evolution seems unable to produce a properly-formated email for the LSM robot.
Evolution fights my attempt to edit an email as plain text. I need to send patches in the body of my email. This is required to be a Linux kernel hacker. Evolution likes to word-wrap, MIME-encode, remove trailing spaces, change tabs to spaces, and do many other evil acts of mail mangling.
Evolution's email editor gets a
Does it really matter? (Score:1)
uh. (Score:1)
Mutt [mutt.org]
Re:uh. (Score:3, Interesting)
that's how i read my e-mail (Score:1)
so I keep navigating back and forth between folders, especially when looking for messages that do not have a natural folder to be placed into, and this happens quite a lot. Something like virtual folders (which I've never seen in another client but apparently they exist in some) would be quite useful.
Re:uh. (Score:2)
It looks awesome, you get the job done and it's very convenient thought.
Re:uh. (Score:2)
I hate at least 99% of HTML email. Sure, there are good uses for it (e.g. using only semantic mark-up to represent meaning to the email, not presentational crap), but even situations that would call for it are usually accomplished via ASCII text (or even Unicode if in another language).
Re:uh. (Score:2, Informative)
I use mutt and it is simple to read HTML mails in mutt [debian-adm...ration.org] if you need to.
(Sadly I do.)
Re:uh. (Score:2)
Do you show html immediatly or do you use it so you have to show the attachment? I don't know if I wanna tell them I've watched the link if there are any, but maybe that isn't an issue when where are no images.
Some points of comparison (Score:4, Informative)
Thunderbird works essentially everywhere. You can share your mailbox over the LAN filesystem or globally via WebDAV, regardless of whether you are using Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris, *BSD.
As far as I know Evolution is best for 1) People who need to interoperate with Exchange servers under Linux, 2) the mentally impaired, and 3) Gnome partisans.
But then, I never saw a good reason to try it.
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
Interesting. I tried KMail just now because of this thread and found that it wants to store lots of stuff locally. You can tell it where your Trash folder is, but I didn't see a place to tell it where to store sent items. Storing anything locally doesn't work for me since I have lots of machines that I check email from.
I guess I'll stick with Thunderbird for now.
Choose sent folder in identity settings (Score:1)
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
I'm in the same situation and use NXClient (using the free-NX server) to have a consistent email application with all email history etc. available from any machine that has a connection.
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
Select "Configure KMail" -> the "Identities" tab -> select your identity -> select "Modify" -> select the "Advanced" tab.
The placement of these options are a little confusing, but when you think about the separation between accounts and identities in KMail it makes sense after all.
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know how (or why) people choose to live with POP mail boxes. I cannot believe POP3 has not gone the way of telnet. IMAP is so superior, that it really makes little sense to use anything else...
IMAP makes a much bigger difference if you have multip
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
KMail just got it with version 3.5 (I don't know about the other clients). You can do filtering with server-side sieve scripts, but thats not at all as handy as using the built-in interface in KMail.
Re:Some points of comparison (Score:2)
It is strange why it has taken so long for the clients to mature with respect to IMAP. I find that strange, as IMAP has been around a long time. I remember using PINE in college back in 19
Exchange (Score:2)
Thunderbird (Score:1)
Re:Thunderbird (Score:1)
The all new Ask Slashdot Jeopardy game! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The all new Ask Slashdot Jeopardy game! (Score:2)
Use IMAP, try them all. (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally, currently, use Evolution - I like it's vFolders, I have a vFolder set to show me all unread mail from the last 2 days, across all my IMAP and local email accounts, one for the last week's mail and one to show me all flagged email and emails related to them (my "to do" threads).
I have the last 2 days vFolder open most of the time, as email comes in I can quickly read it, if it's junk then delete it right there, if it needs some attention (work needs doing) I flag it so it goes into my to do list unless it's a reply to something that's already in there.
Then when I want to work on a job, I open the "To Do" vFolder, and I can see all the jobs I have on the go, including all emails related to them (unfortunatly I can't get it to include emails I've sent in reply in the threads..yet), I also use the flag to keep a record of how long I've spent on the job, and use the "Completed" switch in the flag to indicate when I'm done and it's ready to be billed out (when it's billed I clear the flag and the thread drops out of the "To Do" vFolder).
