| Fred Stluka on 12 Feb 2006 00:52:35 -0000 |
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Nathan, I've been using Netscape mail clients for years, and am recently using Thunderbird, which is the e-mail client of Mozilla Firefox, the latest in the Netscape code base. Features: - Does all the standard mail client stuff (send, reply, forward, attachments, fonts, sorting, threading, undo, goto next/prev unread, etc.) - Pulls from any number of POP3 and/or IMAP servers. - Great support for RSS and Atom, making your feeds look like just another POP3 or IMAP server. - Great support for Usenet news feeds. - Keyboard shortcuts for everything. My favorite as I reach the age where tiny fonts are starting to look too tiny at 1600x1200 on my 15-inch laptop screen: Ctrl Plus/Minus to make fonts bigger/smaller. Just hit it a couple times to notch the fonts up to a readable size, or down to see more text on the screen at a time. - Manages the mail in standard mbox format, so you can massage/edit/ search/manipulate it with any text editor if necessary. Or can access the same set of messages via any other mbox-type mail client on Unix, Windows, etc. - Great support for mail filters, allowing you to delete, file, copy etc. any message based on combinations of a wide variety of rules, including my favorite: "If the sender is in my address book". Now it is trivial to use your address book as a whitelist, moving all other mail into a "Likely to be spam" folder. - The filters are also stored as just plain text, so you can manage them with text tools. For example, I often search the rules file to see if any of my hundreds of rules refer to a certain person or domain name, or word, or whatever. - Address book exportable to standard LDIF text format, so I can compare it before doing backups, to make sure I didn't accidentally drag/drop wrong or make any other mistakes with my nearly a thousand contacts. - Address book imprtable/exportable from a variety of formats. I haven't had to manually re-enter an address in over a decade as I moved through various mail clients. - User preferences stored as text. - Each mail folder is a mbox-type file in the file system. - Nested folders are regular folders in the file system. - A binary index file is kept for each folder, but if you delete it, it gets recreated automatically very quickly. - No problems with large mail files. Some of my folders are 80MB files on the file system. - Very fast. I can search the full text of the bodies of the nearly 10,000 messages in that 80MB file for a word in a couple seconds. - Very efficient. 10,000 messages in 80MB mans 8MB per message. - Lots of options for security, privacy, style, layout, etc. I recently had to start using Microsoft Outlook at a corporate client and have gotten to learn its embarassingly small set of features. I didn't realize that people still used such limited e-mail programs. --Fred -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/ Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- "Glad to be of service!" --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi everyone!
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