GUI replacement for mutt

[Kristian Rink]

[Steve Lamb <grey at dmiyu.org> @ Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:34:08 -0700]

>     Also the less than stellar IMAP support.  TBird excels at that.
> So far only TBird's been able to host all its folders on the IMAP
> side.  :(

I want to throw in different experiences with IMAP in TBird which
actually made me switch to Claws Mail (again). My point is: It seems
that TBird, while "deleting" mails from IMAP, it just marks them as
"deleted" and does an IMAP-"expunge" (i.o.w. _really_ removing the
mails from the remote server) when I choose to "compress" folders. This
in itself is annoying when running a strict IMAP quota and a slow line
because by then TBird once in a while gets stuck trying to mess with
all the deleted (yet not expunged) entries in the mail spool. I would
at least want to see a configuration option here to allow for
_immediately_ removing mails rather than just marking them as deleted
on IMAP.

Second thing, which seems worse to me: _If_ I actually do mark mails as
"deleted", I don't need a "Trash" folder on IMAP. Marking mails as
"deleted" _and_ copying them to "Trash" IMHO seems pointless,
especially given that, in "Trash", while emptying "Trash" they also
aren't expunged immediately but just (you guess) "marked as deleted"
and "expunged" while "compressing folders". If you do have your own
domain and a ever-filled catch-all mail account, you quickly will learn
to hate this. These were my experiences using TBird 1.5.0.x, feel free
to correct me if I got something all too wrong.

Aside this:

(a) TBird is _heavy_ on memory. I use Eclipse every day and can live
with Eclipse burning > 600M RAM (after all, that's what my machine is
made for...), but I can't live with an MUA burning > 250M RAM.
Claws-Mail comes just up to aroun 90M when it's running wild once in a
while.

(b) Claws-Mail has a feature set far superiour to TBird when it comes
to mail filtering / processing. In TBird, having a per-folder filter
set up to move old mail from an IMAP folder to a local folder depending
on the age automatically is simply not possible.

(c) Claws-Mail includes the ability to support maildir++ and a Perl
based filtering (for you to write perl scripts to process your mail)
via plugins, which is helpful. Especially messing with large mbox files
in TBird can be a pain in the a** in terms of incremental backups.

(d) Claws-Mail has a junk filtering facility using the bogofilter
plugin which is at least on par with TBird.

(e) The RSS reader plugin in Claws is far more better in terms of
features and usability than the one in TBird which is hardly usable if
you want more than "just" getting a bunch of feeds.

(f) Claws-Mail is more "open", in terms of that you can decide to use
external or claws-builtin tools for pretty most of the important
functionality: You can use imapsync instead of the builtin IMAP
routines to sync your server-side IMAP spool with a local mail folder.
You might use an external editor (vi) instead of the one built into
claws. You might use the "common" fetchmail-procmail-postfix chain of
tools for getting remote mail instead of using Claws to actually pull
mails off POP3.

Overally, I'd definitely second the idea of "Claws" being a GUI-based
counterpart to mutt. Using it with 5 different IMAP acounts and > 50
RSS feeds and feeling happy so far. ;)

Cheers,
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
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"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)