Re: MUAs that compare with Outlook (your chance to show how much better Linux is than MS!!)
Kurt Lieber wrote:
> I, for one, am brand-spanking new at Linux and have yet to find a Linux
> MUA that meets my needs. I really do like Linux and would like to
> transition over to it for my desktop machine, but because of it's
> weakness on the MUA side, I haven't been able to do so. ("weakness" is
> my perception - you can prove me wrong by continuing to read)
You don't say what Linux clients you've looked at and found not to your
liking, which would have been helpful, but I'll try a suggestion or two
anyway.
> - Must support caching of IMAP messages to local folders (i.e. offline
> mode) no -- POP3 won't work for me.
By "caching" do you simply mean that you want to be able to manually
copy messages from the server to local folders, or that you want the
client to automatically mirror the server's messages locally?
> - Must have sophisticated filtering/rules capabilities. (pretty sure
> procmail can fulfill this)
I trust by "sophisticated", you mean "vastly better than Outlook", since
the versions of Outlook that I have seen had very limited, filtering
capabilities. Comparing Procmail to that is analogous to comparing a
programmable scientific calculator to a non-programmable four-function
model.
> If there isn't, then I hope the person who stated "anyone who uses MS
> email products is ignorant" will reconsider their statement.
I didn't see that remark, but I haven't been reading this thread
carefully. "Ignorant" is a bit harsh. Microsoft's email clients are
defective in a variety of mostly minor, irritating ways, such as the
thing someone else was complaining about where the body text of
MIME-encoded messages sometimes appears in Outlook as an attachment, and
the way Outlook (or Outlook Express, at least) does not display leading
whitespace in non-HTML messages, thus damaging the message's formatting
in possibly disastrous ways (particularly if the text in question is
source code written in a language in which leading whitespace is
meaningful). Not to mention its vulnerability to VBScript viruses
embedded in HTML emails.
Anyway, I've observed that Outlook users tend to like Sylpheed, which is
available as a .deb package in the sid (unstable) branch, or as a source
tarball from http://sylpheed.good-day.net. It probably doesn't fulfill
every single one of your requirements yet, but it should do most of the
major ones, and its developers are working very hard at improving it and
are quite open to suggestions.
Craig
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