[ILUG] Mail clients

[Conor McDermottroe]

On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 10:38 +0000, Kevin Philp wrote:
> I have been looking at mail clients for use with our imap system. I use 
> Ubuntu as my system so it made sense to use Evolution. However compared 
> to other clients I have used (kmail, thunderbird) I find its performance 
> very flakey. specifically it regularly throws up "opening folder..." on 
> the status bar and then promptly freezes. I have an up to date Ubuntu 
> Dapper system. Thunderbird on the same computer, doing the same job is 
> quicker and stable.
> 
> What are peoples opinions of Evolution ?

The only reason I use it is because Thunderbird can't seem to handle
watching large numbers of IMAP folders for new mail.

I have procmail and SpamAssassin filtering my mail on my mail server
into about 140 different folders so that when I read my mail (either
over IMAP or with Mutt on the server) my mail is already sorted and
organised to my taste.

The problem with this setup is that mail can arrive at any time in any
of the 140+ folders. Some IMAP clients, notably Thunderbird, have
trouble watching that many folders.

My advice is:

Thunderbird is better in general, if it fits your needs go for it:
Caveats:
  - I have found it to suck with large local mailboxes. (I have 37000+ 
    messages in my ILUG mailbox. If I wanted to use TB and have the 
    folder stored locally it would be very, very slow.)
  - It won't read Maildir local mailboxes.
  - (Minor) You have to use Enigmail to get PGP/GPG support.

Evolution may be better in some small edge cases:
Benefits:
  - If you want to use Maildir on your local machine it has support for 
    that.
  - (Minor) Built in PGP/GPG support. Beware, GPG 2.x seems to be a 
    little funky with regard to pinentry and evolution.

-C