It makes it very easy to manage the large amounts of incoming mail I tend to get, provides a pretty good timesheet system (for me, when I'm working on a job, it's always related to an email, so that's the perfect place to record time spent) and saves me from being frustrated at an INBOX containing several thousand messages!
Re:Use IMAP, try them all. (Score:2)
Recently I switched most of my filters to procmail on the IMAP server, and with the important messages pre-filtered into folders, evolution's filters can never see the messages and never play the sounds anymore.
Re:Use IMAP, try them all. (Score:2)
Re:Use IMAP, try them all. (Score:3, Insightful)
For my mail server, I run IMAP (specifically Cyrus IMAPD) with server-side filtering rules (using sieve). These rules basically filter things caught by spamassassin and messages from mailing lists into their appropriate mail folters.
On the client side, I can use whatever the heck I want. I use KMail on my desktop, Mail.app on my laptop (it's a PowerBook), pine when I ssh in remotely, and RoundCube for Webmail (new AJAX thing, still heavily development/featureless
None Of The Above. Webmail only. (Score:4, Insightful)
No connection, no mail. (Score:1)
Re:No connection, no mail. (Score:2)
The beauty of webmail is I can connect from any computer anywhere there is connectivity, which, if you read the news, is everywhere
If I don't have connectivity, I can surely read a book or something until the plane lands...
Bad for business. (Score:1)
Re:Bad for business. (Score:2)
I'm curious how a normal email client will be able to receive mail while the internet connectivity is down?
Need to access already-received mail. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bad for business. (Score:2)
In a locally based client you can compose offline! (Score:1)
You cannot do that with webmail.
Personnaly I don't use a locally based client, even though I use only one PC almost exclusively. I use FastMail.FM's webmail client and I don't know a locally based client that can duplicate the functionality I use on that webmail client (but then
Re:In a locally based client you can compose offli (Score:1)
Re:None Of The Above. Webmail only. (Score:2)
One problem with IMAP (Score:2)
IMP, SquirrelMail, and Pine are about the only IMAP clients I've used that don't try to download your mail locally even when using IMAP. Everything else I've tried has been a POP client with IMAP support hacked in.
SquirrelMail chokes on large mailboxes, so I use IMP. It works great, and there is also a version of it designed for mobile devices
Re:None Of The Above. Webmail only. (Score:2)
Not to mention that the required ports on a foreign network may be filtered or blocked, whereas ports 80 and 443 are almost never blocked or filtered stringently enough to kill IMP.
Also not sure what functionality makes the local clients "
Re:None Of The Above. Webmail only. (Score:2)
Seamonkey (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Seamonkey (Score:2)
The name change (Score:2)
Use IMAP? Use KMail. (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally I had enough. I tried KMail. It has superb offline IMAP support: operations happen quickly and in the background, and are queued as well, letting me continue to do things while KMail syncs it. It has nice little features like automatically changing addresses from "someone at somewhere dot org" to "someone@somewhere.org". It also seems faster than Tb.
I still like Tb; it has a good interface, and is pleasant to use. I will try 1.5 when it comes out. But I am also disappointed in the Tb's team not fixing old, simple, outstanding bugs that have been in the bug db for years. There are some important ones that are breaking Tb for people, but they don't seem to care. Those people would be glad to help test and debug...but the Tb team has more important things on their list, it seems.
So, I highly recommend KMail.
Re:Use IMAP? Use KMail. (Score:1)
I have this problem on *every* platform I use Thunderbird on: OS X, Linux, and Windows. I can't figure it out for the life of me. The only way to make it notice the messages is to restart it. It's most annoying when nothing tips you off that you might have messages and you just asusme you actually don't. I'm convinced all IMAP clients are horrible.
Re:Use IMAP? Use KMail. (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe it's a problem with your IMAP server. Some IMAP servers don't support "idle" well.
Another one to be considered (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in the "if you like it, use it" boat. An email client is just a means to an end, it's not a destination in and of itself.
