Mail Client Quest

I've spent almost the whole last week testing different mail clients because I somewhat wasn't happy with mutt (especially the address book functionality sucks). Also, now that there are new methods in categorizing data, via tags/labels for example, the possibilities of processing my mails effectively with mutt seemed limited.

Until now I've used my INBOX as a staging area to organize tasks which are associated around the projects I am involved. I simply kept mails which required action on my behalf in my INBOX. Be it that I just have to reply or that I have to look at something or fix a bug, you get the picture. Since I get lots of emails (~1000 on an average week) things got quite messy in times and I sometimes forgot about some of those mails/tasks. What I ideally wanted to have is a way to label messages and then search my INBOX for mails which have a certain label assigned, or limit the number of mails I see by certain key words. The IMAP protocol supports user defined labels which would be a starting point, but mutt doesn't support them (it should be noted here that mutt wasn't designed to work with IMAP in the first place).

I first took a look at sup. Sup is written in Ruby and promises a completely new approach to mail. Most of it's features are inspired by gmail and mutt. It supports labeling of messages, vim style key bindings and some really nifty quoting features like auto folding in mailing list threads. It's usage is quite intuitive when you come from mutt and I've used it exclusively over the last week. But, all those nice shiny features aside, sup has some major drawbacks. To allow labeling of messages it manages it's own index where it keeps all the related meta data. The problem with that, is that it doesn't update the mail status on the server side. Means, mails that appear as read in sup are still unread in the INBOX on the IMAP server. You also cannot move mails between IMAP folders, sup provides it's own folder mechanism though. Also, if you access your INBOX from another mail client and change things, like moving mails to folders etc. sup won't start anymore because you have to sync it's local index again with the IMAP account.

The other client I've tried was cone which is part of the courier-mta project. This mail client is designed from the ground to deal with IMAP accounts (it supports POP3 as well), therefore it allows labeling of messages. It also allows you to store it's configuration settings on the IMAP server itself and supports IMAP address books. That all would fit perfectly if it's user interface wouldn't be that crappy (IMO at least). Well, I have to say that I am quite used to have vim key bindings everywhere possible, browser, shell, editor (hah!) and preferably in my mail client as well. Also the way how mailinglist threads are visually presented in the INBOX listing is not satisfactory once you're used to the nice thread view mutt offers.

So it seems I won't get 100% lucky anytime soon. I didn't try alpine, because form what I've seen on some screenshots it doesn't provide a nice thread view. And before someone now says “gmail”, I don't like to have my private mail on a machine I have no control over whatsoever .

At least I was able to solve my todo crisis. Tante mentioned remember the milk lately on friendfeed as being a nice tool to manage ones todo lists. While I have heard of it multiple times, I haven't tried it until two days ago. I have to say it's quite nice. I love the fact that you can navigate your online todo list with the keyboard only and especially that you can mail new tasks, which then appear in your task INBOX (hah! another one). Though I would prefer not to have to process new tasks which I've send by mail in my task INBOX again.

So I think for now I'll stay with mutt, although it's IMAP support is somewhat limited.

What mail clients to you use and why? Do you have any suggestions? Did I miss one (ncurses/command line clients only)? Is there a nifty tool to integrate IMAP address books in mutt (I've searched but with no luck)?

UPDATE: Ok, it seems I was a little quick on this one, because cone has a nice threading view. You can enable it by using $ + T. I'll use cone now for the upcoming week and see if I can get used to it's different key bindings (I constantly hit ”j” and ”k” to navigate around but it doesn't work ). Anyway, the better IMAP support will probably be worth it.