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Comment by grn | Hacker News Reader

From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.

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There is Geary, but I have tried it and it is both lacking in features and pretty buggy. It is quite nice looking however.

Myself I have all but given up on GUI email clients, I still use Thunderbird from time to time but only when I need PGP encrypted email, otherwise I stick to webmail. I am looking forward to Mailpile if it delivers on its goals, looks very promising.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...

I've tried lots of email clients but I always end back at Thunderbird. I'm curious, what makes it feel cumbersome to you?

To me, Thunderbird + Nostalgy + Enigmail + Colored Diffs = bliss.

I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly desirable, either.

I've used claws in a pop environment; it beats the pants off of evolution as an e-mail client. I haven't tried its imap though. I stopped using thunderbird about 7 years ago when it deleted messages off of a Pop3 server before noticing that the disk with my mailbox on it was full, thus losing dozens of messages. People tell me it's better now, but I'm currently happy with claws.

I've recently been trying trojita as my imap client (have been using mutt otherwis). It's fairly feature simple, but blazingly fast.

Claws disqualified itself by being slow and crashing often when I tried to use it (with IMAP) maybe a year ago. If there's been significant progress since I might give it another shot, but it'd take a long time to have any real confidence in it...

I'll poke at Trojita but it'll have the same confidence issue by virtue of being relatively new.

Evolution flies as a IMAP client. I loathe to use any client with POP.

Have you tried Postbox? (http://postbox-inc.com/) It's a commercially maintained fork of Thunderbird that runs on Mac & Windows, and it's the only email client that keeps my email life sane. (Though I've had to install a plugin to add back email-priority functionality.)

I'm somewhat confused. Thunderbird on my computer is at version 24.0.1, are you referring to an ancient version, or a different numbering scheme?

Thunderbird 3.0 was released at the end of 2009. This was before Mozilla adopted a Chrome-like versioning strategy that led to rapid number inflation for both Thunderbird and Firefox. (1.0 was released in 2004; 2.0 was released in 2007; 3.0 was released in 2009; 3.1 in 2010; 5 (there was no 4) in 2011 commencing rapid versioning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#... )

3.0 was a radical departure from and regression in speed, stability, and usability relative to the 1.x and 2.x series.

I think Trojitá http://trojita.flaska.net/ has recently crossed the line from being a promising project to being a useful MUA. It has quite a good IMAP implementation.

The author (Jan) has been very active in the standards community, and really cares about getting every edge case _right_ rather than just being expedient. It's a pleasure to work with him.

Opera Mail would be that one, but it's interface is not the best.

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