Next Generation Mail Clients Reviewed 743
kreide writes "E-mail is the 'killer app' of the Internet; an enormous number of messages are exchanged every day, and while web-based mail has become very popular in recent years, many people still prefer the added speed and flexibility of a mail client application. In this review I compare the next generation of the most popular e-mail clients, including Evolution, KMail, Opera and Mozilla, and their usability in dealing with large number of messages."
Outlook XP/2002? Where's Outlook 2003? (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to mod me down as a troll, but the author isn't being honest with the community. Open-source folks will be better off knowing what's in the current version of commercial products, not the older versions.
I read through the reviews... (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail is NOT the killer app of the Internet. I have used plenty of different email clients and they all work the same. It is just as important as any other Internet communication device (IM, IRC, whatever).
In order to get a feel for how each mail client handles daily tasks, I conducted my review by performing a number of tasks:
Download a reasonably large amount of messages, about 2100 in total
This is funny to me. I consider myself a "regular" computer/Internet user. I don't see the need to download 2100 messages as part of my "daily tasks".
Why is new mail notification (on 3 of the 5) "Audio Only"? I much prefer not having sound and just having a popup notification (or a small blurb come up):
[10:08] > From: Kitch@removed.org
[10:08] To: Bill
[10:08] Subject: Re: ok.
I guess I am old fashioned...
I also find it strange that only a single one (KMail) supports Maildir. The rest are mbox. I thought Maildir was the future?
Just my worthless review of a worthless review,
Re:And what's wrong with Outlook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Killer app ... yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
But having said that, I think email (non-spam, even) probably has been using more bandwidth (speaking globally and through the years) than any other form of internet usage, at least until p2p came along, so I think email has earned its "killer" title.
And now, I'll go read the article!
No import? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:outlook 2k3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Killer app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the internet has had several killer apps that kept the boom going:
a) Communication: This includes IM's and email. In the early days it was mostly email.
b) PR0N: Actually, it's been around since the early days of the internet. Heck, I remember it was a big part of BBS's before I got on the 'net
c) Games: This really hit when TCP/IP games became popular over the internet. Less need to lug your PC over to a friends' for a LAN party, and you mom can play solitaire with your aunt in another country
d) Music: I know a lot of people that subscribed to high speed just to get supposed "free" music.
Email is perhaps, however, one of the "killer apps" that has suffered the most during its time online. Games have their botters/hackers, pr0n has its misleading popups, and music has its Britneys, but by far SPAM has become one of the larger unfixed problems so far (patched, perhaps, but not fixed)
Re:Why do we need local clients (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what IMAP is for.
Re:Outlook XP/2002? Where's Outlook 2003? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still prefer text-based. (Score:5, Insightful)
Text-based MUAs such as Mutt are still (IMO) more effective at dealing with large numbers of messages. They do have a learning curve, but you can cut through the masses much more efficiently. External programs are called for HTML, images, encryption, etc. in the Unix tradition (and even Microsoft uses an external HTML viewer). For those of you who edit a lot of text too, Mutt even calls an external editor for composing messages.
No, they're not for everyone, or perhaps even most people. However, my father is an auto mechanic working as a shop supervisor for UMBC. He doesn't like PCs very much, but he asked me to "set up PINE" (meaning an SSH client) on a new machine that the campus IT staff had set up for him with Netscape 7's email client. He's on some high-volume lists, and it's just too slow to use a GUI client.
For the record, I do prefer Mozilla to w3m, because I find it to be faster for most tasks (even for freshmeat work, where I have to edit a lot of text in Mozilla's editor versus the ability to use Vim in w3m). I also use GAIM, and used Pan back when I downloaded large quantities of fansubs. But email is basically dealing with a lot of text which sometimes has other stuff, and for that, I find text-based to be the way to go.
Re:outlook 2k3 (Score:1, Insightful)
Besides, Outlook is hardly a viable solution. I don't know anyone who uses Outlook. Period. Not at work, home, family, friends - anyone.
