What’s wrong with other IMAP clients
Evolution
I like its virtual folders, but every time I’ve used it, it would start hanging at startup, within about 2-3 days of beginning the test.
Eudora
The interface is very different from what I’m used to, quite spartan, and not very good I18N handling. Not to mention that its MIME attachment handling isn’t the best either.
Becky
Its interface is in Japanese! Is this a serious option? 
Outlook
Hard to see the *raw* mail format. Untrustworthy and insecure. Feels like the heaviest of all the options. Dumps crap (ms-tnef) in your mails if you’re not really careful.
Outlook Express
This isn’t too bad. Again, can you see the full mail? Doesn’t seem easy to search for mails, compared with Mozilla.
Clevercactus
Works well, lots of cool features. Not too happy (yet) with my 10000+ mail folders, but it’s still in beta, and this isn’t a normal use case scenario!
vm
I don’t use Emacs.
mutt
No folder/mail caching, far too slow for large mailboxes as a result.
July 29th, 2003 at 12:59 pm
Can always try M2 mail agent in Opera. Some people are quite fond of it, I hear.
July 29th, 2003 at 1:29 pm
It’s a bit weird. If the mail body isn’t downloaded, the body says “Message body not downloaded”, and there’s no obvious way to tell it to get the body.
I can’t see how to have multiple identities which use one account (or at least save into the same IMAP folder).
It doesn’t turn the IMAP folder listing into a hierarchy (if using sub-sub-folders).
The IMAP folder subscription page usually doesn’t see any of my folders, but it did once.
They’re right to name this a beta product, I like some of the ideas in it, but…
July 29th, 2003 at 3:57 pm
Played with Thunderbird 0.1 yet? It’s only 2 days old…
July 30th, 2003 at 2:55 pm
So, what *do* you use? Personally, I’ve found Mozilla’s client to be the most complete, especially for dealing with mailing list threads and such.
July 30th, 2003 at 2:56 pm
Next time I’ll read the related entry before posting
August 1st, 2003 at 3:44 pm
Becky is avaible in English: http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm
For my needs it’s the best IMAP-Client and I tried them all
And if you get a non-standard icon-set it also looks nice.
August 3rd, 2003 at 3:25 am
I’m not sure now why I thought it was in Japanese. This post was just a set of thoughts off the top of my head, and the only time I had used Becky was when I was testing it once for its behaviour with some Japanese character set decoding (it might have been to do with ISO-2022-JP decoding in email headers).
I know the version I downloaded was in Japanese, don’t know if I just missed the English… might as well try it anyway
Oh, Brad Choate mentions another option “here”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001449.php#001449 - something called “Bloomba”:http://www.bloomba.com/ - it sounds not too bad, but not quite there either. I can’t really say for sure without trying it though!
August 4th, 2003 at 2:54 am
Mulberry ( http://www.cyrusoft.com ) is one of the best darned IMAP clients I’ve ever used, available for both Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s not free, but its darn cheap.
August 4th, 2003 at 3:23 am
Thank you - am downloading it to have a look now.
Oh, the list of key features I gave them to answer the questionnaire:
* Search filter “folders” like VFolders in Evolution.
* Stable and fast when working with folders with 10000+ messages.
* Supports LDAP TLS, namespaces, quotas…
* Good I10N - RFC2047, MIME handling.
Not asking for much, am I?
August 4th, 2003 at 10:37 pm
I’m undecided about Mulberry. There are some things about it which are really cool. It _only_ downloads what it needs at the time, I was amazed to see it showing me a view of my 10000+ mail folder within a second, unlike any other mail client I’ve seen (it seems to only ask for the headers for mails which are currently in view). And yet once all the information about a folder is downloaded, simple searches seem to run quite quickly—I’m wondering if there’s a database it puts all that stuff into.
On the downside, the UI is flaky. I don’t know if you can see the _raw_ source of a mail (before any decoding is done on it). And (I consider this important) it seems to have little to no idea about how to deal with character encodings. Japanese text comes up in question marks, RFC2047-encoded headings remain encoded.
I think it has enough promise that I’ll play with it in work for a day or two, and see how it plays under real working conditions.