Over the last few months, I've started using my proper laptop a lot more, and at work as the exclusive desktop interface and moved the 'Desktop' into a VM host. The only issue being that while the Desktop had 8G of ram, the laptop has 'only' 1G. And my email client of choice, Thunderbird is not happy. I've been running the nightly builds for a long time ( almost 6 months ), and that really needs about 2G of ram for itself ( on a i386 machine, with my email load ). You can see how that's going to be Fail on the laptop with a Gig of ram, and I *do* intend to run other things on there along with my email client. Like *drumroll* Firefox */drumroll*. And about a dozen ssh client instances in gnome-terminal, pidgin, a desktop wiki, and the usual normal things that people do.

First thing that I considered was - it used to not be this ram hungry in the older days, so lets try and older build. Out came the tarballs for thunderbird-1.0, build and install. Works. However, its not really that much better on ram consumption. Hitting 600M of usage after a few hours. However, more irritating than that is that IMAP support in Thunderbird has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and I've grown used to those. So much so that I kept getting thunderbird-1 into a state where we were fighting again. Not a good sign that.

Next thing to consider was moving to another email client. Just to see what the options really are. It wasent pretty. Evolution is unable to handle either the quantity of email I receive or be reliable enough to make it through a day without crashing on me a few times. Imap support is mostly ok. However, the UI and the way things work is still the same non-intuitive and cumbersome interface only a mother or outlook users would love.

Claws on the other hand has almost nonexistant imap support. While using it, I kept thinking the 1990's were just around the corner, peering over my shoulder and would attack me any minute! Dont get me wrong, on the Nokia n810 I *love* claws, it actually makes the nokia an extremely potent communication platform. On the desktop though, it just feels clunky and keeps getting in the way ( maybe its just me and my way of thinking, expecting it to work a lot faster than its able to ). And where is that IDLE support ? Even some of the basic things, like using a 3 pane wide-view layout ( I have a 1680x1050 display on the laptop ) are hard to get right, and after fighting it for almost 2 days and getting irritated many times, decided to give up on Claws.

Mutt and Alpine are both options, good ones. However I've been unable to get either Mutt or Alpine playing well with server-side mail filtering and even getting reasonable report-views on state of folders on a remote end. With Alpine there seems to be a way, but sitting and adding manually, dozens of folders and having it manually manage each one is quite a pain. Added to that is that while I am ok to use Mutt as a backup or a use-in-a-hurry type mail client, I'd really like to be able to just use a GUI based client for most things. Mutt can perhaps come very very close to replacing it, if I can get the mutt-sidebar working ( have completely and totally failed for me ). If nothing else works, I might revisit that and see if anything can be done to make it not segfault on load.

Kmail is another option, slightly made more attractive with the built in sieve support in addition to the local maildir stores. But having used it in anger, I didnt like the way it laysout emails or how it handles multiple ID's per mailbox, in the past. Perhaps its time to revisit Kmail again.

Balsa is another option that I considered and its not half bad a client, but I think a bit basic for my needs.

Anyway, for the time being, its back to thunderbird and nightly. And a 4G swap partition. Atleast this way I get enough time to get up and refill Tea / Water / Coffee mug everytime I start reading emails :) I just feel that thunderbird as a client is really at the best place that email can be at the moment, its matured quite nicely and with the new development features for Tbird3, its only getting better. Now they just need to see if perhaps moving from the mbox storage format is an option, specially for people who get lots of emails that can be quite a winning development. Now, if only they would stop wasting time with 'tabs' in a mail client! Wtf is that about anyway ? I've not come across a single use case where I'd want to be running tabs while 'doing' email!

Are there any other major email clients on linux that come 'recommended' ? No 'telnet' does not count as a mail client.

- KB