Personally, I use and recommend "The Bat! [ritlabs.com]" on my Windows boxes. I have what could be called "advanced" needs and this is one awesome program. It allows (automatically) different sigs per account, different sigs per folder, shared folders between multiple users on the same desktop, cookies, etc. It's not free but a short time using it hooked me. If you have some time and perceive some limitations in your existing client(s), give it a shot.
Standard disclaimer, not affiliated, yadda, yadda.
Re:Another one to be considered (Score:2)
Mmmm, how I long for it (= how
Evolution has Calendaring (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Evolution has Calendaring (Score:2)
Re:Evolution has Calendaring (Score:1)
Re:Evolution has Calendaring (Score:1)
Re:Evolution has Calendaring, isn't this... (Score:1)
Gmail Is My Favorite (Score:3, Interesting)
Is anyone aware of such an effort?
With KDE Strongly Consider KMAIL (Score:2)
It is so nice to be able to easily drag and drop between konqueror for attachments (especially for my non-techy wife). The tight integration really is the main thing for me.
I am a bit tired of customizing things, I have been doing it for close to 10 years now with Linux, that I am at the stage where i
Re:With KDE Strongly Consider KMAIL (Score:2)
I've been switching to everything part of the KDE suite ever since, just for the integration (except the browser, too addicted to se
POP3 mail clients are so 1990 :-P (Score:1)
So drop all 3 and go Gmail all the way!
https://mail.google.com/mail/ [google.com]
Most users have no alternative to POP3 (Score:1)
O. Wyss
Re:POP3 mail clients are so 1990 :-P (Score:2)
-bZj
Re:POP3 mail clients are so 1990 :-P (Score:1)
O. Wyss
Re:POP3 mail clients are so 1990 :-P (Score:2)
-bZj
I prefer KMail (Score:1, Insightful)
(1) KMail is mature. It can handle a variety of mail delivery systems properly. In particular, it handles my setup extremely well. (The others do equally well, however.)
(2) KMail integrates well into the KDE platform. If you're using KDE, you'll probably like KMail. If you're not, then it probably won't work for you.
(3) KMail seems to be
Evolution vs. Thunderbird (Score:2)
I decided to try Thunderbird against this to see how it worked without jeopardizing my primary mail folders. It went badly. In a folder with about 70,000 mails in it, Thunderbird completely fried. Evolution would allow that and search it no problem. I don't generally have real folders wi
Re:Evolution vs. Thunderbird (Score:2)
Bummer, it does not let you include content from "archive" folders in your "Search Folder". I assume this is what you were tal
Oh it's history (Score:1)
Then I was KMail user (rather old release... KDE 2.x times)
Then there was ThunderBird...
Now... One and only Evolution. Why?
Calendar, Address Book, sync with my cellphone, vFolders. I just wish that new-mail-notification was working in KDE. Appart from this it is a great software.
What's more amazing ... (Score:1)
O. Wyss
If you want to sync with a PalmOS device (Score:2)
I switched from Kmail to Tbird 6 months ago.. (Score:1)
Sylpheed (Score:2)
Keep it simple. Sylpheed [good-day.net]. Or fancy it up a little with Sylpheed-Claws [sylpheed.org].
I prefer Thundirbird after trying all 3 (Score:2)
When I started using Linux a few years ago, I used Evolution which I liked very much. Unfortunately at the time I did not find it easy to integrate it with Spamassasin so I move to KMail. I found KMail's interface not as polished as Evolution's but it did integrate pretty well with Spamassasin.
Then my ISPs started offering spam filtering service on its servers and I found that it was more effective than running Spamassasin locally (or training the email client locally to catch spam) and I switched email c
Here's the Real Answer (Score:2)
2. Evolution has the best interface but it's not as stable as Thundernerd and still feature limited compared to KMail
3. Kmail has the best features, and as a subcomponent of Kontact you get a full features PIM like Evolution with far more integration into KDE + New Reader. Too bad about the ugly interface, and slight instability. (More stable than Evolution)
My biggest beef with KMail is mostly
Re:Here's the Real Answer (Score:1)
Re:Here's the Real Answer (Score:2)
No complaints about any of them (Score:2)
One thing I do miss with the current version is that the pre 2.0 version had a start page that could be configured to g
Re:outlook (Score:2)