What mail client do you use, and why? (not a poll)

Greetings,
I've been using a web based solution for a/my mail client for years. But I'm finally exploring the other possibilities, in hopes of a better solution. FWIW for the most part, all my mail is served up from my own MX's. So, anyway, in hopes of finding that "better" solution. I thought I'd ask what everyone's choosing for a mail client, and why they chose it. :)

Thanks for your input!

--Chris
 
I kept losing mail every time I reinstalled my OS. So I'm mainly using a web interface (Roundcube). I do use Thunderbird but with IMAP so all my mail stays on the server.
 
I kept losing mail every time I reinstalled my OS. So I'm mainly using a web interface (Roundcube). I do use Thunderbird but with IMAP so all my mail stays on the server.
Thanks for the suggestions, SirDice !
Right. I should have mentioned I use IMAP(S) as well. :)

Thanks again!

--Chris
 
I've been using Outlook for many years. The main reason was because I run my own company and this helped me to keep both track of e-mails, appointments and as an added bonus I could also access the Outlook database from within Word thus making it much easier to put the right data on a letter.

Fortunately for me communication pretty much completely shifted from snail mail to electronic mail and since Word can't write e-mails... (well, technically you could but sending Word documents as e-mail? I once had a would-be customer who did that and more or less suggested he'd go to another hosting company because of it :D ).

Then I discovered that todays Thunderbird also provides support for a calendar and todo's. Not necessarily as extensive as Outlook did it but... I also relied on an Outlook extension (Business Contact Manager) which had been discontinued. So functionality wise I wouldn't be going backwards, and then there was also this thing about not relying on closed standards (Outlook storage) anymore.

So I moved the whole kaboodle around. All my mail now resides on a dedicated ZFS filesystem, provided to me through Cyrus IMAPd and I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client. On all platforms I use.

I used to rely on Horde as a backup but I grew tired of that (also because it's basically a 'blob' which doesn't connect to anything) so replaced that with a minimal web based client called Squirrermail. Sorta, that is still on my todo :p
 
Thanks for the reply Max212 !
I've tried the Horde application suite. It was nice. But I'm already using a web based application, and am attempting to get something more "local". :)

Thanks for your input!

--Chris
 
mail/neomutt, and mail/fdm for filtering. If one need tagging and searching mail/notmuch is the right complement. Still, www/pycarddav or PR 227807 can be used for CardDav integration.

This is a very powerful and extreme flexible solution.

At the GUI side, a lot of people like mail/claws-mail, and for something more simple and Qt based mail/trojita is something I like.
Thnk you for the rpley, lebarondemerde !
Hmm... attempted to get a closer look at neomutt. But my attempt to go to their website, returned: This Connection is Untrusted (invalid cert). I'll try to find more information elsewhere. Shouldn't be too hard. After all, it's "mutt" based, and mutt has been around for... forever. :)

Thanks for the information, lebarondemerde ! :)

--Chris
 
There are other variables that impact the choice of an email client:
1) Mail format: mbox vs mh vs maildir
2) Contact management
3) gpg, security, encryption
4) command line vs gui: gtk vs Qt
 
I've been using Outlook for many years. The main reason was because I run my own company and this helped me to keep both track of e-mails, appointments and as an added bonus I could also access the Outlook database from within Word thus making it much easier to put the right data on a letter.

Fortunately for me communication pretty much completely shifted from snail mail to electronic mail and since Word can't write e-mails... (well, technically you could but sending Word documents as e-mail? I once had a would-be customer who did that and more or less suggested he'd go to another hosting company because of it :D ).

Then I discovered that todays Thunderbird also provides support for a calendar and todo's. Not necessarily as extensive as Outlook did it but... I also relied on an Outlook extension (Business Contact Manager) which had been discontinued. So functionality wise I wouldn't be going backwards, and then there was also this thing about not relying on closed standards (Outlook storage) anymore.

So I moved the whole kaboodle around. All my mail now resides on a dedicated ZFS filesystem, provided to me through Cyrus IMAPd and I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client. On all platforms I use.

