Re: E-mail client for POP3?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Juli-Manel Merino Vidal wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Sep 13, 1999 at 04:25:53PM -0500, David Kanter wrote:
> 
> > I use POP3 with my dial up connection, and wonder what people generally use as a mail client for this situation. Do people just default to Netscape? I was looking at Mutt, which looks a little confusing, but seems to be somewhat popular.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> 
> You don't have to worry about your mail server. You should use
> fetchmail, a program to retrive mail from mail servers that allows
> pop3, imap, etc. Once you have downloaded all the mail to your own
> mailbox, you can use any mail user agent (MUA) program to read it.
> Read fetchmail and procmail manpages.

I considered this approach, but it doesn't really do what I want.
I've got an office PC running Debian and a home PC running
Debian, and neither one has any kind of backup capability. I need
to be able to read my mail from both boxes, as well as from any
of a couple of hundred Windows boxes (via Telnet).

So I'd like to leave my mail on the server and read it via IMAP;
that way I can read it from my office PC or home PC via Netscape
(too many non-plain-text messages for a text-based email client
like mutt), and I can telnet from one of the Windows boxes to my
office PC and read it via mutt, but still with the mail on the
server, not fetched to my office box.

However, I haven't been able to find a way to configure Mutt to
read via IMAP, so I've been using Netscape in the office and at
home to read the mail from the server via IMAP, and then when I'm
at one of the Windows boxes, I telnet to my office machine, fetch
the mail (with the -k option to keep the mail on the server so I
can read the non-text messages later - yes, I could point
Netscape to my local mail cache, but then again, my local machine
doesn't have backup capability so there's the risk (albeit small)
of data loss), and then use mutt remotely. The disadvantage of
this method is that I now read through a hundred or so messages
remotely, only to have to scan through them again when I get back
to the office so I can clean them off the server.

Which boils down to this: fetching from the server is not a real
good solution for me. Is there a text-based email client that
uses IMAP rather than POP? Alternatively, if fetchmail had an
option to fetch my messages, let me read them and delete 90% of
them, then let me fetch again with some option to delete messages
from the server that I've deleted from mutt, that would work
also, but I haven't been able to find such an option.

(I just realized the topic of this thread, started by David, is
about POP instead of IMAP, so this rambling doesn't really belong
here -- sorry.)