[NTLUG:Discuss] Mail Clent Recommendations

[Jeremy Blosser]

MadHat [madhat at unspecific.com] wrote:
> al_h at technologist.com wrote:
> > I currently use NS Messenger for 99.999% of my email, I have played with
> > Kmail, which doesnt offer any advantages over NS Msgr.
> > Does anyone have a mail client that they feel improves upon my current
> > choice? I am interested in end user experiences, please tell me about
> > what you - - use.
> > 
> > Why?
> > 
> > What will I gain/loose from NS Messenger?
> 
> The problem I find is that most people want a GUI that does everything
> Netscape does, but don't want to use Netscape.  I like mutt (and is what
> I use for my business mail), but if you are using POP mail, it doesn't
> allow for filtering directly, you have to use fetchmail and procmail to
> do filtering, AFAIK.  I might be wrong.

This is correct, and it's not just related to POP mail.  Mutt doesn't do
any filtering on it's own.  One of the design goals is to keep with the
Un*x philosophy of "do one thing and do it well", eg. stringing lots of
small utilities together to get a complete package.  Mutt is a MUA (mail
user agent, aka mail reader), and a darn good one.  Filtering incoming mail
is the job of an MDA (mail delivery agent) such as procmail.

Leaving MDA stuff out of the MUA gives you maximum flexibility and allows
you to accomplish most anything.  And if you don't like the way filtering
is done, you can get a different filtering program without having to lose
the rest of your setup.  Plus Mutt wouldn't be able to be as good of a mail
/user/ agent if it bothered with delivery stuff, since the developers' time
would get wasted on implementing filtering features that are better handled
by a program dedicated to filtering, and the client would end up with half
a filtering mechanism and half a mail reader program.  Pretty much every
attempted GUI reader has taken this "do it all" approach, hence none of
them are really at a highly usable state.  Plus, since they each think a
mailer needs to do "POPping/filtering/composing-with-its-own-editor" and
not much else, they continually try to reinvent the wheel instead of seeing
past to the real features a power mailer *could* have.  But by not
bothering with stuff that isn't their business, the Mutt developers instead
have added a lot of really useful features for *reading* mail that make
Mutt darn near indispensible for a lot of us that use email an unhealthy
amount.  Mutt has incredible support for mailing lists, sending/receiving
mail from multiple addresses, header editing, MIME composing and reading,
multiple mailbox formats, message postponement, handling huge amounts of
mail quickly, and incredibly useful but rarely implemented header features
like mail-followup-to -- with Mutt you can easily reply to just the sender,
the list, *or* the correct 'group' for mailing list or other mail.  It's
dumb this should even be an issue, but every other mailer I've seen is
pathetic when trying to handle this simple task, hence the wide-spread
stupidism of reply-to munging.  But Mutt can recognize and deal with that
transparently, too :)

If you're looking for one that does all the popping/filtering/etc.
internally, try to think of the process in terms of utilities that "do one
thing and do it well" (the Un*x way) instead of monolithic applications
(the Windows way) -- "it's a rain bonnet, but it's also your parents".

"All mail clients suck.  Mutt just sucks less."

> I want to see Eudora for Linux.

Hmmm... it had nice features, but it's pretty crappy when it comes to
playing well with others by means of accepted standards, so if they ever
did that hopefully they'd fix it first.  And the failure to handle
attachments in any kind of sensible inline manner, or to understand the
concept of "mailing list" at all, is really annoying.

> I still use Netscape for my personal mail because I haven't found
> anything "clean" (or finished/polished) enough to do everything I want
> (filtering, threading, decent spell checking, easy to set up and change,
> good address book, mailbox compression, etc...).

Mutt does threading and compression (with a patch not in the main tree, but
well maintained).  Add procmail for robust filtering that can do most
anything.  Add ispell for spell checking that lets you keep the same
dictionary/settings for any program that uses it.  To me Mutt's flat file
address book is perfectly fine, but YMMV -- it has support for external
address database queries as well, but I've never needed to use it.  As for
easy to set up and change, I find it fine, but again, YMMV.

> I still don't know of a good client that has the ability to check
> multiple POP accounts anlong with all the above.

Mutt+fetchmail.  Retrieving mail isn't the job of the MUA, it's the job of
an MTA.

Again, to those of us that are used to it, this method of not having all
our needs met with one app is a very good thing, not a bad thing.

-- 
Jeremy Blosser   |   jblosser at firinn.org   |   http://jblosser.firinn.org/
-----------------+-------------------------+------------------------------
"If Microsoft can change and compete on quality, I've won." -- L. Torvalds
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