As part of the Great Weekend Update (switching my main desktop from Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper) I decided it was also time to switch mail clients.
I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for quite some time, but I decided I wanted to switch it up a little bit and use something new for a change. I reviewed Sylpheed 2.0 last year, and almost decided to switch then — but decided to hold off because it’s such a royal pain moving mail back and forth between clients. But, since I was already doing some workstation housekeeping, I figured now was as good a time as any to switch.
After spending a good deal of time over the weekend importing mail into Sylpheed, and getting Sylpheed configured just so I’m pretty happy with it. I have Sylpheed set up for three windows: One with the mail folders, one with the message view, and one with the current folder view.
One thing I prefer about Sylpheed, over Thunderbird, is the ease of filing messages. When I want to file a message, I simply hit Alt-o, select the folder from the dialog using the arrow keys, and hit Enter. In Thunderbird, you have to hit Alt-m, then m to get to Move, then select the account, then select the folder. On average, Thunderbird adds several keystrokes to filing messages.
For the most part, I don’t need to touch my mouse at all when zipping through email — which is exactly what I like in a mail client. I like to be able to skim through lists like the Debian user list quickly and efficiently — see if there’s anything at all interesting to read and skim over the messages which are essentially noise.
I’m not ripping on Thunderbird, though — it has lots of features that I like, but it was time for a change. I suspect I’ll be giving Thunderbird another chance when the Moz folks release Thunderbird 2.0, and I might keep Thunderbird around for feed reading…
I don’t know why but I could never get into Sylpheed. I tried it again about 6 months ago.
My favorite MUA is Kmail. In second place is Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird because it does most everything I want it to do and it’s cross-platform. I dual boot with Windows so that’s convenient. Where Kmail shines over Thunderbird is it’s mailing list management. It’s very “list friendly” in almost every way imaginable;making full use of the headers included in mailing list emails. Thunderbird can do some of this thanks to extensions, but Kmail still has it beat even then.
Were it not for my use of Windows, I’d be using Kmail right now.
Wow…sounds a lot like my situation.
I used sylpheed from the early days up until around v2.0 then, basically, got sick of it and some of its quirks. I then tried every email program in the ubuntu repositories (besides thunderbird … for some reason I had bad visions of netscape mail) until settling on Evolution. That went ok, but I quickly tired of the rigid interface with its wasted space and memory requirements. I also wanted a bit more customisation.
I then tried thunderbird and have, basically, been a happy camper since. It’s easy to rsync data (even to windows which I, for no reason in particular, tested out) and it looks pretty nice. It still feels a bit slow compared to a native gtk2 application but I can live with it. However, just recently I looked up sylpheed again to see how they’ve come along. I was tempted to try it again, but thunderbird just works too well. Searches in one of my 10k email folders is near instantaneous and I’ve grown attached to its built-in newsreader.