Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phyzome | Hacker News Reader

I've been using this for years, and would recommend it to power-user types.

Pros:

- You can define custom actions to run, including running external programs

- Very keyboard-accessible (including bindings for those custom actions)

- You can define boolean filters to process messages as they come in, but also per-folder processing rules to run when you visit a folder. Again, you can run external programs as one of the actions when a filter or processing rule matches.

- You can write whatever From address you want. A lot of mail clients make it way too hard to do this, but it's important if you have multiple aliases or a catchall at your domain.

Cons:

- Seems to be single-threaded. Certain UI and network operations block the rest of the UI.

- Has a good search feature (same as filter rule language) but not great -- it doesn't build an index and doesn't search across more than one folder at a time.

- Can't send HTML email (whatever) and can't view HTML without a pretty clunky plugin (annoying). I usually use a keybinding to send HTML emails to a Firefox instance that has networking disabled. :-P

- One big keyboard binding that's missing: You can quickly get a list of all URLs that are in the email, and select and launch one, but not just copy it. (Most people won't care about this, but I prefer opening some email links in a private browsing window.)

Long time user, ~17y, first Sylpheed then Claws. I have 20 years of email (90k messages, over IMAP). Running Claws on Slackware, and (reluctantly) Windows.

Stable, fast, functional (limited threading, and single view notwithstanding).

Sadly I am being pushed into using Outlook - a UI that looks like an explosion in a widget factory, and which crashes at least twice a week :/

Outlook fails to hold my attention. Tried it several times and it is just complete over-stim. I feel repulsed by it and need to look at something less busy.

Disclaimer: autistic.

I'm using Outlook for the first time after more than a decade away from Windows, and I feel the exact same way. Just looking at the app is overwhelming and makes me want to panic-close it.

(Idk how it can have so much garbage all over the UI and still be missing basic features I care about, either.)

I'm going to try the web client today. Hopefully I can stick to that one.

I use Claws when I need to quickly check an email update or do a simple search, because it's much faster and less memory hungry compared to Thunderbird. In fact, the inability to read HTML emails is pretty much the only thing keeping me from using it as my main mail reader. (I didn't know about this plugin, clunky or otherwise, could you mention that it's called? Also, in what way is it clunky - is it unstable/unreliable, or is it just slow to load or something?)

https://www.claws-mail.org/plugins.php

There are three. Dillo does some crazy embedding thing (and only works in X, not Wayland), litehtml is simpler but can't render everything. Haven't tried 'Fancy' - since it's webkit, it's probably the closest to a real HTML email experience.

There are a few [1]. I've used "fancy" in the past. I can't say I have a complaint.

[1] https://www.claws-mail.org/plugins.php

I moved from Thunderbird to claws because it works on my 2GB ram Linux netbook.

Performance is great but one feature I miss is an "archive" button that would let me move selected messages to an archive folder. I can still manually drag them, but sometimes I drop at the wrong place and have to navigate around to make it right. Would love to see this simple feature.

Also, claws search is horrible, I often have to open thunderbird on another machine to find things that claws mail can't.

You can select messages and press C-o to open the "Move" dialog, which has a select-as-you-type interface. (For example, I might press T, R to select a Trash folder, then press down-arrow to jump to the Trash folder in my second account.) It's very, very few keys.

However, if you're always moving to the same folder, I think you could define an Action with a keyboard shortcut.

> doesn't search across more than one folder at a time.

But it does search recursively, which makes this way less problematic than it could. Just search your entire archive.

And you can switch folders with the search staying active and only showing the matching mails in the folder you switched to! It drives me mad that Thunderbird insists of clearing the search filter when I switch folders.

> Can't send HTML email (whatever) and can't view HTML without a pretty clunky plugin (annoying). I usually use a keybinding to send HTML emails to a Firefox instance that has networking disabled. :-P

That is a huge pro for me, I despise HTML emails and it is actually so easy to spot scams when their button hyperlinks are shown in plain text, full URL.

The single threaded nature is what kills it for me. I placed the indices on a ramdisk to make the performance viable.

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