Mail Client Quest - Revisited

A while ago I was searching for a new mail client because I wasn't all that happy anymore with mutt. Until then I had tested sup but discarded it again. The fact that it doesn't updated the status of the mails on the IMAP server itself was just a too big downside for me as I access the server from different computers, and I can't install sup on every one of them.

The next alternative MUA I've tested was cone. I first had some problems with it's index overview because I thought that it wasn't able to show a threaded index like mutt does. Apparently it does, once you tell it to do so via $ + t . However, after one week of using just cone it was “back to mutt” for me.

The reasons are simple and more a matter of personal preferences. While cone is a nice, and very fast mail client I didn't like the following things:

• You don't see where you are in a thread while reading a message, in mutt you see the thread/inbox inbox above the mail you're currently reading.
• For the life of me I wasn't able to get used to the key bindings. I've been using mutt since I came to Linux (I used thunderbird at a job but that's it) and I found myself constantly quitting cone by pressing q .
• The colored quoting that mutt offers makes reading quoted mails really really nice, AFAIK cone doesn't offer something like that (but I could be wrong on this).
• You can tell cone to use an external editor (vim please) in the configuration, but it doesn't start it for you, you have to do that yourself when writing an mail.

Of course cone offers some unique features which you don't get with mutt:

• It's faster (though I think if you use header caching in mutt the speed is comparable)
• It supports IMAP address books.
• Managing multiple IMAP,POP3,local mail accounts is easy while in mutt it's more of a PITA.

But those were not compelling enough to make me switch.

So it was back to mutt. I took myself some time and did some tuning of my mutt configuration, as well as make mutt work on my laptop so I don't necessarily have to ssh to my box to read my mails (well, when I am sitting in front of a computer chances are low I don't ssh to it ). The only problem that remains is the address book thingy. I am currently thinking about keeping all my contancts as simple vCards and use a small script to look them up from within mutt. I know there are multiple tools which allow you to query evolution databases or LDAP and what else, but I think vCards are probably the better option because they're widely supported. Well, we'll see. Once I've found a solution to this as well I'll let you know about my achievement .