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Free GUI E-mail Clients For X11? 21

Posted by Cliff from the mailers-that-don't-run-macro-viruses dept.
TheLocustNMI asks: "My question is this: Are there any stable, easy to use GUI e-mail clients out there? I'm in the process of making the switch from Win9x to Linux, and I'm finding it hard to get hold of a decent GUI mail program. Most of the ones I do find are PINE or MUTT, etc. But, coming from Win9x, and as much as it pains me to say so, I liked Outlook. It was easy to use and configure, and wasn't too terribly huge. I've looked into Balsa and Adora, and I've used KMail, but they are either not stable enough (Balsa), not in development anymore (Adora), or just plain clunky (KMail). I would have expected more GUI clients out there, but so far, I've come up with a very short list. Ideas?" Lately, I've been using Pronto, a GTKPerl based email client that supports multiple accounts, filters, MBOX, Maildir and POP3 support. Pronto was originally CSCMail but CSCMail has since moved to C.
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Free GUI Email Clients for X11? More

Free GUI Email Clients for X11?

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  • I am a former NeXT user that is making the transition to Linux from Mac/Win as well. I was looking to use pine, but now you've got me thinking. There are all the Mail.app clones on freshmeat, but I wonder if GNUstep is to the point where the REAL Mail.app from my old nextstation will work with Linux? And if it isn't now, it surely will work sometime in the future (hopefully not so distant).

    This to me would be the greatest option, because despite it's quirks, Mail.app is my favorite e-mail client hands down (not trying to start a flame war, just saying).

    Would this work now?
    Franklin Gordon Bynum
    Undergraduate Student at The University of Texas at Austin
  • Writing an email reader from scratch seems like an awful large task for a person that is simply distraught with their lack of options...

  • Spruce (Score:2)

    by rjh ( 40933 )
    Spruce (here) [sourceforge.net] is my preferred email client for UNIX. It's not quite as featureful as other clients, but is fairly stable.

    Best of all, it supports GNU Privacy Guard. I've got a couple of minor quibbles with how it does things, but on the whole, it's my preferred email client today.
  • I believe there is a mail client in staroffice, i may be wrong. anyways, i know staroffice is %99.99 compatible w/ windows office programs ;)
  • Wait a few more weeks for KDE2 and Magellan [csis.ul.ie] to become stable.

    Never heard of Magellan? Blame slashdot. It's the KDE2 Outlook replacement. Evolution ain't got nothing on the most current Magellan snapshot [csis.ul.ie]...

  • pine in a terminal window. Can't get more stable than that.
    --

  • dah! (Score:1)

    by CentrX ( 50629 )
    this is insane! stop the madness!

    Chris Hagar
  • I've never used it (I don't use mail clients, I have a dinky little free webmail thing :)), but I know one of the developers, and he said it was stable and good, anyway, you can find it at http://althea.sourceforge.net

    Chris Hagar
  • I always found that staroffice ran like kind of a pig. With a 1/4GB Ram and a 333 it ran like a pig. I don't want to know what it would be like on my 300 laptop with 64MB. I did like the interface a bunch, like the individual apps were fine, but as a whole it was just real sluggish for me.
  • This is a great client. And for someone coming from outlook they'll fit right into it. Pronto is also now a good bit quicker than CSC used to be (running as a flat file anyway, I haven't used the mysql database). Now if there was something that could import Outlook address books, calendars and mail directly, that would be a beautiful thing.
  • That must be why there are so many orphaned GUI mail clients on freshmeat. This is one of my biggest annoyances with my current computing lifestyle -- I have to use ssh and pine for decent mail (Netscape is the only other choice and is okay if you're doing POP. IMAP only works on LANs though, tons of timeouts req. ALT-Q or kill -9 if you're modeming). Pine/mutt is a great way to do mail, don't get me wrong -- but attachments bite the big one because they mean that I need to:
    a) use fetchmail and keep all my mail on the local client (again, big PITA when modeming)
    b) save the attachments, and scp them to my local client, then open them.

