Flutterby™! : Wanted: An email client 2007-08-16 00:04:47.065859+00

Wanted: An email client

2007-08-16 00:04:47.065859+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Oh, wow. After a year and change using the Mac as basically my sole computer, it's amazing to get back to Linux. No more networking stack randomly going nuts, much more responsive on basically the same CPU, applications that feel better integrated and just work better (yes, most of that is that I loathe the native Mac apps like Safari and Mail.app and use alternatives). As the Mac2Ubuntu.com guy says:

P.S. Yup, you can do more on Ubuntu than you can on your Mac.

It's like switching from haute couture to blue jeans, yeah, some of the edges are frayed, but it's just a much more comfortable environment that's built to fit me, not some highfalutin' thing that looks great but conforms me to the computer.

The switch leaves me wondering if I should still keep using Opera's email client. Charlene's been having some issues with Opera on Ubuntu, I've been having some issues that I'd chalked up to Mac wonkiness, but now that RAM is essentially free Firefox is looking better.

So: What's an email client that does IMAP well and allows quick piping of messages to an external application? Do I go back to Emacs and Gnus (where, I believe, the key is "|")? Evolution has been ignoring this feature request since 2002, KMail lets you run filters that can spawn external apps, but it's not clear that the interface for this is simple and quick. Or are all of the GUI based mail client writers stuck in GUI land thinking?

OTOH, Gnus and IMAP is not the best combination in the world -- things basically work, but it's a bit flakier than Gnus and something like nnml.

Based on what I know of your work flow and habits, you're going to end up back in Gnus anyway, you might as well just start there. 8^)=

I would love an email client that did tagging (alá GMail) rather than just folders. But for now, I use procmail and mutt, since it's fast (much faster than Thunderbird) and I can use it from anywhere I have SSH access.

Ahhhh... Dang, spc476, you just brought me up short. One of the things I've become so used to in Opera's M2 is the awesome search, which, I think, gnus doesn't do. Okay, off to try KMail.

I may be in love: Claws Mail, "it bites". In fact, after discovering this and playing around with it a little I'm going to reinstall using XUbuntu and just use the lightweight clients.

The geek stuff goes mostly (read: totally) over my head and I think I'm really just, like, happier that way, ya know?

But Dan using a simile from the fashion world..."like switching from haute couture to blue jeans"...did give me a giggle.