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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.

I'm tired of:

- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or plain text format.

- Search that takes forever.

- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.

- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.

Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross platform?

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Your Thunderbird experience is almost completely opposite of mine. Gnus is my main e-mail client but there are a couple of Windows machines I run Thunderbird on.

All of your points can be solved by going through the configuration options. Maybe that shouldn't be necessary, but not everyone's the same.

Likewise. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the Thunderbird client, but it consistently and mostly stays out of the way. Search is pretty fast and messages go where they're supposed to go.

In ~five years of using it across three machines, I've only had two instances in which a folder got corrupted, and in both cases I was able to repair it and recover the messages.

Also, when I migrated from Windows to Linux, transitioning my email profile was utterly seamless.

If the command-line interface doesn't scare you, I recommend Mutt. It's customizable and have pgp integration.

It seems there's a Windows port too but I haven't tried it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unixmail-w32/

I have not tried it, but Zimbra released a desktop client. http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html

Well the prompt for html/plain text can be turned off... But I also had a hard time finding it when I started using Thunderbird. Junk in your inbox - use a e-mail server with a good junk mail filter... your e-mail client won't ever be as good as filtering... and you don't want to be downloading tons of e-mails before you can filter them...

I agree with your other pointers....

But no, I can't recommend another e-mail client

have you looked at thunderbird 3.0b4/ the new search works great

gmail?

GNUS

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