Re: POP3 mail clients

[Sandip Bhattacharya <sandipb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!
I had gone into a POP3 mail client search expedition some months
earlier and by now have taken a look at quite a few of them -
graphical or console-best. My experience has been thus -

1. Graphical clients - no matter how beautiful and "user-friendly"
they might be , tend to get into your way if you use email a lot. I
would really like to go all out and tell this - any mail client which
requires you to reachout and use your mouse to click buttons or menus
- would slow you down and get 
in the way. Again, let me emphasise , this is for people who use mail
a lot. I have tried Netscape(memory hog), Kmail(too primitive),
sylpheed(too much emphasis on MH folders), Balsa(the last version I
tried was too primitive), Arrow(a bit weird), etc.

2. Console clients - even though these are faster to use, need a bit
of your time initially for letting you remember the key strokes.

At first I settled on Pine and used it for a couple of months. It is
quite nice to use... even though it has a couple of quirks (lack of
built in PGP support and THAT frustating FROM: header setting etc.).

And then I discovered Mutt. I must warn you, learning and getting used
to mutt would take you 2-3 days as mutt has single character commands-
not even ctrl- Alt- sequences... but at the end of that you would
have had everything you wanted in a mail-client right before you -
built in PGP/GPG support, mbox/Maildir,IMAP,MH support, custom colored syntax-highlighted message
reading, POP3/IMAP connections are so easy - they are treated right
like folders, and you don't even have to keep the settings if you want
to). Infact, if you have IMAP accounts, you can get hold of any m/c
that you haven't touched before , and chek/reply all your mails
without touching and setting anything on the machine...i am getting
carried away now. But you got to give it just one serious try in your
lifetime. And the chances are yo would fall for it ..

And all this in a mere 400KB of executable (compared to 2.5 MB of pine
and multi-mega MB Netscape executables).

BTW, mutt _doesn't_ have in-built filtering - it "expects" you to use
a MDA like procmail to do so. Unless you use mail-rules a lot, you
won't miss it much ...and anyway writing simple procmail files aren't
much of a big deal for folks who have ventured into Linux anyway .. ;)


Regards,
 Sandip
-- 
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Sandip Bhattacharya 
sandipb @ bigfoot.com
http://www.sandipb.net
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