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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

For those using Outlook only for email, thus not tied other services, I would strongly suggest taking a look at Claws Mail.

https://www.claws-mail.org/index.php

It's lightning fast compared to Outlook, and very stable/reliable. Also available on Windows.

Outlook .pst files (both mail and contacts) also can be easily ported to Mbox or other standard formats, then imported into Claws Mail, by using the readpst utility which is part of libpst utilities, available on various Linux distros. On Debian it's part of pst-utils.

https://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/

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I'm used to claws-mail, so I'm using it daily. But I think it's quite terrible -- there are regular delays every minute for a couple of seconds and in that period, most buttons on the UI are disabled. I think that whenever it does something with IMAP most of the functionality is locked. Also I think it doesn't implement IMAP push and it has to poll for new mail every minute.

Also opening a mail that's 30 MiB in size (pictures) and has to be downloaded just freezes the entire UI.

I'd like to advise people to use other software, but I don't know of any perfect email clients:

* sylpheed/claws-mail has this locked UI problem

* mutt doesn't render images and has a steep learning curve

* thunderbird has software bloat, doesn't work on my low end hardware

And other recommendations?

Webmail is also mostly broken. I liked prayer, but it also doesn't render images IIRC and roundcube dropped the classic theme on new versions, and the new theme has less information density.

I like the classic HTML UI of GMail and OWA, though.

I confirm the issue of delays/freezing of Claws-mail. I really liked the simple UI, but freezing too often, couldn't stand it. I had searched about it, I got some answers that's it's single threaded if I recall well.

Since you mentioned mutt and it's steep learning curve, I recommend you another TUI MTA/mail app. It's nmail (https://github.com/d99kris/nmail). Simple, Pine/Alpine like interface, has great features (for example, saving mails in sqlite - can be viewed offline). Also the developer is active and friendly, in case you find bugs or have any proposals for enhancements.

On Windows, Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/features/mail/) is a surprisingly good option. You can just ignore the browser part, and even set up all the toolbars so that only stuff that is relevant to mail is there.

I use gnome evolution. It's not great but it gets the job done; much better than Claws.

SeaMonkey has a classic UI and is basically a modern Netscape Communicator. You can ignore the rest and just use the Mail part. It's a solid email program that has worked well for about a decade now.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

GTK apps on Windows always stand out, in a bad way.

I'm rather sceptical of using politically inclined software

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