Mail clients (and text editors)

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

My head is swimming a bit trying to limit my choices of mail clients to test.

I'm wondering if someone can help narrow my choices.

Background: Like many, I'm coming from a Windows environment.  I've got
three linux machines under my desk and for a year now I've booted Win98
used basically only browsers and Eudora (3.0) on my Win98 machine, and
spent all day  with SecureCRT ssh'ed into my Linux machines and to other
machines I work with.

So, to start off with, I'm looking to make the transition to full-time
Linux easy by finding similar tools to I'm used to using.

I was using RedHat 7.2 for a while and I actually liked the KDE setup,
although a bit heavy weight.  But I also like how light-weight of a setup I
now have with Debian.  (I suppose I'll need a desktop environment at some
point.)

So, for graphical mail clients:  Knowing that I'm coming from a simple life
with Eudora (and have never liked Outlook), any comments or simple
overviews of the following:

I know it's a lot to ask, but please no flame wars on which client stinks
or is best.  I guess I'm looking for someone with a similar history as mine
that can say "try this", or "Evolution is cool, but it's too huge and slow..."

Evolution:
Mahogany:
Aethera:
Balsa:
Sylpheed: (which I just read about on this list).

Also, on my home machines (I think) I'd like to switch to IMAP to make
managing mail from different locations a bit better.  I know very little
about IMAP.  Currently I think I've got about 50,000 messages in my Eudora
folders, so I'm not clear if IMAP will be slow working with that many
messages.

And not related to email, anyone have a replacement suggestion (other than
Emacs ;) for my old basic friend on the windows side of Program File Editor
(pfe)?

I'd also like to find a nice client like SecureCRT for linux.  Something a
little more feature rich than xterm.

Sorry for the wide open question, but any pointers to reduce the time to
evaluate various mail (and other) packages will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,


-- 
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org