Slashdot Asks: Which Is Your Favorite Email Client? 406
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 or AlPine (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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No, calling the mail storage of Thunderbird "mbox" is a stretch. Calling it "standard mbox format" is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:i sense wormsign. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but which mail client do you use in emacs. There are about a dozen.
Yes, but they all lack a decent editor...
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SBC ? (Score:3)
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 instal
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You darn kids - get off my lawn!
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Maybe Thunderbird has gotten better, but when I used it about a decade ago it was the worst email client I've ever used. A simple task like configuring a POP server was impossible till I realized I had to halt it's braindead "auto-configure" mode in midstream. If I waited for auto-configure to fail, I was STUCK, with no option to configure it myself.
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Maybe Thunderbird has gotten better, but when I used it about a decade ago it was the worst email client I've ever used. ...
On that, I'd have to go with Lotus Notes. GAWDAWFUL.
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Auto-configuration nowadays is a lot better in pretty much any email client, thanks to our friend the DNS. But Thunderbird is still a bit behind in that regard compared to outlook.
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Re: Thunderbird or AlPine (Score:3)
Thunderbird, and I have the inbox zero strategy. It helps me getting ahead of the game and not lag behind at work because then I can figure out what's important to work on and stay clear of working on futile things.
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Thunderbird, and I have the inbox zero strategy. It helps me getting ahead of the game and not lag behind at work because then I can figure out what's important to work on and stay clear of working on futile things.
I use a streamlined version of inbox zero. Every Monday I do a CTRL-A + DELETE on the entire inbox. It's scary the first couple times but after that it's quite zen. I also aggressively auto-blacklist fluff, HR announcements, status updates and anything where I'm in CC. It doesn't take long to realize how futile email is.
Personally used TTYs. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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I prefer pine. An ios version would be somewhat nifty.
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What about Mutt instead of (Al)Pine?
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+10
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One problem I have (and I don't think I'm alone) is that work mail is via Exchange only. I use this [mozilla.org] to allow Thunderbird to interoperate, and its.. OK. Not perfect, but better than having to use Outlook, which to me seems to have odd quirks and does not play well with my IMAP server.
Last year I experimented with Spark email [sparkmailapp.com] on MacOS. It was grea
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Amen. I use it, but the bugs are so bad I live in frustration. I need to get off my butt and get something else. I guess it's just not quite broke enough to fix it.
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What are some of the bugs you encounter in Thunderbird? I've been using it forever and it I can't remember experiencing a bug.
Re:Thunderbird or AlPine (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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What are some of the bugs you encounter in Thunderbird?
The interface used to freeze randomly and completely for varying periods of time. Made it completely unusable for me. It's not an unknown problem. [mozilla.org] Unfortunately, none of the fixes ever seemed to work for me.
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Unfortunately, Thunderbird is an incredibly buggy and sometimes inoperable application, in which long-term bugs never get fixed and frequently it fails to work correctly at all.
If only the developers would spend some serious time getting it working right, it would be awesome.
You could always donate. Seems that the Thunderbird developers have their hands full just chasing Firefox (mostly the same code base) and keeping it building.
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Thunderbird on the desktop for serious work
I wonder what kind of serious work involves email.
No web mail (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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AquaMail doesn't do LDAP or CardDAV, wanting instead to use my address-book for everything, which is not what I want.
Is K-9 better in that respect?
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Sounds like you need DAVdroid. It makes your CardDAV directory available to any app that needs to work with addresses: your address book (into which it syncs your directory), email apps, etc.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/ [f-droid.org]
(It's also available through Google Play, if you prefer that source.)
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I also do not like HTML in my mail, nor do I like linked pictures and graphics.
Are you one of those people who reply to HTML with plain text, and who use *stars* and _underscore_ to emphasize things since bold and italic are unavailable in plain text?
When I get one of those email I always feel like one-upping the sender by replying with direct uuencoding.
Re: Outlook and Gmail. (Score:2)
And why do you want to use Outlook? It's a pretty crappy client with a junk mail filter that's bad.
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Why would I want to use Outlook? To get away from the google. I'd prefer weak, old evil to the strong and fresh stuff. Microsoft actually has the resources to offer a superior email client--but they don't and I suppose they never will.
Upon reflection, I now feel like the Ask Slashdot question is ill formed. I am not one to have favorites, but there are definitely good and bad features of some email programs, and I could list a number of important features that I've been wanting and even advocating for over
I don't have a favorite but I am Inbox Zero (Score:2, Informative)
Over the years, I've used any number of email clients which were everything from POP clients to shell (mutt/pine with procmail) to webmail (tried em all, including my own hosted ones) to GUI (Groupwise/Outlook/Maill.app/etc).
I haven't ever had a favorite, although Groupwise's detailed transparent tracking features were great to CYA, especially in a union environment where everyone was backstabbing one another. I currently use the latest Outlook (Mac) and it works ok enough for the desktop and I use any numb
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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.
Easy (Score:3)
for a dedicated client (Score:5, Interesting)
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I also use SeaMonkey and LOVE it. If I wasn't so busy with other stuff, I would become a contributor and write some code for it and help keep it alive.