I used to rely on Horde as a backup but I grew tired of that (also because it's basically a 'blob' which doesn't connect to anything) so replaced that with a minimal web based client called Squirrermail. Sorta, that is still on my todo :p
ShelLuser , Outlook? really?! You should be ashamed of yourself. ;)
mail/Thunderbird. Hmm I used to use this quite a long time ago. But stopped for some reason. Tho I don't remember why. I just went to take a look at it. But they only want to tell me where to download it, and nothing else. I guess they must have some super-secret things they want to install. Before you find out what they are, and have no ability to undo what happened. ;)
Thanks for the information. Maybe I can gather some more fact about it somewhere besides Mozilla &Co. :)

Thank you very much, ShelLuser ! greatly appreciated. :)

--Chris
 
There are other variables that impact the choice of an email client:
1) Mail format: mbox vs mh vs maildir
2) Contact management
3) gpg, security, encryption
4) command line vs gui: gtk vs Qt
Indeed there are, shepper . I run all my MX's locally on some of my servers. Which, of course all run FreeBSD. So the mail box format is naturally, mbox. As noted earlier, I'm currently using IMAPS. As to the other(s). They're usually available as plugins/addons with most of the apps available these days. GTK-vs-QT; while I'm no big fan of QT. In the end it (techinaclly) doesn't really matter, as both toolkits will run on nearly any of the Desktops available on FreeBSD. :)

Thanks for taking the time to reply, shepper !

--Chris
 
All new mail is kept on servers that are administered by other people (by big and competent IT departments or ISPs). We've been doing that for about 10 years.

For my home e-mail: I use Apple MacOS mail, as does my son. My wife uses a web-based UI provided by our ISP, which is pretty good. On the cellphone, we use gmail (they are Android cellphones), while our son uses Apple iOS mail.

For her corporate e-mail, my wife uses outlook, because that's what the IT admins told her to use.

For my corporate e-mail, I use a web interface provided by my IT department.

For e-mail that's stored on our home server (before we switched to other people's servers), we used to use mutt and pine. But these days, nobody logs in via a shell window any more, except to do system administration. And many e-mails are HTML based or have attachments, so shell-based e-mail is just impractical. For a while, I was running a dovecot server and we were using a combination of Thunderbird and Apple MacOS mail. But a few years ago, I turned it off, and nobody has complained (neither my wife nor our son). Right now, if we have to retrieve one of the old mails, I use emacs and read them right out of the mail spool files.
 
kmail ,was included with kde desktop and i could import email from old windows outlook express.
never had problem with it ,never tryed to search for another program.
 
I also use neomutt (which is a package in FreeBSD). I have a page on mutt that some find useful, at http://srobb.net/mutt.html (basically the same for mutt and neomutt) I use getmail to get the mail, maildrop for filtering (I download all my mail to my machine), and msmtp for sending. (All this is at least partially explained on my mutt page, though it doesn't cover filtering for imap, which is something I may get around to one of these days).

At work, I use thunderbird, though I can also use mutt, because at work, I do rely on imap filtering.
 
scottro ,
Ah. Another (neo)mutt user. :)
TBH I get a warm fuzzy feeling reading mail in POT (Plain Old Text). Probably due to my being a computer geek since the 70's. But still, any MUA less inclined to anything but text, for email. Gets high marks from me. TBH if I had my choice. I'd turn my editor/IDE into a MUA. I live in the thing, anyway. So seems a good deal more practical. Maybe have some indicator in it for when email arrives. Tapping a meta-key combo opens a new window/tab with the mail in it... alas I'm dreaming. But really Someone(tm) should do that! I think emacs might have something like that.
Nice work on your (neo)mutt page! Nice to have those references. Especially when they're based on personal experiences! ++

Thanks for taking the time to reply, scottro !

--Chris
 
Jason Ryan of ArchLinux has a nice article (linked on my page) about reading html with mutt (a shortcut that opens a browser). In addition, I have to agree with his feelings in the article about html mail. Sigh, in the late 90's and early doubt oughts, even the MS lists would curse out people using html mail.
 
TBH if I had my choice. I'd turn my editor/IDE into a MUA.
mail/mutt and its fork mail/neomutt both offer a configuration option for the editor. For that matter I recall that mail/sylpheed and its fork mail/claws-mail also allow the configuration of an external editor.
The pertinent section of my muttrc
Code:
#    Set Global options
#
set autoedit                    # Include header
auto_view text/html                 # Use W3m as inline html viewer
auto_view text/calendar
alternative_order text/html text/enriched text/plain
set copy=yes                                # Always save a copy of sent messages
set date_format="%b %d, %Y: %R"            # Set Date/time
set editor=set editor='gvim -f -c "set spell spelllang=en" -c "set tw=72"'
 
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