Last week proved to be a bit traumatic for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that my Windows box, has finally decided it won't boot into Windows except under safe mode. SFC fails with a general protection fault, which I'm sure is not good. I was going to try and repair the damaged files from the install disk, but even that won't boot. I'll get around to fixing it eventually, but at the moment the only immediate problem is reading my mail locally. Having been meaning to transfer my mail to my Linux development box for some time, I guess now the time has finally come to bite the bullet. However, before I install anything and start down the long road of configuring it just for me, I thought I might ask some advice from anyone reading this journal entry who has their favourite Linux mail client.
I only have a few requirements, so I'm sure there is quite a choice out there that might suit me. However, I would prefer to have one app that does both a GUI and Command Line implementation, but I'll settle for two that will talk to each other.
Ultimately I'll plug in some anti-spam and anti-virus apps in along the way, so something that already has plugins for that sort of thing would be nice. Also name lookups for both would be a nice to have.
The last time I used a *nix mail program it was 'mail', and still was up until a couple of years ago, whenever I had to go and retrieve my mail when I was offsite from the mail server directly at QIIS. I know there are a wide variety of mail apps out there and have seen a few, but I've never actually played with them to see if they do what I want.
So what are your choices and how well can they do what I want?
PS: Any suggestions for a decent binary newsreader would also be welcome.
I use KDE, and KMail has the GUI features you mention. (I don't use any command-line mail client, so I can't say anything about that.) It integrates nicely with other KDE apps, and comes with a SpamAssassin plugin. I'm quite happy with it, although of course YMMV. Particularly if you prefer Gnome or some such.
I don’t use a GUI mailer, so I can’t help you there.
mutt is an excellent choice for a terminal mailer. It does all you require and much more. Beware, though:
It’s a bit daunting to begin with, but once you have a set of dotfiles that suits your tastes, it rocks.
As for the clients being aware of each other, that will be easy so long as they don’t use proprietary mailbox formats. mutt has no particular preference for where the mailboxen are stored and can read the mbox, MH and Maildir formats – ie anything that’s common in Unix.
If you’re using fetchmail to pull your mail, you’ll also want to have the GUI mailer simply read the local mailboxen instead of fetching mail itself.
I recommend this anyway, because a fetchmail+procmail configuration makes it easy to temporarily or permanently move duties between machines, and it also makes it possible to change mailers to your heart’s content without ever losing your filtering ruleset.
