Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

Yes, everyone hates Evolution. It does sometimes show its usefulness though. And it'll be one step closer to being on OS X once Imendio completes the port of GTK+ to Quartz.

there really isn't anything. Thunderbird is your best bet.

Apple's Mail.app isn't too bad, but doesn't do NNTP.

ignacio, I did try evolution. It crashed within about 5 minutes of me using it with nice memory corruption, unfortunately, and wasn't quite as customizable as Thunderbird/Seamonkey (e.g. doesn't have a "just remove the mail when I delete it" option). I can probably live with the latter, but not the former....

Stuart, that makes me really sad. :( Waiting about 2 seconds per mail for the silly thing to load is being a big productivity drag.

Opera's mail client does all of these things. It also automatically arranges mailing lists based on listid and such too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mail

David, I just tried Opera Mail based on your advice, and quite apart from it failing to connect to the mail server on the right ports by default (which was easy to fix), it gives me a "Failed to Authenticate" message with no indication as to what the issue it's having is.

Not being able to connect to the IMAP server in question means it doesn't in fact do all these things (at least for purposes of me using it).

Hmm. I'm using Opera Mail right now to connect to a secure account, so I know the functionality must work to some extent ;-)

You can see a mail error log by going to Tools-->Advanced-->Error console and then choosing "Mail and chat" in the dropdown at the bottom. That might give more detail...

Also, it may help to manually specify the details of the authentication type used by your mail server in Tools-->Mail & Chat Accounts-->[ your account... ]-->Server ...Opera tries to detect this automagically but that doesn't always work.

The error console is what popped up with the authentication error...

And yes, I manually specified the auth type.

I also tried both leaving the password blank in preferences (so that it would prompt me) and typing in my password there (something I really don't like). Neither worked.

For what it's worth, I've just gone ahead and switched to using a branch Seamonkey for both mail and browsing. It's not precisely snappy, but its UI is so much more responsive than trunk, it's night and day.

Boris,

Which version of evolution did you use in your testing?

The better question might be from which distribution did you install it from?

Emil, I use Fedora Core 4. So that was evolution 2.2.

If there is a simple way to install a newer evolution without an entire OS reinstall, I'm all ears.

What kind of system are you using?
Or rather, how many mails do have?
Because the most likely culprit is Mork, getting superslow on large mail indexes... :(

Hey Boris. I use claws-mail, and it does everything listed there except NNTP, and it might have an NNTP plugin available. The UI is extremely speedy, but the app is apparently single-threaded, so you can't simultaneously read a message while it's checking the mailbox, which is the only limitation I've found.

I switched to it from Evolution because Evo was very unstable and Claws is extremely stable for me.

-Max

Quote: "For what it's worth, I've just gone ahead and switched to using a branch Seamonkey for both mail and browsing. It's not precisely snappy, but its UI is so much more responsive than trunk, it's night and day."

Have you been using latest trunk? A fix (bug 379828) went in a couple of months ago that should have improved speed of switching between emails. I haven't got it onto branch yet.

Apart from that, AFAIK the major changes are:

- SeaMonkey's mailnews is now built statically on trunk. Only the import stuff is a separate lib.
- SeaMonkey is now using toolkit as opposed to xpfe.

So I don't see why trunk is slower, unless we've got some other big regression in (or toolkit is slower than xpfe).

you can try claws-mail , is very fast and i used it before (there are some migration scripts too from thunderbird)

http://www.sencer.de/article/2039/welcome-claws-mail-goodbye-thunderbird

The laggy UI is the number one reason I've never switched from Eudora to Thunderbird. There's plenty of other reasons too. Now that SQLite is being integrated into Thunderbird at least for the Address Book, hopefully some day both Eudora 8 - based on Thunderbird - and Thunderbird itself, will create meta information about mail messages and store that in SQLite where it will be faster to access than the raw MIME that Thunderbird processes every single time a mailbox is opened.

I guess you don't have time to do perf comparisons e.g. branch gtk1 vs gtk2; branch gtk2 vs trunk gtk2; trunk gtk2 vs trunk cairo; trunk xpfe vs trunk toolkit to see where the big hits are?

Mnyromyr, I have about 100-some mails in my inbox; about 2000-some in my Sent folder, and some folders with amounts in between. The mork theory is an interesting one, but falls flat given the branch/trunk comparison.

Max, Marius, I'll give claws-mail a try!

Standard8, of course I was using latest trunk (even with the deadlock insanity it had). You missed two big changes: gtk2 instead of gtk1, and cairo instead of old gfx. Both were major performance regressions over here. Not sure about toolkit vs XPFE, but as we've been switching to toolkit performance has sometimes also gotten worse. At the same time, cairo performance has been getting better. It's hard to tell what's going on with that many overlapping performance regressions. There was also threadmanager, which might have affected event delivery and hence responsiveness.