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They need all the help they can get as most of the developers time is spent on keeping up with Mozilla (Firefox) changes.
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Should be pointed out that SeaMonkey and Thunderbird share a lot of code to do with mail and newsgroups and are actually similar.
Thunderbird... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is the worst one out there, except for all the rest.
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Indeed, the state of email clients is really pretty awful as a whole.
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Re:Thunderbird... (Score:4, Informative)
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
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Personally, I had to stop using it because of performance issues. Nothing I tried fixed the periodic freezes that would lock the client up for 30 to 60 seconds or so. I would never have stopped using it except for that.
Re: Thunderbird... (Score:2)
If you have a problem with the font you should have your eyes examined.
The fonts that are used by many web sites today are the worst, they are all fuzzy. Thunderbird has really sharp and easy to read characters.
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The default font in Thunderbird is god almighty horrible. Yes, it supports the basic features, but it looks like shit.
Change it, it's one advantage of a client, you have control.
Mutt! (Score:5, Informative)
Because it doesn't expose my gpg encrypted email by loading messages into a web view...
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Kmail. (Score:2)
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Yep The Bat still alive from the Windows98 era till Windows 10. https://www.ritlabs.com/en/pro... [ritlabs.com]
Another one i liked was Agent mail and news integrated from http://www.forteinc.com/ [forteinc.com]
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Yep The Bat still alive from the Windows98 era till Windows 10. https://www.ritlabs.com/en/pro... [ritlabs.com]
Another one i liked was Agent mail and news integrated from http://www.forteinc.com/ [forteinc.com]
I only used Agent with Windows, version 1.9 was my Usenet, e-mailer program for years, then 6 to connect to Google.
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That might not be very reassuring, but I think Kmail is worth the extra trouble. And, again, everything seems to be running fine now.
Thunderbird (Score:2)
At home, Thunderbird with "View Message Body as Plain Text" and Javascript disabled (for messages from asinine senders that can only be viewed as HTML - grrr) to POP mail from ISP and Gmail. Never really been a fan of browser-based email clients, especially having to worry about browser/javascript exploits, etc..., but will periodically log directly into Gmail to permanently delete mail put into in the trash via the POP3 processing -- that should have actually been deleted, also grrr -- (still haven't dec
Thunderbird, K-9, RoundCube (Score:2)
I use Thunderbird on my desktop. I used to use Evolution, as at the time it had better Exchange compatibility, which I thought I was going to need, but I got extremely frustrated with it. It was super slow moving messages into large folders (like when I archive my mail instead of deleting it), and it seemed I was always fighting bugs. Thunderbird has been a vastly superior experience.
I will say that I'm not excited about Thunderbird, either. It does the job, but it feels clunky. It would be great to ha
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The "super slow moving messages into large folders" isn't Evolution's or Thunderbird's fault, it's Exchange's fault. At least through Exchange 2010 (The last version I have experience with), folders with more than 20,000 messages in them cause Exchange to timeout and abort the connection. Outlook hides this by working in "offline" mode most of the time, regardless of what it tells you, and using its own s00p3r-s3kr1t protocol, while Evolution and Thunderbird have to stick to ActiveSync. But even then, it ha
Outlook desktop client (Score:5, Informative)
Usable but there needs to be a better alternative (Score:3)
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.
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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 some
M2 (Score:2)
Loved the integrated M2 client from Opera of yesteryear. Opera has promised to deliver an updated standalone version, but it's been a long time and I've given up hope.
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I really liked M2. The folder view feature was a better previous than gmail labels, I thought. It even had SSL-client authentication, which we used at work. I still use the 1.0 standalone client for some throw-away email addresses.
Web Mail (Score:2)
I haven't used Thunderbird in at least 5 years, maybe more.
Eudora (Score:3)
All others are imitations of this best ever email client.
Agreed (Score:2)
I used Eudora forever and even way past when they quit supporting it.
Claws Mail (Score:5, Informative)
I use Claws Mail [claws-mail.org]. It's light on resources, fast, stable, and can deal with gigabyte-sized mailboxes without a hiccup. Moreover, it uses the MH mailbox format [dovecot.org], 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 [sourceforge.io] available on it.
Emacs VM (Score:3)
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.
Thunderbird (Score:2)
I've tried others--Kmail for a couple of years, Evolution before that--and occasionally try new versions of those older favorites but I haven't found any new features and/or behavior that keeps me from going back to T-bird.
I do try and keep my Inbox cleared and everything filed but usually seem to have a few dozen emails that I haven't yet filed away at any given time. I don't do any automatic filing using filters as I find the filters too unreliable. I do an initial scan and drag the easily identifiable
Thunderbird, with short-term smartphone support (Score:2)
I use Thunderbird on a Mac. It's allowed me to keep and organize my email locally, and support my previous move from Windows to OS X/MacOS, retaining the UI and metadata (no import with unknown conversion lossage). It's configured to download and delete my email every 10 minutes or so. My smartphone is configured to monitor the server using its built-in email client. So I can deal with important messages quickly on my phone before they move to my Mac, but they're safely off the server relatively quickly
Eudora (Score:2)
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I'm still on Eudora as well. It looks like my oldest sent mail there is 1/29/1995 and I've got a few pieces of incoming mail from 12/1994.
