Atomized

Every email client sucks

I have come to the realization that every single email client ever made sucks. Hard.

The List of Suck:

• Apple Mail v2.0.3. Crash-prone. Doesn’t filter spam in IMAP mailboxes correctly, requiring me to delete it by hand – gee, kinda defeats the purpose of spam filtering in the first place, doesn’t it? Also: no indication in the message list of which messages it things are spam. Right-clicking spam in a folder shows the option “Move to Spam again,” even though it was never moved there to begin with. New message counts in IMAP folders are always wrong. Setting up multiple email addresses per account is hard, because the field you put that info in is labeled ‘Email address,’ (singular) not ‘Email address(es).’ Also: you can’t set different display names or signatures per-address. Can’t thread folders. Because a standard feature of email clients going back to the early ’90s just isn’t that important. Found: View → Organize by Thread. There is no global preference for this, so it has to be set by hand on every folder, and I have twenty-seven.
• Evolution v2.2.3. Doesn’t show new message counts in subfolders, requiring a click on every folder to see if there’s new mail there. More bloated than a week-old whale carcass. Spam filtering seems to leave the actual message on the IMAP server, and the spam you delete reappears the next time you open the app. Headers get out of sync, so that message with the subject ‘YUO CAN HAEV A BIGGAR P3N15 TWOMURROW’ in the mail list could actually be a message from your boss.
• Mozilla Thunderbird v1.0.7. Also doesn’t show unread message counts in IMAP folders – is this some sort of conspiracy? No hotkey to delete a message – you have to click the ‘delete’ toolbar button. Get confused if an IMAP connection is dropped – you may not see new email on that account.
• KMail v3.4.2. Doesn’t filter spam on IMAP servers at all. Downloading attachments from messages on an IMAP server frequently just doesn’t work. Crash-prone. Message subjects/bodies get out of sync the same as with Evolution.

Seriously, guys. What’s going on here? Is there any mail client for OS X/Linux that doesn’t utterly, utterly suck?

Discussion

i used to like apple’s mail a lot until 2.0. now it crashes on me constantly. i can’t use it any more.

in thunderbird on windows, there is a keyboard shortcut for deleting a message: the DEL key works, even when viewing a message in its own window. i assume you already tried that on the mac… wonder why they would change that for the mac?

i gave columba a quick try, on windows, but it didn’t seem to have much luck connecting to my IMAP account over SSL.

what is it about IMAP that makes it so hard for email clients to support well?

bunnyhero

2005/10/12

Delete key works for me in TB. Get Mail automatically reconnects on disconnection.

I use Thunderbird w/ IMAPS (courier & exim on centos4). It displays my unread message count next to the folders in the sidebar. They always appear correct.

I only rely on one thing to sort my mail, since i use various clients (squirrelmail, mutt & thunderbird), and that is called .forward. This is specific to exim, many good hosts let you manage your .forward file. I have mine set up to automatically create sub-subfolders for mailing lists that I might join.

My only annoyance is that there is no notification of new folders – I have to periodically check and subscribe to new ones. SM & MUTT show everything.

Maybe something is wrong with your service provider. Or maybe we need to make another sucky client that behaves for you.

MEMEyou

2005/10/13

“I only rely on one thing to sort my mail, since i use various clients (squirrelmail, mutt & thunderbird), and that is called .forward.”

.forward is a standard thing on most UNIX MTAs. I use it in conjunction with procmail to sort my messages. I edit .procmailrc by hand whenever I need a new rule – it sure would be cool if there was some sort of Sieve/procmail setup so you could configure it directly from your MUA.

I doubt it’s my service provider, since it happens with three different IMAP accounts I have. Far as I know, they are all running Courier IMAP (two are for sure).

Ian Eure

2005/10/25

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