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Comment by Yetanfou | Hacker News Reader

What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message.

Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier.

Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc.

Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

[1] http://www.claws-mail.org/

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I second that 100%. Using Sylpheed, Sylpheed Claws, then Claws Mail since early 2000s and never had any issues. It runs circles around Thunderbird and others speed wise because it was initially written when hardware limitations forced one to choose the right tool for the job and not simply pick the most famous language. At one time I had more than 10 email accounts and creating folders for each one plus filters to redirect incoming emails was straightforward; it's so fast that even today I keep in my Mail directory all mails since day one, including backups imported from other softwares. That means all mail since 1996, and it still loads instantly.

To edit the From address in outgoing email with Thunderbird, try the Virtual Identity extension.

The really nice thing about Virtual Identity is that it remembers which From address you use for each To address. Additionally, if you reply to someone that you've not written to before, VI uses the incoming mail's To address as the outgoing mail's From address.

I've tried Virtual Identity several times, several versions, but it always ended up making it impossible to read or send mail. When the extension was active I could not open messages (got empty windows), disabling the extension made everything right again. When it works Virtual Identity works well, but unfortunately it rarely works - at least for me.

Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.

> Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since.

The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up.

I may not be a typical e-mail user.

A N900 has 256 MB (plus 768MB 'swap') and as such is rather memory- (and CPU-) restrained. Still, looking at my current running instance of Claws (on a T42p, 2GB/1.8 GHz Pentium M) the process has a resident size of 32 MB. The currently opened mailbox contains 4417 messages (I need to archive a few of these...), the IMAP folder tree contains around 300.000 messages. In comparison, browsing the same folder in mutt takes 20 MB.

I just tested it on a folder containing 40.000 message (list archive), this increases the RSS to 82 MB. The same folder in mutt takes 64 MB. In other words, the 'penalty' paid for a GUI instead of a TUI is around 10MB + ~15%.

Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now.

I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).

Hmm. I remember Claws from when I had an N810. It wasn't the greatest mail client at the time, but in part that was the lack of power / screen real-estate on the N810.

I should give it a try again sometime.

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