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Comment by madrona | Hacker News Reader

Bah. What's a good alternative native email reader?

My own preference is mutt, and I'm deadly serious about that.

KMail / Kontact is actually a very nice client / integrated suite (and it will happily play either way). I consider it the best general PIM I've encountered on any platform.

Balsa and Thunderbird (GNOME).

I prefer Sup to mutt. Labels instead of folders, indexing for super fast searching, it's awesome.

Homepage: http://sup.rubyforge.org/

Note: No built-in IMAP (use fetchmail). Uses Xapian for searching. Handles multiple SMTP servers well (unlike TBird)

I've been meaning to try that. Ah ... it's in Debian repos now: sup-mail.

From what I recall and read: sup is the ruby-based implementation of mutt. I believe there are also forks of the mainstream mutt which incorporate indexing, tags, and notmuch.

Opera's built in mail client is excellent. It's unfortunately baked into the browser, so while still pretty light (Opera's what 10-15 Mb) it's got a bit of irrelevent UI laying about in email mode. Still excellent though.

Why switch now? It's not like they're deleting it off the Internet.

I run Apple's Mail.app and Outlook (for calendaring) side-by side on OS X 10.7 reading from a Gmail IMAP account and an Exchange Account. I prefer Apple's Mail.app - thought I had my doubts for the first few releases of 10.7 when it crashed continuously and got hung up on the Exchange Server with a "constant activity" task. As of 10.7.4 it's (mostly) returned to 10.6.8 stability. It's a viable alternative to Thunderbird/Outlook for mail reading on OS X. Though, honestly, if you are happy with thunderbird, I'm sure it will be many years before you need to consider alternatives.

Mutt?

In seriousness, I'm not sure there is one.

Used to use alpine, never could make the ui switch to mutt. Now I'm on offlineimap+notmuch+notmuch.el+postfix and I frigging love it.

My favorite combination is offlineimap+mu+mu4e. Mu is really fast, mu4e is a great reader and its interface is similar to Wanderlust (another great Emacs based mail reader) which is why I prefer it to notmuch.el.

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

Clawsmail or it's ancestor, Sylpheed. If you're one for a beautiful and flashy UI then these options are not for you.

Native to what?

I think he meant as a desktop client.

For what OS?

Any. If the e-mail client is good enough, I'll run the required OS in a VM.

Is there a good non-native one that's not tied to a specific provider either?

On Linux: Evolution

Has evolution improved much lately? When I last used it about 2 years ago it was quite buggy.

According to this [1] article, it is the best client after Thunderbird.

[1]: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-lin...

I actually switched from Thunderbird to Evolution because the former couldn't handle some of my larger IMAP mailboxes. It also makes me happy because Calendar works nicely (in my case at least) with Google Calendars.

pine (alpine)

dead unfortunately. (and some things are very hard to integrated nicely)

Outlook ?

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