Shopping for an email client

IgnorantGuru · 2010-01-17 02:58:31

I'd like to replace kmail which I've been using for years, not because it doesn't do what I want, but because of the KDE dependency. I see KDE going in bad directions so I'm trying to shift as much as possible away from it. Reading descriptions of email programs doesn't give me the details I need, so before I start installing things I thought I would ask for input.

Do you know an email client that can...

1) kmail has a pretty good set of configurable filters for incoming and outgoing email. So if the From header or entire message contains blah blah blah, it can execute commands or even pipe the message through a command I set. This ability is essential.

2) When HTML emails are opened, only the plain text version is shown, or if not available, then the raw HTML code. If I click on the security advisory at the top, then the HTML is displayed, but external references are not loaded (eg an image is not downloaded). If I click a second time then external references are loaded. I consider this a very good security practice and wouldn't want to live without it.

3) kmail can retrieve mail from local maildir folders, and can send mail via sendmail.

4) SSL, etc to pop and smtp servers

Those are the main points I'm looking for, in addition to just a well designed app in general. I haven't tried any other email clients in many years, so I don't really know what's out there. Staying with kmail is an option too if you think that's necessary.

Thanks for any input.

hunterthomson · 2010-01-17 04:51:38

Hum, I also don't know all that many email clients. I have been using Kmail too but could never get GPG working. I just use Mutt from the shell now. However, I have read about a lot of the other ones in Linux mags and stuff. The one that is spouse to be the best is Thunderbird.

Mardoct · 2010-01-17 05:02:35

I've always loved Sylpheed. It's in the repos.

fflarex · 2010-01-17 05:17:52

Claws mail is the best graphical client in my opinion, although it doesn't exactly fit your requirements. It requires a plugin for HTML, and doesn't support maildir (it uses MH, which is similar but incompatible with maildir).

If you're willing to try out terminal clients, the most obvious suggestion is mutt. You could also try sup or alpine.

Last edited by fflarex (2010-01-17 05:19:30)

mcmillan · 2010-01-17 08:46:03

I'm also using claws (which was a fork from sylpheed by the way) which I like, actually using it within KDE even though it's gtk based since I like having something a little more basic than kmail.

Since fflarex mentioned alpine - my school uses that for it's mail servers, and we can get access to email via a ssh that leads into a shell running alpine as well as a web version that's built around similar features. I haven't really tried to learn it too much, but it seems like a decent client form what I've seen and I know a lot of people that rely either entirely on the web interface or the cli rather than dealing with external email clients.

lustikus · 2010-01-17 09:47:47

Linus Torvalds is an alpine user, too (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_(e-mail_client) )

Personally, I use the opera mail client which is built into the opera browser.

moljac024 · 2010-01-17 12:42:41

I used claws-mail, it's good but now I'm using Evolution.

kjon · 2010-01-17 16:20:55

sylpheed over here. I just converted to it one week ago.

I really liked thunderbird, however is getting to bloated to my lovely xfce setup.

Last edited by kjon (2010-01-17 16:21:36)

rebugger · 2010-01-17 16:25:53

I'm using thunderbird since the last months. I used claws-mail some time ago, but my problem is: for every smtp you want to add you must add a pop/imap server - but i'm using my local imap server (that fetches all mails from the remote pop-servers) and just use the remote smtp-servers for sending.
If the claws-mail developers ever will seperate the two things, i will switch back

Roline · 2010-01-17 16:27:04

Claws-mail.

Last edited by Roline (2010-01-17 20:22:28)

sHyLoCk · 2010-01-17 16:27:54

alpine <3

fastfret79 · 2010-01-17 16:46:07

+1 for Alpine

siriusb · 2010-01-17 17:23:57

I tried some email client. I dropped kmail when it turned out you cannot search by date.
I loved Claws, but Thunderbird which I am using now with all those addons is the best if you want to customize your client to suits you. Maybe you want to try Thunderbird 2 instead of TB3, because not all addons are updated yet.

fsckd · 2010-01-17 18:07:09

I made my own e-mail client and it meets all four of your requirements except for outgoing filters. Mail is sent using msmtp which is sendmail compatible. Messages are viewed and edited using Vim (for which I wrote a .vim to add MIME syntax highlighting and some keybindings to jump around the message). You won't see it though because I'm wrote this to brag.

Anyhow,

Alpine - used to be pine, releases have stopped but development seems to continue, available as alpine in [extra] and re-alpine in AUR

MUTT - still going strong, features are well documented around the net

Thunderbird - If you liked Outlook, you'd like this more, some claim is one of the best graphical clients to date

Balsa - I've never used this but some people swear by it, it is graphical

Claws - probably better than Balsa and more cross-platform

Sylpheed - Claws is better

SquirrelMail - if you like rodents, I've never used this one either

There's also something called sup which made the rounds last year. Ignore it. It's a crappy client and only has search going for it.

I hope that helps some. You'll have to do your own research and may be some testing. I didn't like any of them which is why I made my own.

Last edited by fsckd (2010-01-18 05:11:28)

Kitty · 2010-01-17 18:25:26

I use mutt, but it won't display html mail. But a simple script fixed that. Use mutt's 'v' command to see the different message parts and find the main html body to pipe.

#!/bin/bash

##
# mailsave - save html emails to disk
# Depends: mktemp
##

file_name=$(mktemp /tmp/mail.XXXXX)

while read input; do
    echo $input >> $file_name
done

I set ctrl-v to pipe to this command and then point firefox at the file, that way I get all my flashblock/adblock goodness w/o worrying about my mail client being an infection vector.

