Help me find the ultimate e-mail client

April 3, 2006 2:44 PM

Is there a Windows e-mail client for power users that I am missing? I recently tried Thunderbird, Outlook, The Bat, Pocomail and Opera.

I'll give a list of wishes, but if you use e-mail a lot and use something I haven't mentioned, please let me know what you are using, even if it isn't perfect.

- multiple POP accounts, preferably with a single inbox. It should reply from the address the mail was sent to. (this is important)
- powerful templates. I would like to tie a template to a contact so that e-mail from A always gets replied to with "Hi A!" and e-mail from B with "Dear Sir'. The Bat does this really well, it even has regular expressions in the templates.
- powerful and fast search.
- good filters and spam filtering
- decent shortcuts. Opera is great with a simple 'r' for replying, 'k' for marking read, etc.
- HTML support. I want to be able to display external images on a case by case basis. Thunderbird and Pocomail do this well.
- a decent editor that knows how to wrap. This is the dealbreaker for The Bat. I cannot get MicroEd to work the way I want, and the plain text editor is too weak.
- fast in general. Thunderbird was often very slow and felt buggy. Pocomail crashed. Outlook was too slow on my computer.
- a decent user interface.

I tried mutt on cygwin, but that was too slow with mailboxes from mailinglists and it is cumbersome when I want to see an image or copy text from an e-mail.

Any suggestions are much appreciated. I do want something I can install myself, not hosted web based e-mail

posted by davar to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Have you tried Eudora recently? I've found it decently stable and well-loaded with options.

I can't remember whether Mulberry supported multiple POP, but it worked well for me as a student with heavy email needs.
posted by salsamander at 2:57 PM on April 3, 2006

Sylpheed isn't on your list. Win32 port here. I only used it briefly, to do some mailbox conversion, but featurewise it seemed comparable to the clients you've looked at so far.
posted by unmake at 2:57 PM on April 3, 2006

I use Sylpheed-Claws. Sylpheed integrate well with outside tools. It has decent basic searching, and you can get fast, full-body searches with Mairix under Windows.

Sylpheed has excellent filtering. Spam checking, however, is done via an external tool, such as SpamAssasin or Bogofilter.

It might be a tad slow with large mail boxes when using the default storage format. Check that first to see if it's good enough for you. You might also want to try the alternative formats plugins.
posted by gmarceau at 3:56 PM on April 3, 2006

My Bat copy wraps text in the plaintext editor just fine.... best damn email client I've ever used.
posted by devilsbrigade at 3:59 PM on April 3, 2006

Coattails Question: Does any client other than Outlook allow you to sync your emails to a pocket pc? Either directly or to it's own ppc software?
posted by tiamat at 4:04 PM on April 3, 2006

I second Eudora as a power-user and -tweaker program.
posted by theredpen at 4:14 PM on April 3, 2006

This is not exactly what you're looking for, but you did ask for other suggestions:

For fast searching and the perfect user interface, I suggest Nelson Email Organizer. Yes, it's an add-in for Outlook. Shockingly, that's not a deal-breaker - NEO is just that useful.
posted by gd779 at 4:46 PM on April 3, 2006

Thanks for the replies so far. I actually did try Sylpheed, but I guess it did not impress me that much. I'll check out the Claws version and give it a better try. I did not realize it integrated with external tools, and I just noticed you can edit mails with an external editor. That's very promising.
Is there a way to automatically reply with the address the message was sent to? And is there a way to reply with an address that is not tied to an account? I have a couple of business addresses that are forwarded to one e-mail address, but I would like to reply using the business address.

I just installed Eudora as well. That brought back memories :) I have a hard time getting used to the interface again, but I'll try it out further if Sylpheed does not work out.

Devilsbrigade: I think this is a personal thing. I saw more people in the Bat forums complain about the wrapping, and other people not understanding what the problem is. It's hard to explain but it does not work the way I work, apparently. And I don't like how The Bat handles multiple accounts. I really do like the templates and the unread view though.

NEO looks interesting, but I'm afraid Outlook consumes too much memory on my computer. Perhaps I should try it again. Is there a standard solution for templates in Outlook?

Other suggestions remain welcome!
posted by davar at 4:56 PM on April 3, 2006

Pegasus? Mahogany?
posted by five fresh fish at 5:49 PM on April 3, 2006

I'm a happy Thunderbird user.

Thunderbird allows you to set up multiple POP3 accounts that go into a global Inbox, each one with its own corresponding SMTP server if you want (it defaults to using a single SMTP server for all outgoing mail, and despite its dire warnings about "causing errors", has never done so for me). Replies will go out via the same account as the incoming mail by default; replying via a different account just involves selecting the "From:" account you want from a dropdown menu.

I can't speak to Thunderbird's template facilities as I have never used them.

It search is pretty decent, as far as I can tell.

Its adaptive spam filter works very well. Mine's not getting much exercise these days, though, as my main POP3 account is now my Gmail account.

Message filtering rules also work well, but don't have the ability to forward mails out of the box (I believe there's an extension available that can do this, though).

Thunderbird's mail storage files are all text, which makes it easy to get at your mails with external tools, and its extensibility is very good.

One very nice feature is the ability to limit incoming message sizes. You can tell Thunderbird not to download mails bigger than (configurable) kilobytes. Mails bigger than this get the first few lines downloaded, and still show up as usual in the Inbox, but require a link inside the mail to be clicked to download the rest. This is a godsend for those of us on dialup lines with Unfortunate Friends who haven't grown out of forwarding the powerpoint joke of the day.

The online/offline mode stuff is also very useful for those of us with dialup connections.

The editor wraps just fine.

Thunderbird runs at a reasonable clip for me, even on an old 266MHz HP box with 192MB RAM and XP Home (like all the Gecko-based things, it's slow to start but fine once started). Which version did you try? 1.5 is out now and works very well indeed.
posted by flabdablet at 10:41 PM on April 3, 2006

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “a decent editor that knows how to wrap.” Do you want hard or soft linebreaks? And you realize that influences, and is influenced by, the format=flowed message-display standard, right?

Nonetheless, Eudora, which does indeed look like shite on Windows, does what you want.
posted by joeclark at 6:38 AM on April 4, 2006

As much as I love Mulberry (it's still my client of choice), it is however no more, as the company went away.

For those keeping score though...

- multiple POP accounts, preferably with a single inbox: Multiple POP boxes, check. Single inbox, Nope. Although you could setup a filter to do that.

It should reply from the address the mail was sent to. (this is important): Check. This one is important to me as well.

powerful templates.: Hmm. Nope. Never really noticed that any mail client could do this before. I don't actually see the use of it really. For things I want to use a template for, I simple have the template saved in my drafts folder.


powerful and fast search Check. not quite regular expressions, but good.

good filters: It can do all the filtering I do in procmail.

spam filtering: Nope. I (and the makers of Mulberry) believe that tagging for spam should be done on the server.

decent shortcuts: Check.

HTML support: Sorta/not really. It does some basic html formatting, but no external images or seriously complex html. I consider this a feature and those companies that send me sucky html get hate mail from me.

a decent editor that knows how to wrap: Check. Options to quote/unquote and wrap/unwrap lines. Customizable wrap lengths for the outgoing mail as well.

fast in general: Check.

a decent user interface: One version looks very much like the 3 paned Eudora interface. The other puts each message, mailbox, and the mailbox list in seperate windows (my preference).
posted by fief at 8:05 AM on April 4, 2006