Finding the right Mail client
March 30th, 2003 by HenI’m venturing out into the ‘real’ world after having used pine for the last decade for my personal email. At work I’ve used MS Outlook and Lotus Notes, and occasionally in the old days in the UK I had Outlook Express setup at home.
For the last 5 years or so, I’ve run my own email box and just used pine on the server. Along with putty, it gives me a very easy way to check email from any machine I happen to sit at. Extreme mobility, which is useful when you’ve not got a stable-home or a laptop. But now I have a stable-home and a laptop, so I’ve setup IMAP/SSL with which to check my email.
Pine sadly, is not very hot with IMAP and especially not hot with Maildir formatted mail boxes [which courier-imap demands, and I demand virtual-IMAP for customers, so courier-imap wins out]. Mutt is alleged to be better, and can read Maildir, so I expect to try and use that on the server side, however I want something graphical to handle the mail lists I’m on.
Mozilla’s MailNews application isn’t bad, but has one big problem. Only one From: address per account, so unless I play silly buggers, I’ll have to stop using the 7 or so email addresses I currently use.
OS X’s Mail.app isn’t bad. It feels a bit clunky though, might stop erroring when I actually give it a legal SMTP address.
Outlook, OE and Entourage are obviously damaged goods. I’d be worried about becoming virus fodder.
Evolution sounds good, though is Linux only. Indeed, Mozilla seems to be the only common option. That said, common options are de-skilling, but time-saving. By using a different agent on each platform, I can learn more.
At the moment it’s looking like:
Server: Mutt
Windows: Mozilla MailNews
Linux: Evolution [Failing that, KMail]
Mac: Mail.app
If anyone has any better suggestions, I’d be very interested in hearing them.
March 30th, 2003 at 5:07 am
I don’t know if you can use Mutt in Windows, but why not use Mutt on Linux, and then use fink to install it in OS X? Then you’d have more time to do other things than learn 3 or 4 different mail clients
March 31st, 2003 at 1:47 am
Hi,
Using Outlook or OE is fine as long as you do the following:
1) Have an up to date anti-virus program that integrates properly.
2) Have the safety settings such that it won’t run email attachments wothout your express command (i.e. disble scripting and axtivex components in messages).
I’m using OE on XP, 1 is covered* by my mail hoster as part of the service 2 was covered by the default settings (much to my suprise).
I need to get round to installing proper virus protection though now I’ve got the DSL up and running and probably download more crap!
Iain
* not had any virus come through in the last 2 years so I assume they’re working.