Email roundup 2006

November 22, 2006 12:38 PM

What's your favorite email client for Windows?

Basically I'm archiving 3 years worth of my email and am ready to start with fresh folders and maybe a new client. I'm most after:
(1) stability -- no errors or weird behavior
(2) good spam control -- squashing image spams is a bonus
(3) security -- not vulnerable to mime/html trojans

I prefer not to use Outlook because of its history of vulnerabilities. Also I have my own domain/addresses and want to store messages on my hard drive, so GMail is probably out. Shareware and payware are fine.

What do you like to use?

posted by chef_boyardee to Computers & Internet (20 answers total)

I use PC-Pine. There are no image spams since it doesn't support inline images. As an added bonus, it is easy to control from a keyboard, and works the same way Pine does at work and remotely.

If you don't want to use PC-Pine, then I recommend Thunderbird, which I use occasionally.

Also as an e-mail organization technique I find it quite helpful to make the top level the year. That means I can start new folders, a new organization scheme or even a new client every year, while still being able to find things quite easily.
posted by grouse at 12:44 PM on November 22, 2006

Thunderbird. Just make sure you set it up as offline.
posted by orthogonality at 12:45 PM on November 22, 2006

I meant to mention that Pine does not have good built-in spam control, although it can be good if used in conjunction with an external program.
posted by grouse at 12:45 PM on November 22, 2006

You can use Gmail via POP3... just a thought. Thus you can use whichever client. I've always been happy enough with Outlook, but Outlook Express was awful...
posted by tomw at 12:47 PM on November 22, 2006

They all suck. Thunderbird sucks least, but it still sucks. It's pretty decent on your three criteria though.
posted by reklaw at 1:25 PM on November 22, 2006

I used to like The Bat! a lot, and I've heard decent things about PegasusMail and Eudora. If memory serves, though, these are all pay software, and I'm not sure that any of them are a whole lot better than the free Thunderbird.
posted by box at 1:35 PM on November 22, 2006

I used to faithfully use Eudora when I had a PC, and it's going open-source in a few months.
posted by loiseau at 1:43 PM on November 22, 2006

I used Eudora a few years ago but for some reason it had a very weird bug where, randomly every few days, it would dig one random e-mail out of my Sent box and put it in the outgoing queue. After some awkward exchanges and a closer look at what was going on I gave Eudora the boot. Maybe it's because I had too many messages in the folders (about a thousand on some of them).
posted by hodyoaten at 2:05 PM on November 22, 2006

Thunderbird. Just make sure you set it up as offline.

Why?
posted by modofo at 2:09 PM on November 22, 2006

I mostly agree with reklaw. I went through something similar when my hard drive died and lost everything so I had the opportunity to start over. I tried every single e-mail client out there that I could find and they all seriously suck big time... Either they have dismal protocol support, or a user interface that looks like it was pulled straight from Windows 3.11 with a sea of unintelligible buttons, or some random weird bugs, or something else that just really grated on my every time I had to launch the thing.

IMHO, Outlook and Thunderbird are your best options, for a local client anyway. Neither are great, but I found one handles certain things better than the other; for example Thunderbird is better with IMAP (although Outlook 2007 may have improved this), and Outlook is a lot neater and cleaner but didn't have RSS support (at the time anyway... this is now included in Office 2007).

In the end, I gave up on a local email client entirely because the two "best options" just weren't good enough. These days I just use Gmail and Hotmail's new Live thing. It's not ideal either, but at least this way it's accessible from anywhere with zero reconfiguration on each PC and I don't need to run another application all the time, as I'll almost always have a browser up anyway.
posted by jon4009 at 2:19 PM on November 22, 2006

Second the 1-2 Thunderbird/Eudora recommendation. I also used Eudora for years until I grew a little tired of its completely unpredictable flakiness and (compared to TBird) inflexibility.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:25 PM on November 22, 2006

I use fetchmail, procmail and mutt on a FreeBSD box in my cupboard -- it's fast, flexible, stable, and scalable to the sort of mail loads I see (>2,500/day, maybe 1/3rd spam, with full archiving). It also fits in nicely with industry standard spam and virus filters like SpamAssassin and ClamAV, and of course the machine doubles as a fileserver, network firewall, etc.

I don't expect such a setup to be of interest to you, but that's what GUI clients have completely failed to draw me away from for the past 5 years or so; decent Windows SSH clients are way easier to find than decent mail clients. And I get remote access for free :)
posted by Freaky at 3:43 PM on November 22, 2006

Formerly Eudora. Now Thunderbird. At work Lotus Notes. Everything else is brilliant compared with Notes. Thunderbird has reasonable anti-spam.
posted by rongorongo at 3:56 PM on November 22, 2006

Another vote for TBird, though I admit to using Outlook Express sometimes, for its better Find functions. TB finds things ok, but doesn't "chain" them, while OE lets me step through a list of found emails easily. I use IMAP, so TB does the junk mail and rule filtering, but I can still get at the same stuff via OE when necessary. Use IMAP if you can, rather than POP.
posted by anadem at 5:37 PM on November 22, 2006

Another vote for The Bat. Its simple and to the point., never gets in your way, & when you look has just about every feature you could want. And fast, especially for searching.
posted by devilsbrigade at 9:06 PM on November 22, 2006

Opera's integrated mail client takes getting used to but is pretty good. I use an IMAP account, and my emails are stored locally on all the machines I use.

Opera is also fast as hell and about 3 steps ahead of Firefox as a browser...
posted by FauxScot at 8:10 AM on November 23, 2006

I like Thunderbird. The spam filter isn't superawesome, but after a few weeks of training, it gets all the image spams, and I've never had a false positive spam detection.

Google Desktop is great for searching email. It will integrate with Thunderbird.
posted by rxrfrx at 8:41 AM on November 23, 2006

Another vote for opera. for the image spam you have to train it, but it does squash it.
posted by bigmusic at 11:00 AM on November 23, 2006

I am surprised nobody mentioned yet. I didn't think it was so obscure. Yes, it is a Linux program, but the Windows port works great, and does not look too bizarre.

Sylpheed is (I guess, like The Bat), simple and to the point. It is also open source, light, really fast, and absolutely crash proof. It was also in the only client I found was happy to play with external programs. You can use an external spam detector, an external editor, an external mail downloader, external actions, etc. With Sylpheed, you can export its weaknesses away.

You will want to know that Sylpheed has no internal spam detector. You have to run it externally. It might be hard to install an external spam filter, that's the bad news. The good news is, you can shop around for the best spam filter independently of your mail client. For instance, bogofilter is excellent.

I also like Sylpheed for its unchorded keyboard shortcuts. Next is n, previous is p, composed mail is m, etc. Down with the mouse, I say!

Here's a long, supporting review
posted by gmarceau at 9:48 PM on November 23, 2006

oups, the link to Sylpheed disappeared.
posted by gmarceau at 9:49 PM on November 23, 2006