email clients
 

ive always used microsoft outlook for retrieving email. im also not too good at running virus scan software. this is an increasingly bad combination. i have recently installed mcafee, and now im looking to replace outlook. i tried mozillas email client, but that really doesnt do it for me (though i love the browser, just started using it recently). assuming im stuck in a windows environment (dungeon siege and simgolf being, for all intents and purposes, windows-only products), can anyone suggest a decent email client? free is nice, but im willing to pay, if i like it.

~james

It will probably help focus people's recommendations if you can say something about what you didn't like about Mozilla Mail.

i have tried to ditch outlook but find that i've grown used to the little trashy program.

as a way to protect myself, i've started using mailwasher

www.mailwasher.net

it's slightly off-topic, as it doesnt make your mail client more secure, but it sure helps weed out the crap, which is usually the dangerous stuff.

For starters you should make sure your McAfee configuration is set to Enable Microsoft Outlook E-mail Scanning.

That may be too obvious a comment, but might be helpful since those are the programs you're currently using and it's an optional setting.

I run an IMAP server to keep all my email, and I've found that Outlook Express is actually a better mail client for IMAP than Outlook is. I guess it makes sense, since OE is also a newsreader.

actually, its not something i can really explain. maybe im just too entrenched in microsofts software. i hate outlook, but its comfortable. i havent read too much regarding mozilla mail. is it a good client? im sure it does just about everything outlook does as far as filtering, etc. but is it relatively intuitive? is the documentation up to snuff? ill give it another try and spend some time getting to know the software before jumping to conclusions. i think its mostly fear of the unknown (read: i was too lazy to learn more before i passed judgement).

i havent enabled outlook mail filtering, mostly because its not currently installed on my machine. im trying to avoid doing that.

im using xnews right now as my newsreader. which actually brings up another question. what do people think of the newsreader in mozilla? i havent really tried it yet, but there are a couple of nitpicky bugs in xnews that are driving me crazy.

~james

How about Eudora?

I too was severely disappointed with the Mozilla mail client. Maybe you're right about being comfortable with MICROS~1 software. But it just didn't seem to, I dunno, flow smoothly.

Things weren't intuitively placed. I couldn't figure out how to purge deleted mail (yeah, IMAP-specific, but still..) for the life of me. There were also several other things that just didn't seem to be where they should have.

It didn't seem like you could easily switch from HTML to plain text. I never really knew what format it would use. And you couldn't just pick a font, you had to use their "styles" or whatever. It ended up just pissing me off and I went back to Outlook.

Oh wow! That takes me back to college days! :)

tobiasly:

MICROS~1

that was fucking funny. i hadnt laughed all night. thanks.

~james

eh, that's an old joke. :]

I may be the last man standing, but I'll die using NS for e-mail and ng's. :) I have Outlook Express, but I don't like the feel of it.

i think i heard it once before. but right before i read that, i was talking to a customer who was bitching about exactly that. and it was my job to fix it. i love customers.

~james

Yes it's old but I laughed my ass off too the first time I saw it. I dunno why, it's just fuckin' hilarious.

Much better than Micro$oft. :)

--toby

When I want to read my mail, I log onto my Unix shell account and type "mail."

Works for me.

(Largely due to a huge procmail filter I've installed, of course.)

On the Windows side, I still use Pegasus Mail, just because I'm used to it.

For newsgroups, I swear by MicroPlanet (formerly Anawave) Gravity. The newest version (2.6) is free, has some nifty functionality and supports yEnc encoding.

Actually, the filtering isn't quite as good as I'd like, especially since I'm running SpamAssassin; MozMail has no provision for running a third-party filter. So what I do here is use fetchmail to grab the mail from my ISPs POP, then use procmail to invoke SpamAssassin.

Then I use the MozMail client to wrk the mail locally though IMAP. Tobiasly: There's a *boatload* of stuff on Bugzilla relating to IMAP, so I have to agree that this part of Moz is "not really done yet". Still, it seem to be working good enough for me to use it. I just got fed up with kmail insisting on using konq for the browser.

If my ISP only had POP, I believe I'd do the same thing anyway, just to get it in an IMAP server. Having all my email in one place w/ IMAP is so nice, compared to before when I had to use Hotmail (which is discontinuing free POP retrieval anyhoo) when I was away from home, and then my read and sent messages were scattered all over the place. Now I've got a hook in postfix to save all my sent messages, no matter where I send 'em from.

Good thing to know that at least they're working on the IMAP support, but yeah, it looks like I'll still be using OE for a while.

--toby

Even if Moz.mailnews.Networking:IMAP isn't good enough for your situation (and I'll admit that having root on the IMAP server does cover a multitude of sins :-) ), I'd be very, very, very reluctant to run either OE or Outlook itself, simply because its security has such a completely crappy record to date.

I'd happily SSH to someplace where I could run Pine or Mutt rather than worry about what Outlook was doing behind my back.

And that, my friends, is how I get my email.

ssh to the mail server, mutt. Best email client <b>ever</b>. :)

I use kmail. :)

Well, that's because you're a KDE queerio. GNOME is way better. So eat it. :)

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here.. but in my case, my cable modem goes directly to my Linux box, and so I just set up my own SMTP and IMAP servers, since I've never been 100% pleased with any ISP's email service.

At least now if it goes down, it's my own fault :). (And since I own the domain and control the DNS info as well, I have my friend's hosting/design company -- spinweb.net -- set as the backup mail service, just in case.)

And I don't open my IMAP port to the outside; I either use webmail, or SSH in and port-forward. Which is also a necessity at work, because my employer has this silly firewall that only lets certain outgoing services through.

Having that SSH channel in between makes me feel much better, but you're right, I still have to be pretty careful about what I open in OE.

Ain't SSH just the greatest thing since sliced bread? I can use XP Remote Desktop and otherwise connect to my Windows machine without having it actually hooked up to a broadband connection.

--toby

You answered your own question. Running Outlook is like hanging an "Own me, hard" sign on your Winbox, unless you've got *really* competent filtering upstream. .
It's one of the wonders of the modern world.

Of course, VNC kicks "XP Remote Desktop" butt, especially with compression and crypto turned on....which is why MS doesn't want you to run it.

http://www.realvnc.com/pipermail/vnc...er/025660.html

I'd never used VNC before; is it really that much better?