Neil, I indeed don't have time for those. Worse yet, doing "perf comparisons" on UI responsiveness is hard. Txul is the same or better on trunk compared to branch (I just tested). Yet the actual perceived performance (how long I have to wait after hitting Ctrl-N until I have a new window I can work with) is a lot worse. Opening a new tab on trunk is a lot slower. Opening menus is slower. Clicking in a textfield and typing doesn't work; I have to pause for a little after clicking to let our focus code catch up with reality. Any sort of UI interaction on trunk just feels like swimming through molasses...

Fixing the UI latencies is high on my list of UX improvements for Tb3...

David, that's good to hear! Unfortunately, the fixes are likely to need Gecko changes (since Seamonkey and Firefox suffer from the exact same problems), and time is running out on those....

"Ideally is available on both Linux and OSX (though if this can't be done, so be it; I can deal with different clients on the two operating systems."

Mail.app is the best client on OSA X and by a long way. It also fulfils all your requirements except NNTP support. But for that you could use Unison:

http://www.panic.com/unison/

That'd save cluttering up the UI with too many different functions, anyway. I don't take RSS in Mail (or Safari) either. I look for the best in each category. Mail for mail, NetNewsWire for RSS, Unison for NNTp is the OS X dream team.

On Linux I'd use Evolution. I have found it unstable in the past, but it is pretty slick, looks the part in a GNOME desktop, and has some good functionality and provides GPG and S-MIME signing/encryption out-of-the-box. I can't comment on NNTP on Linux, because I don't do newsgroups there.

If you must have something to run on both platforms you might try Mulberry. It's the IMAP client _par excellence_ with very full and correct support for the standards. It's also now open source:

http://www.mulberrymail.com/

However, Mulberry maybe falls down on your 7th criterion, "Integrates well with the operating system". Mulberry's codebase on OS X is old, was originally written for the old Mac OS *not* the Unix/NeXT-based OS X and does not use Cocoa:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_%28API%29

If you want *real* platform integration with OS X you won't find it at any very impressive level where the up-to-date native technologies haven't been used. Besides Mail the only Cocoa email clients on offer are GNUMail (which has a glacial development pace) Gyazmail (which is nice but nothing special) and Correo (which is in its infancy, being at version 0.3).

You might look at Mulberry for both OSes. But if I were you I'd settle for the best options on the respective platforms rather than settle for something merely adequate on each. IMO, that means Mail on OS X and Evolution on Linux.

2.2? No wonder you had so many problems with it. Also, FC4 has been unsupported for a long time now; you might want to consider upgrading regardless.

Well... FX 3 will be released soon, but SeaMonkey 2.0 will take a while.
Even if this issue won't be fixed on alpha, I do believe it will make for 2.0.

Nick, I'd really like to keep all my Mozilla stuff in a single client, newsgroups included. But yeah, if I have to I could try a separate NTTP app. To be honest, the sad state of window management on the Mac makes me want to minimize the number of apps I'm using at once...

As for Evolution, see comments above. Unstable is just not an option for me. Stability is more important than slick. Evolution is just a non-starter unless I upgrade my operating system, which is not happening until summer.

Perhaps I should clarify what I meant by "integrates". I want the default handlers for files launched as needed for attachments. I want the default browser launched when I have a link in a mail that I want to open. I don't much care whether it looks like a Cocoa app on Mac, nor a GNOME/KDE app on Linux.

Ignacio, I'm not stupid. I know what the support status of FC4 is. That doesn't change the fact that an upgrade of FC is a major undertaking due to how much stuff they break all the time, and that doing it involves accepting that my computer will not be usable for a week or so. Sadly, I have work that needs to get done. I'll upgrade when I have a week with nothing else to do. Of course at that point I'll likely just buy a new computer, with something other than FC on it.

Asrail, maybe I wasn't clear. If the problem is in core Gecko code (as I suspect it is), and if fixing it requires destabilizing alpha-type changes to said core (which I suspect it does), then it can't be fixed between Fx 3 and Tbird 3, or Seamonkey 2.0, or anything else based on Gecko 1.9.x.

If you can disclose this, what is the mail server running and what type of encryption is being used? Or is it a hosted mail provider (Gmail, etc)?

I'm going to file a bug on your Opera Mail issues if you don't mind :-)

I have no idea what the actual server software is. The IMAP server in question is PO11.MIT.EDU. It supports SSL but not TLS, last I checked.

And I have no problem at all with bugs being filed to make all this better. ;)

Oh, and the server uses a certificate signed by a certificate authority that most mail clients probably don't trust by default, for what it's worth.

The Opera Mail checkbox for TLS actually enables SSL too (as long as you change the port). It's not labeled very well.

Installing the CA in Opera first might help...
http://ca.mit.edu/mitca.crt (opening the CA file in the Opera browser should make Opera offer to install it)

Have you tried emacs/gnus + bbdb ++

emacs sadly fails the "works to open URLs in a browser" test.