Entries Tagged 'Quests/Email Client' ↓

“The Next Generation of mail clients”:http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/nextgen-mua/; reviews from Linux Weekly news. I haven’t finished reading yet, but looks to be pretty comprehensive, and worth reading if you’re looking for a client (and use Windows - 3 of the reviewed mail clients work on Windows)

Recently I’ve been looking at, and thinking about, email clients. I’ve been using “Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/ now for nearly 2 years, and have been getting more and more dissatisfied with it. I have somewhere over 80000 emails in folders/mailboxes; currently I recieve over 2000 emails a month (mostly from mailing lists) but before I unsubscribed from many of them I was getting nearly 7000 messages a month.

Email is data. And the problem with today’s email clients is that most weren’t designed to handle the volume of messages we receive today.

Opera’s “M2″:http://www.opera.com/m2/ has pointed the way. Access points, a central database of messages… all good. But I think it needs taking further.

Many of us red high volume mailing lists. If you’re on too many (which is very easy, as so many have the occasional interesting/useful thread), it gets hard to keep up and pick out the messages of interest. I’d like to see some kind of in-built AI, along the lines of the Bayesian spam filters, that depending on your ranking of previous messages flags those it thinks you’d be most interested in.

Access points, or views as some people call them, are extremely useful. Instead of having a rule to copy all messages containing a certain string to a folder, I set up a view. This prevents having duplicate messages with the consequental increase in disk space required.

I believe that newsgroups should be closely integrated. It should be (practically) invisible to the user whether the message they’re reading/replying to is an email or a newsgropu posting - after all, why should it matter?

Attachments should be able to be filtered into folders. One of my biggest complaints about “Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/ is that I can’t do this - so photos from a couple of photo-only mailing lists end up mixed together, along with all the other -crud- attachments (”Eudora’s”:http://www.eudora.com/ @attach@ folder currently has over 900 attachments in it). This makes management of the files much harder than it should be.

I don’t want the mail client to come with an in-built spam filter. There’s plenty of stand-alone tools to do this instead, and they have the benefit that if you change email clients then you don’t have to start training all over again. I’m a great believer in each tool being specialised and only doing what it’s good at.

An email client must easily support multiple email addresses or/and POP3 accounts. I have an infinite number of addresses (due to a catch-all) and over 10 domains I manage. I need an easy way to send a message from any of them - ideally by typing the address I want into the “From” field of the message. Some email clients ‘bung’ all messages from multiple POP3 accounts into the same folder tree; others (like “The Bat!”:http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat/) give them separate trees. I’m not sure which is best - I always use only 1 POP3 account and redirect email from all my addresses to it. An unusual approach? Maybe, but it means I only have to enter 1 password to check my email (”Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/ won’t store the password for me).

In the end it comes back to the fact that as yet we don’t have very good information/knowledge management tools. This is the case in all areas - look at the struggles “charted in this weblog”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/other_weblog_tools.html as I try to find a tool suitable for posting links I find, source code, and articles like this.

h2. What’s currently available?

Short answer: loads and loads of similar email clients.
Long Answer: Plenty to keep you occupied if you want to test them. I haven’t tested many - usually because they are 30 day trials, and ’sometime in the future’ I may want to test them more seriously than I do now. Below are a few with innovative features:
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