He said 'next generation' (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Next generation mail client (Score:3, Insightful)
no mention of Protocol support ?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that Kmail does a pretty good job of supporting most of them (PLAIN, LOGIN, GASSPI, KRB5, etc)
Sunny Dubey
Re:outlook 2k3 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:And what's wrong with Outlook? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps having a mail client that supports scripting which someone else can trigger is the problem, not scripting per se. Apple's Mail, for example, fully supports AppleScript but it won't trigger a script on receipt of a mail message. AppleScripts have to be activated by a user.
Of course, there are dumb users who trigger their own infections by clicking on attachments without checking, but the same goes for a file loaded on a floppy disk, CD or any other source - not the fault of the mail client.
Having a scriptable mail client can be very useful if you get a lot of spam or need to do a lot of fancy filtering.
Re: Continued factual inaccuracies on Outlook (Score:3, Insightful)
I e-mailed the author, and pointed out some of the more obvious problems with his review.
Yet another case of the the anti-Microsoft world spreading their own version of FUD. And because they are not part of the legitimate media establishment, they can do a really shoddy job of journalism, and never print a retraction, or correction. In fact, their readership would be disappointed if they ever did correct their mistakes, because their readership does NOT want to hear anything positive about a Microsoft product.
Outlook mostly useless? (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, Outlook is NOT a bare bones mail client. If he wanted to compare the MS mail client, that would be Outlook Express.
Also, why didn't he review any good closed source clients? This seems to be a silly OSS vs. MS thing. If it was a real review, he would have at LEAST needed to include Eudora and Pegasus, both of which have been around for ages (much longer than any of the ones he reviewed, in fact).
Re:Next killer app? (Score:5, Insightful)
seriously. this brings up the biggest hole in email as a communications medium: it's inherently broadcast.
for email to really become the predominant communications medium, privacy and authentication must be dealt with. whether that's through some open encryption/signing standard like gpg/openpgp or through some proprietary technique doesn't really matter (although obviously, i'm rooting for gpg). what matters is that people a) realize the shortcomings of email in this area and b) do something about it.
None of them are the next generation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Next killer app? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe because that's e-mail? You can hardly call it an instant message, anymore
Re:Next killer app? (Score:1, Insightful)
Somehow I get no spam on my important account of 5 years. But plenty in my free netscape.net that I use when ordering, downloading etc.
Re:Next killer app? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've never met the client and I'm not about to ask for his Yahoo! ID.
If he's even on Yahoo. Email is universal; there are multiple, competing IM systems.
f my company had it's own internal IM that didn't require public servers out of our control, it may be feasible, but our information will NOT be stored on MSN or Yahoo servers, PERIOD.
Look into Jabber.
Re:hmmm (Score:1, Insightful)
HTML = next gen ? It should be netiquette. (Score:5, Insightful)
It pisses me off to waste time understanding how people are quoting emails in order to find what they actually wrote. I especially like people who quote everything and then insert replies with a supposed different color. Very convenient when I answer with mutt.
It pisses me off to fight with Mozilla Thunderbird in order to remove decorative bloat with pictures added to every mail sent by my boss.
It pisses me off to removely download a 10 Mb large email through a 128Kb link just to see that it's a BMP screenshot send through outlook instead of writing text.
It pisses me off to receive mail with no subject. And then people reply to it and the subject becomes "Re: Tr: Tr: Re: Re: Tr:".
It pisses me off to receive mail that was actually a "reply to" a message that was 2 years old and that has nothing to do with the previous thread.
It pisses me off to receive mails whose content is in the subject with an empty body.
It pisses me off to receive fully quoted emails, including attachments (even when it's BMP screenshots) just when the real text added by the sender is "ok".
The next generation email is probably when people will respect the netiquette again.
Also, IBM/Lotus Research: "Remail" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And what's wrong with Outlook? (Score:5, Insightful)
how about the simple fact that it enable's the Dill-weeds in marketing to make a "outlook stationary" that is almost 1 meg in size and causes the email servers to fricking choke as the 1.2 million employees stupidly follow the morons in marketing and use it.
HTML email is the stupidest thing ever created, but how outlook does it by having all the graphics IN the fricking email is a magnitude worse.
There is one reason that 90% of the sysadmins on this planet absolutely and utterly HATE outlook.
