News and Reviews > Best E-mail Client

A new start -- IMAP, FastMail, Windows Live Mail

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johnk:
Once I decided to cut the strings with the awful Outlook 2007 (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8770.0), I started to have a good look around at what I really wanted to do with my email.

Well, firstly I wanted to get away from linking my email with my ISP, to make it easier to swap providers. And I wanted to started using my own domain. And I wanted to have my email available everywhere, while using an email client at home/work, so IMAP seemed a good idea.

So to cut a long story short, I spent a lot of time in the wonderful Email Discussions forums (http://www.emaildiscussions.com/index.php) and decided on FastMail for my IMAP provider. A decent reputation (though not perfect -- they have had extended outages in the past), a lot of useful features, and a lean web mail interface.

I started using Thunderbird as the client, but although it had a good reputation as an IMAP client, I found it slow. Then I happened on a thread somewhere about "Windows Live Mail Desktop" (now just called Windows Live Mail (WLM)- http://get.live.com/betas/maildesktop_betas).

I normally keep a close eye out for new email clients, but I hadn't come across this (perhaps because I've tried to ignore the whole Windows Live thing, and I don't use Vista). WLM is generally billed as an update to Outlook Express, although it feels more like a cross between OE and Outlook -- but in a good way. It takes the features I liked from Outlook, including the space-saving two-line message list (the Outlook feature I missed most when I started using Thunderbird):



Best of all, WLM feels much faster than Outlook, and is much quicker than Thunderbird at pulling down large numbers of headers when using IMAP (in my experience, at any rate). Thankfully, WLM appears to use the IE HTML engine rather than the Word HTML engine, as Outlook 2007 does. WLM is still in beta (although I think this may be the new, Google-style, never-ending beta). But it seems stable. I thought it was worth a mention, as there are so many OE users out there who might not realise they have a new option, which seems in many ways to improve on OE (WLM requires XP SP2 or Vista).

tinjaw:
I can elaborate if anybody is interested, but my suggestion would be registering your own domain (I use GoDaddy, but there are many fine registrars these days.), get an email account with Tuffmail (secure IMAP, LDAP address book, and more), and use Mulberry as your client.

johnk:
tinjaw -- I'd like to hear more about Mulberry. Although I keep reading that it's the best IMAP client, I've been put off even trying it because I also keep reading that it has a poor/non-existent HTML rendering engine.

Although I am a fan of plain text, and religiously avoid using HTML email myself, the fact is that I subscribe to so many (HTML-based) newsletters now that having decent HTML rendering is important to me.

tinjaw:
I am only just now switching to it, but I have always heard that it was the best, but outdated, and that if they would only restart development on it, it would be the greatest e v a r !  Well, development has been restarted. So I am switching to it and I plan on actively reporting bugs and suggestions, and where possible, help in its development. But, for now, it does have some limitations in need of updating.

Josh:
How is tuffmail as far as redundancy and server outages? That is the one thing I require. I want to dump my current provider, although they have been good to me, simply because of a lack of redundancy. If they have a server outage, I need my email up as it is a prime means of communication for me. I will be checking out mulberry and see how it fares compared to thunderbird.

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