Plus I like the fact the html mails can all be dealt with later, since most of them (for me at least) are stuff that requires web browsing anyway.

leberyo · 2010-01-17 19:02:01

Not to highjack this thread but do any clients besides thunderbird support IMAP IDLE? It's a must have feature for me.

IgnorantGuru · 2010-01-17 19:03:17

Much thanks for all the info. Now I have some things to try. Claws, sylpheed, and TB sound promising (I hadn't heard of the first two). I don't like HTML email either, but some places send info that way and it's a pain to not be able to read it easily. I might even look at alpine - haven't used pine in many years.

Kitty wrote:

I set ctrl-v to pipe to this command and then point firefox at the file, that way I get all my flashblock/adblock goodness w/o worrying about my mail client being an infection vector.

That's a good idea. Only thing I would watch for with that are the little invisible images (a very tiny white square) that spammers attach or load from html emails. They basically ping their server so they know you opened their mail and then send you more. But you probably don't open those in Firefox anyway. I think I could do something similar to what you're doing - maybe use a browser to view selected email content.

brisbin33 · 2010-01-17 19:51:12

Kitty wrote:

I use mutt, but it won't display html mail.

um...

add to mailcap: text/html; lynx -dump %s ; copiousoutput

add to muttrc: auto_view text/html

protip: use alternative_order to show plaintext when possible

Kitty · 2010-01-18 02:50:54

@ IG: the RequestPolicy addon for FF pretty much stops that sort of stuff.

@ brisbin33: I meant natively, everyone knows you can pipe/redirect/mailcap whatever you fancy.

jwcxz · 2010-01-18 04:47:32

Frankly, Kmail is the one of the only reasons why I have stuck with KDE on my desktop. I really do not use any other major feature from KDE other than Kontact and Okular (which I have yet to find a decent replacement for as well). You can indeed use Kmail pretty much entirely without a mouse by creating some sane keyboard shortcuts. These will allow you to quickly jump between folders, navigate folders and messages, etc. without any issue.

Having said that, I use Claws Mail on my laptop because I don't want a full KDE installation. It is a decent replacement to Kmail (and has a lot of post-processing options), but the shortcut schemes are not quite as good.

Supposedly, alpine can do everything that I want, but every time I try to set it up, I get bored and go back to what I have... Maybe I'm just lazy.

sHyLoCk · 2010-01-18 04:48:38

fsckd, alpine is also in extra =/

Last edited by sHyLoCk (2010-01-18 04:48:51)

fsckd · 2010-01-18 05:08:18

So it is, and get's updates too. My apologies, I've corrected my post above.

toxygen · 2010-01-18 16:32:40

jwcxz wrote:

Frankly, Kmail is the one of the only reasons why I have stuck with KDE on my desktop. I really do not use any other major feature from KDE other than Kontact and Okular (which I have yet to find a decent replacement for as well). You can indeed use Kmail pretty much entirely without a mouse by creating some sane keyboard shortcuts. These will allow you to quickly jump between folders, navigate folders and messages, etc. without any issue.

+1. completely agree. months ago i went through the "let's see if there's another mail cilent i can replace kmail with" and found nothing that really had the features i became used to with kmail. and i came back, because there just arent any that perform as well.

Maybe I'm just lazy.

could be, I feel the same way though.

IgnorantGuru · 2010-01-18 16:44:20

jwcxz wrote:

Frankly, Kmail is the one of the only reasons why I have stuck with KDE on my desktop. I really do not use any other major feature from KDE other than Kontact and Okular (which I have yet to find a decent replacement for as well).

I like kmail too - it does everything I want and is reliable. Staying with it for a time is an option I haven't ruled out, but I wanted to survey the field. I am trying to get away from having KDE components on my system, as I don't trust or like them. But I still use Krusader as well - the most capable file manager I have found. It and kmail are the main sticking points. I wish they would develop them as more independent apps.

For an Okular replacement, I went with epdfview in extra. It's not as fancy as Okular but it does the job decently. I tried as many PDF viewers as I could find and epdfview was the winner.

Also, I assume you know you don't need to run KDE just for kmail. You will need to install a decent number of KDE libraries, but I have found it runs fine under Openbox. In addition to the required deps, I installed aspell and aspell-en for the spellchecker to work, and kdepim-kaddressbook. And I forcefully removed akonadi (even though it was 'required', it's not).

Last edited by IgnorantGuru (2010-01-18 16:51:50)

Barghest · 2010-01-18 18:16:25

What exactly are the differences between alpine and re-alpine. The re-alpine site doesn't provide informations.

On topic. I use thunderbird. I also tried claws and alpine but I always switched back because of the lightning plugin. With no other program I was able to handle the many ics files of my workgroup laying on a ftp server that easy (also tried calcurse but this did't work with curlftps.

Last edited by Barghest (2010-01-18 18:16:43)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-17 02:58:31

Shopping for an email client

#2 2010-01-17 04:51:38

Re: Shopping for an email client

#3 2010-01-17 05:02:35

Re: Shopping for an email client

#4 2010-01-17 05:17:52

Re: Shopping for an email client

#5 2010-01-17 08:46:03

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#6 2010-01-17 09:47:47

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#7 2010-01-17 12:42:41

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#8 2010-01-17 16:20:55

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#9 2010-01-17 16:25:53

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#10 2010-01-17 16:27:04

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#17 2010-01-17 19:03:17

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