Outlook 2003 price (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are an academic, you can get Office 2003 fairly cheap, but for the average shmo that has to buy at retail at bestbuy/amazon, $275 to upgrade old version of office, and $430 for a new one.
I can't think of any features in Office 2003 that are so good I'd give up Star Office and Mozilla Mail and pay the Microsoft tax.
Re:outlook 2k3 (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is a problem, not a feature. "Do one thing and do it well." E-mail clients should let me read e-mail. Scheduling apps should let me check my or someone else's calendar. I shouldn't have to or be expected to use one program to do both any more than I should have to use the same power tool to drill holes and cut 2x4s.
I have always maintained that if you need software to schedule meetings, you are spending entirely too much time in meetings.Re:What about Sylpheed? (Score:4, Insightful)
When you don't need all of the bullshit features of the big and ridiculously bloated mail clients out there, and you want something to do just e-mail, Sylpheed simply cannot be beat. It is bar-none the absolute best mail client I have ever used. Period.
Even if I *did* need the features offered by other mail applications (calendar, journal, etc.) I'd use those separately and still keep Sylpheed as my mail client. It's that good.
Gnus (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently tried to use other mail/news clients that don't make people look funny at you, but quite frankly, they all sucked in comparison, and I switched back. Even without the fancy configuration options, I could not find one that was as usable for reading a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups. I could not find one where I can easily sort mailing lists and newsgroups from various servers into subfolders by topic, or where I can set up the default spellchecking language per group, or easily create scoring rules globally or per topic/group, let alone fix up the mess people create with Outlook Express so that I can actually read them without getting a headache. Actually, it is hard to find programms that let you treat mailing lists and newsgroups and other similar things (like slashdot, which Gnus supports) in the same way - as if I would care about the transport method used! Some programms have some of the features I want, but not one of them had them all.
This thing is really the prototypical Emacs-based application, ugly, hard to learn, but amazingly powerful, flexible and easy to use. Not to mention the huge community of hackers that will implement all features found in other mailers in a small elisp snippet anyway :-)
Re:Where's Mail.app (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, most people use only a small part of the functionality in Outlook... typically people only use the email functionality that is in Mail.app, and the calendaring in iCal, but...
Re:Um... Outlook XP? (Score:3, Insightful)
P.S. emoticons are *not* a killer feature anyway
Re:Next killer app? (Score:3, Insightful)
2100 messages is not 'a large number of messages' (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm actually struggling with this at the moment because I have a wife with a packrat personality who has been out of town for the last month. She has >66,000 messages, >1.3GB, of new e-mail sitting in her account on my NetBSD box (which fetches her e-mail frequently so she doesn't overflow her limit at the ISP). She also has 15GB of old messages lying about. I have so far been unable to find a client that can deal with her. She runs Windows.
I just switched her to Mozilla after it became clear that Netscape wasn't cutting the mustard. Mozilla isn't doing very well either:
I switched her to Netscape after getting tired of pulling my hair out with Outlook Express, which:
If anyone has suggestions for mail clients that can deal with someone that has a morbidly packrat personality disorder, I'm open to suggestion.
Re:Next killer app? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Please..send plain text.
Re:outlook 2k3 (Score:4, Insightful)
I use thunderbird on a daily basis but outlook 2k3 is on a different level as far as UI polish and features go. It is a very powerful tool for coordinating large quantities of mail, appointments, contacts etc. The reason I use thunderbird is that outlook is overkill for popping mail once in a while. Additionally, I like some things in thunderbird such as extensions and UI. Also its development status and the ability to influence its development is appealing. I see thunderbird as a nice testbed, a good outlook express replacement but not a corporate mailclient. The only two clients that come close are evolution and kontact. Comparing those two to the full featureset of outlook 2k3 would be an interesting read.
I don't mind people pushing alternative mail clients. What I do mind is this attitude of ignoring features in outlook in order to prove the point that some OSS client is better. If you do a comparison, make it a fair comparison. At least the developers of the mac outlook had the guts to say that thunderbird has a superior mime implementation compared to outlook. This is true and acknowledging it internally allows them to focus on improving this in outlook.
