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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail interface. The features I use:

Sending and receiving (duh)

delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!)

filtering (and tags/folders)

keyboard shortcuts

simple search, with folder/tag support

browser-based, so I can access it anywhere

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Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely (several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.

Dovecot supports tags.

Dovecot supports it, but are there any good, stable IMAP clients that work with it?

Thunderbird good enough?

(Although I usually kill the default tags that Thunderbird still includes as a hangover from the original Thunderbird release because that way I get useful tag names in the Maildir should I ever need to hack on them directly.)

> Thunderbird good enough?

Oh man. As a longtime Thunderbird user, I have to say, that's a loaded question. :)

Thunderbird hits every one of wccrawford's items, except it's not itself web based.

I use Thunderbird with a cheap fastmail.fm account. You can access your fastmail account from anywhere with their web interface. You can access it from any imap client.

It all works good enough for me. Not fantastic, but good enough.

I didn't realize Thunderbird supported Dovecot's tagging abilities. Is that something I need to enable? How do I use it? I've been using TB for years because it's the only IMAP client that does things the way I want (other than Mutt), but I didn't realize I could have arbitrary tagging with it.

Just right-click on an email and go to "Tag...". You might want to delete the default tags (which originate with TB 1.0) and create your own new ones from scratch.

Oh, I've been using those default labels/tags for a long time already to mark emails for follow up and so forth. If I'm looking to use those tags to organize my email instead of folders, is there a way for Thunderbird to display a tag hierarchy instead of or along side all my existing folders?

The only real interface is to create search folders that search by Tag on the server. Dovecot indexes everything behind the scenes, so it's reasonably fast.

Sadly, a full on "here's a hierarchy of tags, just display mail by tag" mail reader doesn't exist to my knowledge outside of GMail itself :(

Pine (or Alpine) ;)

I love nearly everything about Pine, but I wish that Dovecot's IMAP searching was faster.

Mutt supports IMAP, too.

http://www.mutt.org/

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