For various reasons, it's becoming gradually less & less tenable with time, but it's still my daily driver.
EM Client and Airmail (Score:2)
On the Mac, it's Airmail.
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Outlook (Score:2)
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 do
Eudora (Score:2)
Version 7. It's only 25 years old and my boughten copy has almost paid for itself! It still works and I haven't found anything I like better.
anyone remember Pegasus email client (Score:3)
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I might wind up going back to Pegasus. It was my first serious e-mail client, and looking back, I think it just might have been the best.
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My setup (Score:4)
IMAP server:
dovecot
Clients:
Seamonkey (Linux / Windows boxes)
Outlook (Windows boxes)
Mutt (remote ssh)
Flexible and Reliable.
gMail is close to good (Score:2)
I really have gotten used to the gmail interface, despite having my feature request to add an "ORDER BY" keyword command for years. I really don't see why Google refuses to implement this?
Claws (Score:3)
Claws Mail. http://www.claws-mail.org/ [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 :)
Stay away from Readdle's Spark for iOS! (Score:5, Informative)
Eudora (Score:2)
The last GOOD mail client was Eudora, until Qualcomm abandoned it. Outlook 2010 is OK, but nothing else has come close. Thunderbird was always glitchy. and I've looked at two or three others that weren't TOO bad. Webmail is OK.
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Glad to see the references to Eudora. It certainly was my favorite in its time, though I wouldn't go as far as some of the comments here...
Too bad there wasn't a better economic model in place to keep Eudora alive. Part of the general problem of corporate cancers seeking profit (instead of satisfied users seeking cost recovery for services received).
I miss Eudora (Score:2)
But it’s totally unusable now, with Unicode and whatnot.
I deal with a guy who still uses Eurora, and his emails are a royal pain in the butt. Plus he often can’t see attachments
Thunderbird, maybe some console one (Score:2)
The main bug in Thunderbird is that it supports HTML-Mail.
Looking though the linked article, I can say for sure that none of the GUIs in the screenshots would do it for me, as they apparently all support HTML.
Eudora - Postbox - ? (Score:2)
I used Eudora for years.
Then I switched to PostBox.
Unfortunately, PostBox as of PostBox 6 no longer supports Add-Ons, saying:
I guess these means Add-Ons go away in Thunderbird, as well?
I only have two Add-Ons, but I can't live without them:
- SpamSieve
- Markdown Here
Suggestions?
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if you don't know what or why, you won't like it...
Have to disagree, I didn't know I want it before I discovered it (duh)
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LOOKOUT!!
Re: Only old people still use email... (Score:2)
Only young people haven't grown up yet.
Don't worry, the rest of us don't. You'll figure it out eventually.
Re: Pine (Score:2)
A step up from mailx.
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Yeah, this - Thunderbird is old, and 'support' is relative (Zod only knows how much it is keeping up with the Gecko/Quantum html updates from Firefox's team), but it is solid, portable (sorry, Mac Mail), and doesn't suck by using a rendering engine incompatible with most other email systems (hello Outlook, still sitting on a MS Word rendering engine that's 8 years out of date).
I also use Newton on Win10, Mac, and Android, but that's mostly so that I don't have to go and re-enter 9 email accounts/passwords w
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it has an html engine that is based on Word, which means the rendering sucks even worse than IE.
sure, internally it is just fine within your company, but 90% of the world trying to make emails for 90% of the world have to make really crappy emails in order to look even half-way readable on Outlook. their lack of changes in rendering have set the email client world behind just as bad as IE had for 3 Moore's Law generations before Firefox and Chrome finally started moving the web forward again.
The standards f
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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 o
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winmail.dat
Sucks having to several times a week copy attachments from users to a Linux machine so I can run tnef to extract their attachments.
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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"...
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I don't know if it's the best, but it's more than good enough that I never had to search for alternatives.
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Ahh, the old days. I used the Eudora email client and the Eudora Internet Mail Server. The client had options up the wazoo and was utterly reliable. The mail server was stripped down, but would run for years unattended on minimalist old hardware.
Sigh...
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i used YAHOOpops for the longest time... what that was is a background service that effectively sat on a lan ipaddr and localhost ipaddr, pre-configured to login to your favorite yahoo webmail acct through http port 80 simulated web browsing requests, and then abstracted your webmail as a pop3/smtp host service. it worked awesome until recaptcha would interrupt your session and that means you had to open a browser to re-negotiate your yahoo login to continue your host simulated mail service.
This has to be the most horrible setup possible, short of using Lotus Notes
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I wouldn't say it is so lightweight. But it is better than mutt when it comes to handling several accounts at once.
I don't like how it works over slow GPRS connections, especialliy with big mailboxes - archives of high volume mailing lists - it cannot do long operations in background, but mutt is no better.