Christoph’s Blog

Rants, discoveries and my tireless search for perfect Linux tools

Is TELNET is the only stable MUA?

with 2 comments

The first time I read mutt’s slogan I laughed: “All mailers suck - but mutt sucks less.” But after years of searching for a stable MUA (mail user agent aka mail client) I start to believe that no matter how cryptic mutt is - it seems to be one of two pieces of software that I can actually use to read my mail. After I was offline for a week (thanks, german T-Com) I fired up kmail and it told me that I have 10832 unread emails (nah, not just fan mail - there are mailing lists, too). kmail can’t even fetch mail from a single large maildir folder without crashing. The kind people of #debian-kde recommended me to install the debug version of the KDE libraries to help them track that bug down. And I’m still collecting crash backtraces. But this is ridiculous. I’m restarting kmail time and again. I know that I hear myself ranting about M$ products but even though Outl00k sucks badly it’s at least stable. I think kmail will shortly make room for my good old-school mutt window. mutt is surely cryptic but it’s the only MUA that has all the features someone needs who is seriously working with lots of emails. And if even mutt starts to betray me there’s only TELNET left. Or maybe I’ll start working with email like my old boss when I was a “Hiwi” at university: he had his secretary print out all the emails and put them on his desk. :)

Written by Christoph Haas

February 19th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

Posted in Open-Source

2 Responses to 'Is TELNET is the only stable MUA?'

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  1. Positive word(s) about OUTLOOK? May I have some of your drugs? hehe ;)

    benny

    19 Feb 07 at 11:14 pm

  2. Perhaps you have right, I recognized that since my last MUA evaluation.

    I liked the way Kontact works, you can use all the components seperately and also altogether and this is very nice.

    But I fastly recognized how much KMail sucks - first, because of the same issue you describe (If you make a new account for a IMAP account and he is collecting the mail headers for displaying it there) and second because the mail filtering is awfully slow.

    Evolution is less slow, but has bugs in other ways. It was my second choice, after I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu on my desktop, because both nicely integrating in the desktops and have some features like Evolution, who displays the outstanding tasks in the taskbar.

    Because I am a convinient guy when it comes to mails, I discarded Mutt after trying to work with it a while. I only use it on server-side, for checking maildirs.

    I ended up in Thunderbird. I recognize things often I would do otherwise, but at least it is fast in all ways, sending, recieving and a plus it has a plugin for a calendar, Lightning, and for this calendar a plugin for my Google Calendar, to synchronize it.

    Also the mail filters work fast, and it is also good if I use a mail client every day, which I also can recommend my customers and provide good support for it, because of using it daily. And I can recommend it, no matter what operating system they use because it is available and installable easily everywhere.

    That was a big plus for my deciscion.

    You recommend Outlook? :P Look at your ISP-Mail tutorial, how much workarounds have to be activated in the dovecot.conf :)

    Markus

    12 Mar 08 at 2:30 pm

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