Best IMAP Client

[Josh]

I know everyone says that mulberry is the best imap client, however, I would like some opinions. I currently use t-bird, but have learned that it does not EXPUNGE or PURGE deleted items, merely hides them from view. There are also a few minor annoyances with t-bird that I have. Mulberry appears nice, but I dont know how much development is being done on it.

What are the other major players? Anyone have some opinions? I am looking for something that is easy to use and configure.

[Eóin]

I've searched high and low for a good imap client and keep coming back to Thunderbird even though I have an irrational dislike of it. Mulberry is ugly under XP, but things seem to be improving so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. For the moment I'll have to stick with Thunderbird.

[johnk]

Moving to an IMAP service has been an eye-opener for me. I thought finding a decent client would be the least of my worries. I thought that IMAP had more of a following than it does (I had the impression that it had a reasonable foothold in the corporate market), so I therefore assumed that any decent email client would be as strong on IMAP as on POP. Wrong. Very wrong.

As I mentioned in the Windows Live Mail thread, I initially used Thunderbird, but found it slow when downloading large numbers of headers. And although it claims to avail of IMAP's IDLE command, it doesn't seem to work for me. In fact, if I leave Thunderbird open long enough, it seems to stop finding my mail completely, whether using IDLE or by regular polling. I use FastCheck (http://www.fastcheck.org/) for new mail notification, which seems to work flawlessly (current version only works with FastMail/IMAP).

Windows Live Mail it is for now, but I'm still searching.

[app103]

I have an AOL account and with that comes 4 choices for email:

1. Use their bloated proprietary ISP software which comes with a browser, instant messenger, etc. I don't want to do this because email links open in their built in browser and not my default browser and I get annoying security messages from the built in IM client (and my regular one) about being logged in multiple times, each time I switch screen names to check all 4 mailboxes (It's almost like having noisy popups that can't be blocked).

2. Use their webmail with the browser of my choice. It's slower than a constipated snail. I don't like how it handles image attachments, it messes up the file names and animated .gif files just don't save correctly for some reason, and sending mail can be a pain. It has no ability to send inline image attachments and the receivers of my emails complain about images that should be in the email ending up in a zip file instead.

3. Use some software or service to convert the webmail to POP3. At first this seems like it would be the best solution, but this makes email take forever to retrieve if there is a lot or they have attachments, and sending email with embedded images seems to always result in it added as an attachment and not how it is intended to look. Not only that, but if I get some spam with something nasty as an attachment it will automatically end up on my PC when I download my mail and I'll have to clean that up. I'd rather not.

4. Get yourself an email client that supports IMAP. I have been using OE with it and it's much faster than the POP3 solutions and I don't have to worry about attachments from unknown sources as the attachments are not downloaded till I choose to do it, but I would love to have a better IMAP application, that possibly could take the mail from there (based on some rules) and automatically forward everything (with attachments) to my gmail account so I will have everything in one place.

Now I would just notify people of my gmail address and just have them send everything there and not worry about AOL mail at all, but I am on a few private 'AOL Only' mailing lists that will only send to you if it's an AOL email address. On top of it, I am having a problem with Ebay not wanting to allow me to change my email address on my account to one that isn't ISP based, so I am stuck with it being AOL or Verizon. (I have never used my Verizon email address for ANYTHING and I don't plan to start)

Which brings me to my ongoing quest to find the perfect free email client that can handle IMAP and do that forwarding thing, how I want it.

[iphigenie]

free imap clients I have tried:

thunderbird (dont like it)
mahogany (not tried in windows, clean and simple) http://mahogany.sourceforge.net/
mulberry (tried, pretty good) http://www.mulberrymail.com/
opera (tried and stayed stuck with, easy search and management, but no rules)
outlook express?
courier http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/courier/ (used to be pretty good and now is free)

Not tried the rules bit in any of them but I think outlook express can forward on a rule.

[app103]

Not tried the rules bit in any of them but I think outlook express can forward on a rule.

-iphigenie (July 15, 2007, 09:32 AM)

It seems to be able to do this with the regular inbox folder, but not with any of the IMAP inboxes, or at least I haven't figured out how to do it.

[Josh]

Windows live mail and OE do not support rules for IMAP clients. Outlook is the only one which supports this but outlook's imap support is very slim.

[iphigenie]

opera doesnt do rules at all.
So we are left with mulberry and courier, possibly mahogany (not sure)

[iphigenie]

if opera allowed me to tag mail (i.e. type additional categories and then search/group by them) then i think i would not bother looking for anything more - i dont care it doesnt do rules, beyond what you can do with filters. I do like a lot of the live meta organisation and filtering it does, and the fact that i dont waste time moving things in folders. As a casual mail client it is one of the easiest and quickest.

It is not a business tool though - lack of processing rules, the difficulty to sync/restore email, and a few quirks (at the moment it just wont show me 2 of my imap folders). works wonderfully for all my family and friends and shopping stuff, but i need a bit more when it comes to work stuff

but i must admit i like outlook again
in outlook i have one inbox, one big "processed mail" folder, custom views, category tagging and the "flag for followup" function, and i have a routine that both allows me to keep on top of things and not drop any ball without at least knowing that i am dropping it...
Since i used poco for years (until it slowed down too much and then wuldnt do fastmail) so I tried barca (and it now works ok with fastmail!) but the imap misses some basic option, and there seems to be no category tagging or flag for response functionality that integrates with the calendar

might end up buying outlook, the irony

[Josh]

To all,

Mulberry has opened up the source code to their email client. Hopefully now someone can take it and expand it with some much needed functionality!

Source

[f0dder]

I'm in the process of moving the guys at the museum from POP3 hosted externally to IMAP hosted internally - backups of their local Outlook Express mail archives were turning out to be a disaster, generating several gigs of incremental backups per user per day >_<.

From very sketchy tests I did, thunderbird does seem to be okay, at least when the IMAP server is hosted locally - did take me a while to find the setting to "subscribe" to all mailboxes on the server, though.

[Eóin]

A little know client which seems perfectly capable is Sylpheed. Even though it's GTK+ based it looks perfectly native on XP and memory consumption is significantly better than Thunderbird.

In truth I can't speak from too much experience, I switched to Opera's mail client from Thunderbird, but it's well worth a look.

[greengrl]

Thunderbird is great, until it stops working... Large amounts of mail seem to break the system, unless you compact it periodically.

[Josh]

Haven't compacted mine ever. I have almost 700MB of stored messages and thunderbird runs like a champ.

[urlwolf]

OPera M2 has tags. Shortcut: l, [number].
They are called labels.

Not sure it's as flexible as you expected but it's something.

[fenixproductions]

2Josh
Did you try TheBat!? Not free but worth it's prize.

[Josh]

Yes, I have tried the bat. Unfortunately, it is not very easy to use. It's spam filtration is subpar and it's IMAP support is below that of eudora or outlook. It's also not easy to justify spending that much money on an email client especially when I have to pay for each major revision. The major revisions seem to come out on a schedule rather than on the basis of major new features. Look at the latest major release.

[iphigenie]

Outlook works quite well with imap, I was surprised.

I just wish it would manage to make the flags options work with imap, as this was a majorly useful way for me to keep track of email related tasks in a gtd manner (colors=contexts)