Oooh, time for a Holy War.

[venta]

Well, it looks like the computer glitch I've been complaining about really is caused by running Outlook.


I'd like to find a new mail client. So, I'd require it to do the following:
Allow me to read emails quickly (ie, minimal number of keystrokes/mouseclics to go from one to the next, delete mails, etc)
Allow easy filtering of messages (I don't speak procmail, though might be prepared to learn)
Handle attachments in a nice way (otherwise I'd just bite the bullet and use pine)
Preferably one which can be easily operated by keyboard alone.
Preferably one which will cope with the 'add comment' emails replying to LJ updates. Eudora doesn't (though that might be because it doesn't talk to IE)
Probably some other things I haven't thought of.

Any advice ?

At home I use the free version of Eudora, but am not entirely happy with it. I love the fact that you can rearrange its components to suit yourself (the list of mail folders belongs on the right hand side of the screen, dammit), and it does have many good things going for it. On the other hand, its error reporting is crap, and the handling of messages if you read them in the preview window is very poor indeed.

(For bonus points: explain why Outlook causes this problem :)

Comments

[lathany.livejournal.com]

When you're here this weekend, you can have a look at Pegasus (which we use). It's not brilliant, but its better than Outlook.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Out of interest, in what way ?

Ignoring (briefly) the whole business of security issues, I don't really have any particular gripes with Outlook. Apart from its utter refusal to let me add "-- " to my mails without using quoted printable :)

Pegasus

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Actually, we use Pegasus for a very specific reason: it's one of the only free mailers on Windows which stores messages in (readable) files on disk. This is essential from my POV since I don't like the idea of my access to archived mail having to be via the mailer. Bad bad bad !

Unfortunately, Pegasus has quite a number of flaws which, whilst they don't bother me, irritate some people a lot. For examples:

* Awful support for HTML mail.
* Very poor support for auto-wrapping of long lines in received mail (varies with who sent it, 99% of mail is fine, but just occasionally it gives a horizontal scrollbar instead of linewrapping - usually with mail sent by unknownid the fix for which is to hit 'reply' then read the quoted text).
* Very poor support for sending mail to large groups of people (10+).

Re: Pegasus

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

* Awful support for HTML mail.

Surely any support for HTML mail is awful support for HTML mail? ;-)

Very poor support for auto-wrapping of long lines in received mail (varies with who sent it

I think the most likely reason for this is that it doesn't wrap lines in quoted-printable messages. Could that be it?

Re: Pegasus

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Surely any support for HTML mail is awful support for HTML mail?

Well yes, fair point. But then, the feature lathany mentions below whereby outgoing mail switches to HTML automatically if you paste clipboard stuff into it with any attributes at all is pretty damn annoying.

Could that be it?

Could be. Certainly I don't know many people who use it. I'll have to get Bill to send me a long email so that I can test your theory.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

If you paste in text from a webpage, there appears to be no function for Pegasus to send it as text rather than HTML (I have to go through a wordpad conversion to text first).

Additionally, its help function really doesn't.

On the plus side, it does seem to do attachments quite well, and it does the message folders properly (unlike Turnpike, although I otherwise prefer Turnpike).