Mail clients, what do you use?

[Ant P.]

I've decided I've had enough of claws-mail and want something new. The rough GTK1-era UI was fine by me, but it corrupting all my settings (including logins) after a power failure is not OK; I haven't seen software that loses so badly in a very long time. The lack of IMAP push support is annoying also, given that 99% of what I use it for is notification or authentication cruft that should be delivered on time.

What's the current state of email software? Last time I looked Thunderbird was officially on death row and KMail was still the world's only email client without the ability to receive mail, ten years running.

[Hund]

I use Mutt myself. But I would like to recommend Mailnag. It's a great little standalone tool for push IMAP notifications, if you're okay with GTK3 that is. And if notifications is important you, check out Dunst, which is an advanced yet lightweight notification daemon with a lot of neat features like rules.
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[The Doctor]

Thunderbird dead? That is news to me. New releases keep getting pushed all the time.
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Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[Hund]

[devilheart]

Currently I use evolution because I need Exchange web services support

[1clue]

[Ant P.]

[szatox]

Evolution works pretty well for me. I've created a few accounts with IMAP/SMTP and a local-delivery one with maildir format.
One thing that bothers me a bit is that I don't know how to protect local copy from deletion by the server.

[eccerr0r]

alpine most of the time.
Evolution occasionally. Got it to work because it came with the gnome.
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[Goverp]

I use kmail2; works for me most of the time, then someone in KDE head office improves it, and I have to delete the akonadi database, and reconfigure all the settings that loses. My wife uses SeaMonkey; a bit of a dinosaur, but it works fine.
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Greybeard

[fturco]

Currently I don't use any mail client. I rely on FastMail webmail. I can't use Evolution or Thunderbird because my current Gentoo system is based on Qt5 and I don't allow any GTK+ applications. Trojita is not good enough unfortunately. In the future I may try some Emacs-based mail client.

[mir3x]

I use thunderbird, its ok. Kube looks very awesome, but I cannot configure gmail there. And it shows double imap dirs for zoho .... But in few years it could be good
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[1clue]

[statikregimen]

Does Zoho via Rambox count? Rambox is a love/hate, though. It's basically a dumbed down web browser, and I often wonder if it's really worth the resources vs another Firefox window. But it is a semi-unified interface, and can be minimized to the tray w/ decent notifications on most services.

[mir3x]

[AJM]

The general state of email clients is very depressing indeed, isn't it? I'm using Claws and have been for quite a long time - and Sylpheed before that for at least a decade. Going back a very long time, I was quite happy with the original KMail, even after I stopped using KDE, but all that semantic desktop garbage killed it for me.

I must say I don't recall ever having a corruption issue like you saw with Claws (I do normally use a UPS although it died a month ago and haven't replaced it yet.)

Thunderbird kind of works but it's a horrible bloated mess; Trojita looked very promising but is nowhere near developed enough for real world use and sadly doesn't look like getting there any time soon.

I have installed Mutt a few times as most of my work is in a Screen session anyway but somehow it doesn't really seem to work the way my brain does. I used Pine a long, long time ago but really don't feel it's as convenient or quick for me to use as Claws mail, so I'm stuck with Claws for now.

In one way my expectation that a mail client should be extremely resource efficient doesn't make sense as I have loads of RAM, and plenty spare CPU cycles but I have those resources in reserve for specific situations, not to allow for shoddy programming and pointless layers of redirection bloat...

[eccerr0r]

GUIs themselves eat up a lot of CPU resources, not to mention rendering HTML (at least in Evolution, the rendering speed is awful for some reason)

Then again in alpine - a text mail client - sorting thousands of mails in thread order can be slow at times too. Processing the LKML by thread sometimes takes a noticeable amount of time when there's a lot of messages in the mailbox (like a month's worth) even on my c2q.

It's sort of sad that squirrelmail got lastrited from portage. Then you'd even have browser HTML mail as an option...
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[1clue]

I used to use pine years back, but the nature of my work and dealing with customers means I need to be able to handle html and attachments and pictures/video and tons of other stuff that pine never did well.

Before some pine fanatic goes off on me, pine did handle attachments, but didn't put them in the part of the message they were dropped in, so when it's "customer production system down" status the extra time spent to figure out which attachment the customer means, significant money may be lost.

The days of simple mail are over. In fact, anyone having tried to configure and secure a publicly accessible mail server may argue that mail was never simple since the days of arpanet.

[eccerr0r]

Of course it depends on the nature of what you're doing. If you need to deal with html, then use html. The vast majority of my mail does not need html and the rest gets fed into Evolution to parse. Oddly enough, mails that Evolution choke on, alpine does well; and of course all the graphics laden mail alpine doesn't render Evolution gets just fine. Then again any linked pictures don't automatically get loaded in either client (by choice) and thus both look ratty on these mails.

It also follows that if pine doesn't do, mutt, elm, the original BSD mailx, etc., won't either as all suffer from the same basic problem. Alpine could do a little better by html inline ref linking of attachments, perhaps that could be submitted as a feature enhancement.

To enable the dual client I ended up having to set up IMAP on my server and not deal with just SMTP/maildir/mbox. Yes, the authentication is annoying to set up.

There's a condensed table of mail clients to peruse on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Ant P.]

[HungGarTiger]

[miket]

[Fitzcarraldo]

Thunderbird is alive and kicking: The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog - Thunderbird's Future Home, 9 May 2017

[stephan-t]

I use webmail and (neo)mutt. I have three account and only few (thousand) mail.

[fedeliallalinea]

Kmail/Korganizer/Kontact with DavMail Gateway for exchange
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