Re:Next killer app? (Score:3, Insightful)
Except, I'd guess...that most people out there probably use the same password, or slight variations of it for ALL their passwords. That could be trouble. And most of the ISP's I've been with have the same email access password as they have to log in to the ISP for anything as that person...so, that could be a problem too.
Just some food for though...
Re:Next killer app? (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed.. Nothing can beat email in the way conversations can be tracked, stored, and documented. It is imperative that I keep track of user requests, solutions to problems, and things that I did or did not do. I often find myself looking back at old emails that I either received or sent to recall something useful.
IMs are great in the sense that they provide a simulated conversation, and yes, they can log the entire conversation, but how do you keep track of that in a useful fashion? With email, I can filter out conversations based on who that person was, through email subject lines, and if necessary, through a search.
The real killer app is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong questions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Next killer app? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no problem with you saying that I am wrong. I've learned a great deal by people letting me know that something I posted was incorrect. But if you're going to correct me, at least address what I actually said, which was that there is no need for an email client to execute active code in a received email.
The original problems with Outlook arise when I send you an email which contains code which is then automatically executed on your machine. While it is possible to find a use for such capability, there are alternative ways to accomplish the same functionality without anywhere near the security risk. Providing the capability for Outlook to execute scripts which arive as email was a boneheaded move on MS's part.
As an aside, note that the recent viruses do not rely on a vulnerability in Outlook. The virus arrives as an attachment which is manually executed by naive or poorly trained users. The primary weakness being exploited here (other than user's poor habbits) is that the average user runs with administrative privleges under an MS OS.
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
FUD.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The DRM, if implemented, is more of an Office thing. And then only in a corporate environment, at the server.
User A creats a doc, and assigns it certain restrictions.
He sends it to user B. When user B tries to open it, it authenticates back to the server, and asks "I am allowed to let user B see me?"
If the server says yes, then good.
User C gets a copy, and it asks again. "No. Your creator wishes only user B to see it. Run away and hide."
Outlook, indeed Office, is not telling you what to do with your stuff. This is strictly voluntary, chosen by the document creator, and set up by the system admin.
Re:Why do we need local clients (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think they check content type. More likely, they simply redirect port 80 traffic to their transparent proxy. Since you did not speak HTTP, the proxy hung up.
If they did check content-type, you'd be much better off using pop3s (normally on port 995), which they wouldn't be able to parse anyway. You should use that anyway, since otherwise your e-mail and, possibly, your POP3 password travels in clear text.
Re:MUTT sucks the least! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can automatically have a different sig/from address/whatever based on who I'm emailing.
I can automatically set it to pgp sign/encryot some users and not others.
Also, you can mod the colours to make keeping track of email SO much easier - mail from my GF is red, mail to lists is white,
And easy plugin config - word docs can get previewed thru antiword, very convenient...
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you have issues with the DRM? You already have to ask microsoft's permission to use your $400 program after you paid for it every time you install it ("activation"). If you don't have issues with that, DRM shouldn't be too hard for you to swallow.
Re:read the article's disclaimer (Score:2, Insightful)
I use Netscape (started with 4.7 and now using 7.1) as a POP mail client to access a MS Exchange mail server over VPN and have had a few minor problems with it. None that make it necessary to immediately move to another mail client, though.
In all Help Desk calls I have made about these problems I have been consistently been told to "use Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express 2003", as they "fix the reasons you're using Netscape and POP". I have also seen the mention of several alternatives here on
I was somewhat disappointed that the article only included mail clients (with the exception of Outlook XP) that would run on UNIX boxes. I'm stuck using Windows for work, no matter what my preferences may be, so wanted to see that platform covered, as well.
The article's preview didn't indicate that it was only a review of UNIX/Linux compatible mail clients. Thus I expected to see a review of *all* 'next generation' email clients -- no matter their platform. I expected the clients' platforms to be part of their review.
Or perhaps I misunderstood what the author meant by "next generation"? The term wasn't defined as to what that it meant in the article's context.
What about Palm address book sync? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't read my email on my Palm, but having to only write down email addresses in one place would be, to say the least, a Good Thing.
I guess I'm surprised this is not a more common feature people look for.
And no, I won't use Outlook. : )