Mozilla Thunderturkey and its malcontents

Your Alternatives

I started using Opera at work after reading you previous article and haven't looked back. The 10.60 update solved virtually all the bugs I had filed.

Jamie

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I do like a good email client and my choice for Windows remains The Bat! I am not sure what version you are running, but 4.2.x runs fine under Windows 7 of both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Even better news is that Ritlabs is working on version 5, which will include substantially improved IMAP support. I use Thunderbird mainly as a backup, particularly when I am trying to retrieve or send mail from a flakey 3G connection when The Bat grinds to a halt trying to download messages from all my IMAP accounts.

Julian Beach

Here I put in a word for ProfiMail, a quite astonishing bit of software available for Symbian and Windows phones:

Julian -

No, I use an Android phone and K-9 Mail, which is lovingly developed by a team of developers who work in it in their spare time. Although good mainstream email clients are difficult to find there are a obviously still a large number of developers who know what a good email client is and are prepared to spend their time developing them for the enjoyment of other email enthusiasts, although increasingly for mobile devices rather than desktop computers.

OK, some more alternatives. This one is intriguing, called Sup:

There was never an email client that suited me, they were all abhorrently inefficient or just painful, until that is, I discovered Sup. A terminal email client that is unrivalled (well in my opinion).

I'll let you in on a little secret... It's called Sup, unfortunately, it's written in Ruby, initial import of 20,000 messages should take just a day or so...

Nonetheless. If your work involves dealing with a lot of email, it's very very fast at indexing and searching, kinda like Gmail but not in a browser, oh and you have the data.

Typical usage involves a hook to Offlineimap for download, it then parses and adds content to a Xapian index, serving up the completed product in a Curses interface.

If you can install ruby on Windows, there's a fair chance you could get it to work.

Hey it would be great to give the project more publicity, development seems to be slowing.

Best Regards,

Bryan Hunt

Thanks Bryan. Sup is here, and the engineer has impressive credentials. Unfortunately he also has a day-job at Twitter - what a waste - but if I'd nominate the most promising developer to chuck money at, it might be William Morgan.

You probably had a hundred emails like this, but in case this one hasn't been mentioned, have you tried Messenger Pro (formerly Gemini)? Available for Windows, Linux and MacOS

If you have tried it, how do you think it compares?

Cheers!

-- Graham

I haven't actually, I'm intrigued. It's here.

While I have to agree with your point about Thunderbird. I personally have many problems with Tb as the IT guy in my company (problems with file locking and performance with network shares, lost e-mail with IMAP, performance problems with large folders, etc.). You have missed one of the best mail clients on Linux - Kmail.

I haven't had any problems with it. Handles multiple accounts beautifully. Has no problems with large folders and works with IMAP accounts. Has very advanced filers, ability to answer automatically to specific messages or even lunch specific programs when an important mail comes!

The only downside is that is not yet available as native application for Windows. You can run it using AndLinux though.

Cheers!

Hubert

Thanks for your response, everyone. It's very heartening. ®