    Balsa/Spruce is promising, but still lacks a lot when compared to Netscape. I think Mozilla offers the most hope right now, though I'll check out Magellan -- this is enough to swing my affections back to KDE. Well, this plus some annoying slowness/stability problems with Sawfish. Too bad the best window managers (Enlightenment for high end machines and XFCE for low end machines) are such a pain to configure. I love using them, but setting them up on a new box takes forever. But that's another thread...

  • Evolution [helixcode.com] is a mail client that's being developed by Helix Code [helixcode.com]. It's currently in the prerelease stage, at version 0.3.1, but it's usable. If you used Outlook before, you'll find evolution to have a very very similar interface.

    I use evolution now, keeping a backup somewhere else, and it hasn't lost my mail or anything yet, though it does leave stray processes running all the time. sometimes I have to kill them between launchings of the program so it'll run, but, outside of these glitches thatll likely be fixed by release, I find it to be very easy to use, and pretty stable.

    I'd recommend giving it a try. If you're running a major distro, you'll also find helix's install to be very simple, though if you have a slow internet connection it could be painful. You'll have to download a good number of the latest libraries for evolution to work.

    Neil
  • I love it. But then, I'm a NEXTstep lover! postilion [postilion.org] is a GUI clone of tkrat [chalmers.se], which is pretty mature, so Postilion looks better and should work just as well. Works for me, looks better than Eudora, love it. Depends what look you want, really.
  • Yeah.. terific.... ./configure says it cant find the kde includes. even when I tell it where they are. I have both kde and kde2-beta3 installed. Do you know how much bandwith I have wasted downloading software with broken configures and installs.
  • I tried it. It started with killing my mailbox (yeah, it *must* move mails from my mailbox to some private place, just to be completely like outlook). It lacks lots of functionality. It doesn't do quarter of what pine can do (no custom sort, no group ops, no external edit, no bounce, no filter) - oh my, that's Outlook in it's worst!
    No thanks. I'm back to pine.
  • Yeah... like a stuck pig.
  • I've been using the new kmail with kde2-beta for over 3 weeks now everyday without even the slightest glitch. By the way whoever posted about Magellan... I downloaded it to have a look and the configure script cant find my includes even if I tell it where they are. It gets really tiring to download broken software.

  • exmh (Score:2)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    Subject says it all. exmh is a GUI front end to the all-powerful MH messaging system. It's written in Tcl, and has been stable for many years now. More details at http://www.beedub.com/exmh/ [beedub.com].
  • Pine/mutt is a great way to do mail, don't get me wrong -- but attachments bite the big one because they mean that I need to:
    a) use fetchmail and keep all my mail on the local client (again, big PITA when modeming)

    That's interesting: I started using fetchmail after I had to switch from a reasonably fast LAN to a 56K modem. I found the latency was way too high to read mail in a reasonable fashion (typing mail was horrible), so I started using fetchmail to retrieve all my mail. It took a while, but at least I could do something else in the mean-time and then read it without the pain of waiting 10 seconds for each button click to take effect.

    Well, to each his own. :)
  • 1) Graphical (sorry)
    2) SIMAP (so I can access the server from anywhere and have the data encrypted)
    3) GPG support
    4) Did I mention stable and reliable IMAP support?

    So far, Netscape does it all except GPG, which is a real shame. Hopefully Mozilla will support this. The added benefit to Netscape is the roaming profiles, so I don't have to enter in all my e-mail information each time I install a new OS. Just enter the roaming profile information and go.

  • If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH [uci.edu], which allows you to do anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages, have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell or Perl scripts.

    The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands) are mh-e [uci.edu], an Emacs interface, and exmh [uci.edu], a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly book dedicated to them?)

    Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and gnus [gnus.org], which is primarily a newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like it does for newsgroups.)

    Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt) support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.

    If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best bet is to do a search on freshmeat [freshmeat.net] and try all the mail clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail spool before you start messing around with it!

    My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook, Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all frustrating in one way or another.

    My current setup uses nmh [mhost.com] as the base system; exmh [beedub.com] as my main reader; and mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail [tuxedo.org] to download my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN [cpan.org]) to filter it, catching most spam and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH folders.

    (To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting. Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)

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