E-mail clients

[Wulfman]

mozilla, because of the junk mail filter.

mfg
wulfman

[RC Agent]

mutt

[dbdg]

OE: Multiple accounts with ease and easy to back everything up.

Only alternative I have ever tried is outlook, do quite likes Notes at work though.

[az]

dbdg, you can have all that in M2 (and in several other clients as well, I guess )

AZ

[K6-III]

Mozilla Thunderbird

[Umfriend]

Netscape here (using multiple accounts as well). I wish I coudl have Lotus Notes here with easy setting up mail-accounts as seperated databases. I love that thing (and have that at work).

[agallag]

Originally posted by lecter
Outlook 2003 is a marked improvement over the previous versions and I like it quite a lot...it also features great compatibility with Hotmail accounts. So for who says Outlook is bad, try this latest one and then we'll talk

I second that. Using it at home, and it's quite good. Much improved over earlier versions, security included.

We use Domino/Notes at work, but are in the process of switching to Exchange/Outlook.

I also use Oddpost as my primary personal email account, since their webmail interface is so awesome (IE only though).

[Brian Ellis]

OK, let me give my views on the non-MS clients that I've tried.

Until recently Mozilla was a combined browser/e-mail client/HTML composer, but, like Alice, it grewed and it grewed, until it became less manageable. Netscape is an adaptation of Mozilla. The Mozilla developers (open source) decided several months ago that Mozilla needed a radical change and have separated their development into separate browser (Firebird) and e-mail client (Thunderbird) and they are currently in late beta stage. Both apps are now good and stable. The transition from the old Mozilla or Netscape is absolutely painless.

I have recently tested Netscape, Mozilla Thunderbird (and Firebird, but that is not relevant here), Mozilla, Eudora and Pegasus, as being the main non-MS clients. They are all good, but all have their weaknesses, as well.

Going from what I consider the worst to the best:

Eudora: excellent threading facilities and general intuitive use, but a very quirky address book management and a VERY slow, but versatile, filtering system rules it out. It lacks several features that all the other systems offer, giving the impression that it is an old development. **

Pegasus: probably the most adaptable client of the list, with many options. It is a small, neat system and rapid to boot, with one exception. This is on filtering. All new mail goes initially into a single, invisible, mailbox. After downloading all the mail on the server, it then filters it into the respective visible mailboxes, which slows things down. They have a quirky new mail indicator, sometimes miscounting the number of messages. The worst feature is a totally unmanageable sort-by-thread feature in a mailbox. Remote server mailbox management is good. The most geekish of the clients. ***

The Mozilla/Netscape family is good, with real time filtering, good and easy mailbox management, easy address book management and much less prone to attack from hackers/crackers than the MS offerings (Netscape 7.2 and Thunderbird are even better than the old shortly-to-be-discontinued plain-Jane Mozilla in this respect). This is also the easiest "out-of-the-box" system to set up, although Thunderbird is the easiest, as it does not require browser set-up, as well as the client. A quirky feature, except in Thunderbird, is the inability to download new mail after emptying Trash, without moving the focus to another mailbox. There is relatively little practical difference between Mozilla and Netscape, altough the latter has implemented a few additional features. Thunderbird has implemented Junk mail filtering. This is a rather weak "TOE" (train on errors) system but could be useful to those without a better method. I didn't test this fully, because I use POPFile which is the nec plus ultra, in my opinion, of e-mail sorting and filtering (it sorts my messages into 7 gross categories, one of which is spam, with 99.5+% accuracy).
Mozilla ****
Netscape ****
Mozilla Thunderbird *****

All these clients are freeware (Eudora offers 3 categories, one paying, one with advertisements and one "lite" version) and my comments apply to Windows versions (Linux users: note that Red Hat/Fedora have dropped Netscape to leave just Mozilla: I expect them to adopt the Thunderbird/Firebird system shortly).

My personal recommendation is the Mozilla Thunderbird/Firebird combination, to replace Outlook (any flavour) and MSIE.

[az]

You should try Opera to make the list complete, and to see that an email client can be different

AZ

[Delany]

I still use Outlook Express at home (probably 'cause i'm too lazy to set anything else up and try it).

We use Domino/Notes5 at work (with the wonderful thing that is Pre-Emptive Mail)...If only other Lotus products were as good as Notes...

[az]

What's pre-emptive mail? Somebody receives an email from you, and then you write it? Or you get pre-emptive answers to mails you were going to send tomorrow?

AZ

[PAugustin]

Outlook 2K3 rocks 8)

[Byock]

Yeah, Use Outlook 2003 here at work, and love it. It seems to have fixed most the of the bugs from earlier versions. Still has some issues with customs forms on Exchange, but overall, quite pleased.

Oh, And I wish it would use Word XP, and the mail client, instead of insisting on Word 2003.

[SpiralDragon]

i normaly use outlook.... but because my ISP is an idiot he does not know how to set up SMTP and POP3 ..... so i am stuck with webmail for now... have been for a while..... using a tunnel worked for a while but it just became toomutch of a drag...

[Helevitia]

I picked other because I like the web based email so you can check your email from anywhere, not worry as much about viruses(built in virus removal and virus scanner tools), and the built in SPAM features keep me 98% SPAM free.

Dave

edit: oh, and I've used outlook(2000-2003), outlook express, The Bat, Netscape, Mozilla, Eudora and probably a few others. Outlook has buggy filters and memory leaks. Eudora has tons of memory leaks. The Bat seemed fairly decent, but decided in the end that I like web based email better. Netscape used to be good, but I don't like the new interface.

edit2: I almost forgot to mention that Outlook w/ IMAP is horrible. There are so many issues that I hate using at work. I typically use Pine for my email at work unless I need to open an attachment which seems to be a lot lately. I'd use Eudora but it crashes so much, it's scary And Eudora is our preferred email client at work!
Seriously though, the most notable problems with IMAP and Outlook are:

1. There is no hotkey for purging your mail. You have to click edit, then purge mail. What a waste of time.

2. You can't have spell checker working properly with IMAP while selecting the ">" to distinguish your mail from the replied to mail. It complains that it has to check the entire message for spelling errors?

3. The interface for hiding deleted messages is horrible to use. It's hard to find and hard to understand.

Outlook was never designed for IMAP. I haven't even mentioned the non IMAP issues. There are so many it is sickening. For instance, if you want to mark a message as read as sooon as you click on it, you have to change the time interval from default to 0. They should just have a button to disable it all together. oh man, I could go on.