[nzlug] All email clients suck, no exceptions

[David McNab]

Hi all,

Firstly, this is a gentle warning to those of us in the Ubuntu/Gnome
user community who are currently putting up with Evolution as their main
email client.

A couple of weeks ago, the junk mail filter in Evolution (by default, it
uses bogomail), totally lost the plot and started junking about 50% of
my legit emails.

I was oblivious to it, till some people I was talking to on the phone
asked me 'didn't you get my email?!'.

A search through the junk mail folder revealed what had happened.
Hundreds of legit messages, including mailing list traffic and critical
business messages, had ended up among the spam.

One of these days, someone might come up with an email client that
doesn't totally suck in at least one major area:

 - thunderbird - nice client on the whole, good ui and plugins
   catalog, product of venerable Mozilla foundation. Downside: when
   I upgraded my Ubuntu distro and installed a new Tbird version, it
   failed to recognise my existing Tbird mail store and insisted on
   me creating new accounts. When I tried importing my email from
   the old store, it choked

 - sylpheed-claws - very slick and fast client. Shame that on sending,
   it claims to have sent the message successfully, but quite often
   the message never gets delivered. On the positive side, it is one
   of the few email clients where the authors show the respect and
   courtesy to offer the ability to export the mail store

 - sylpheed - dumbed down version of sylpheed-claws, missing several
   crucial points of functionality

 - pine - bearable - but suffers from the inherent problem in all
   console clients - the inability to display attachments inline and
   properly render HTML messages

 - mutt - claims to suck less, but its curses user interface and lack of
   folder tree display make it (at least for me) agony to use,
   let alone the learning curve. I feel mutt is largely for folks who
   take on mutt configuration as a hobby. Also, great for those who
   still do most of their work on vt100/220 terminals.

 - mozilla mail - admittedly I haven't given it much use, but one
   assumes it would be pretty similar to tbird, given the lineage

 - evolution - lest I forget - good client, good performance (as long
   as one turns a blind eye to the memory footprint), but the good
   performance only lasts for the first few months, until the message
   store starts getting really big. Then it becomes a dog

Maybe, just maybe, someone will come up with an email client with less
than 80% of the suck factor of the existing clients

</rant>

Cheers
David