In search of the perfect IMAP mail client on Linux

This is the story of my search for the perfect e-mail client on Linux. I use an IMAP mail id at work to talk to open source world. I download mails from IMAP server to my machine and view it locally. I subscribe to several mailing lists, hence I use extensive filtering. Like most people who work on Linux, I like my mail client to behave exactly how I configure it, nothing less, nothing more. I like my mail client to be fast and trustworthy and needless to say, not mangle my patches. I keep changing my Linux distro, so I like a mail client that is readily available on a wide set of distros and is being supported actively. I don't like to compile my mail client from sources because of the hassle it creates on a constantly updated machine. Also, the client should store mails in grep-able formats for easy searching later.

None of the requirements above are too out-of-the-world. Most people who work on open source projects, especially Linux kernel, have similar requirements. However, everyone has his/her own favorite mail client and they want you to believe that theirs is the best. When I started working on Linux a few years ago, folks around me told me to use mutt. They gave me a number of reasons to use a non-GUI mail client, even though most of the reasons were invalid or unimportant. For example, it consumes less memory (but I have enough free memory all the time, I never consume swap), it loads up very fast (but I shut down my mail client only once in a week or so), it is fast (is every other mail client painfully slow?) it is text mode (but you use Firefox, right? not elinks/lynx?)

I used mutt for some time. After a while I started wondering if there was anything better. Yeah, mutt was fast and light, but it had a steep learning curve, a few features weren't part of the standard binary that went with the distros, it was easy to make mistakes with procmail filtering rules. Hence, going against the advice by many around me, I set out looking for a GUI based mail client. I decided that I will use mutt only if I have no choice. That would actually be a defeat for GUI based mail clients on Linux.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Probably the most popular mail client on Linux. Though Thunderbird tends to mangle patches, there are ways to make it behave well. However, in spite of doing everything I could, it sometimes mangled some of my patches in strange ways. One of the primary problems in Thunderbird was that it didn't have a native option to "inline" text files. so I set out looking for alternatives.

KMail: I was a KDE user back then, so my next stop was KMail. For quite a few years KMail served as my favorite mail client. It doesn't mess up patches, has enough configuration options to make it behave exactly the way I want, has good filtering that can be easily migrated when I change distros and is generally pretty trustworthy. Unfortunately KMail is part of KDE and KDE4.X is hell bent on fixing everything that is NOT broken. In Fedora11 I hit some ugly problems with KMail. It could not display some of multipart/alternative mails properly, it mangled one of the patch I sent and so on. This, combined with a few quirks I was living with all these years (for example, moving all mails from /var/spool/mail/ to it's internal dirs) made me finally think of trying the alternatives.

Evolution: Evolution has been shipping as the default mail client on Gnome for a number of years. It should have served my purpose pretty well. However, on Fedora11 I hit a number of problems with it. It crashed frequently. It messed up the mail header indexes that it maintained and hence could not read filtered mails. Reading through mailing lists and bugzillas, I realized that Evolution has hit problems like this once in a while. This was a non-starter.

Sylpheed: Sylpheed is a light weight, fast and simple mail reader that is available on most distros. It worked very well for my needs. However, there seemed to be some bugs in it. I could not change keyboard shortcuts, for example. No use.

Claws-mail (Slogan: "it bites"): Claws branched off Sylpheed codebase and is in fact Sylpheed on steroids. It seems to have all features of Sylpheed (and more), but not the bugs. Most distros ship binary for it and it has an active user/developer base. For the last 6 weeks I have been very happy with this mail client. It is _very_ fast, has enough config options to keep me happy, good filtering options, good community of users. It can do everything I want and doesn't come in the way of my work. It has a funny slogan and a strange logo, but it works beautifully. So until I face bad problems on this, I am going to be on Claws-mail.

I now have 6 mail clients simultaneously configured on my machine: mutt, Thunderbird, KMail, Evolution, Sylpheed and Claws! How's that?

Jog falls

I was at Jog falls on Monday, trying to do at least a part of the trip idea I suggested here. Unfortunately the Linganamakki dam, which has to release the water that dances down Jog falls, did not get full yet this year. This meant the falls was far from it's full glory. You can still enjoy it if you are going there for the first time and are willing to climb down the gorge and get wet in the water at the bottom.


Notice the people at the top of the falls to get an idea of relative size of the falls.