but that is not too hard
Geek
Columba is an email client, written in Java, which shows a lot of promise.
For a Java desktop app, it does not seem to suck very much. In fact, on my 700Mhz P3, it is almost as snappy as a native application. It uses Sun's desktop integration library to do things like provide a notification-area icon (which Evolution still cannot seem to do), supports GPG (if you have it installed) out of the box and does IMAPS and STARTTLS for SMTP.
It is decidedly more user friendly than Evo in many the traditional ways that Evolution sucks: a sane toolbar, undo, a real trash folder, no in-your-face progress window and a keyboard shortcut for viewing message source but is still lacking some important features like not fetching images, etc from the network for HTML mail and sorting threads based on the date of the most recent message in the thread. Given these issues, that it does not use the Gnome addressbook and the GTK look and feel for Java still lacks a lot, I am going to keep using Evo for now, but will definitely keep an eye on Columba's progress.
Download it and give it a try.
Comments
I may be alone here, but I haven't used a desktop email client for anything other than work for about four years now. Webmail does absolutely everything I need, and since gmail at least, does it well.
In places where I do need a desktop client, it's because the employer dictates that I use one - and that has been Outlook, without exception.
Still, it's interesting to hear that people do still have uses for these things. For my curiosity, what benefits do y'all get from using your own MUAs?
Posted by: Joel on July 8, 2005 07:56 PM
Lots of reasons!
- Caching mail locally, for offline access (getting less useful these days as it is gets harder and harder to not be online)
- Access to my local contact list and integration with other desktop apps in general - GPG, IM, desktop search, etc.
- Handling the three different accounts that I need to check on a daily basis from the one interface.
- Usability. GMail is great, but my webmail and UniSA's sucks.
- Speed. No network latency issues affecting every user action; I can scroll through my 300-message inbox message list much faster than I can page through it.
- n less pages to re-load when my browser crashes. :)
Many of these problems could probably be overcome as a small matter of code, but I don't have the time and a desktop MUA already solves them all. Having said that, I will probably write one sometime anyway.
Maybe your years using Outlook have jaded your experience with them?
Posted by: Mike on July 9, 2005 11:56 AM
MS Exchange webmail is horrible. I'm currently using it as my primary mail client for work while I'm overseas.
It sure does beat Lotus Notes, though.
Posted by: Dave Hill on July 9, 2005 02:06 PM
Heh. Notes. Heh heh.
Notes should be cited as evidence demonstrating how any "eveything is a XML document" approach is bound to fail, or suck, or both. As should SOAP.
Posted by: Mike on July 9, 2005 03:33 PM
This looks neat but unfortunately doesn't seem to want to work on my mac. I quite like the 'Mail' program that comes with the mac, but it doesn't support secure imap (which is a ridiculous oversight) and it has some problem that stops my sent mail being saved (which is a ridiculous bug). I haven't found anything else that's even nearly good either. Thunderbird hotkeys are all over the place and it's a heavy application and it doesn't integrate so well. There's an openstep version of the Mail program that does address my problems above, but I've found this to be buggy.
I would like to be able to use fetchmail to download email to a folder and then read it through a not-slow mail reading program. I don't know much about fetchmail, but it would be nice if it could keep the server in sync with my folders. But I don't know of any program that's reasonable that I could use for the viewer. Hmm. Maybe I could alias vim. What do other people do?
Posted by: Craig Turner on July 11, 2005 06:30 PM
I don't mind Mail.app - especially the spring-loaded mailbox sidebar (although that necessitates having a "global" inbox for all three accounts, which bugs me). There is an extension which adds GPG support which is really nice - better than Thunderbird's Enigmail and another which makes signatures handled in a sane way. With those two installed, I have very little beef with it.
Anyway, I know it does IMAPS, I use it for two accounts at the moment, both of which use certificates signed by a private CA (i.e. me).
Is the problem with your send mail the fact that you have not specified a sent mail folder? For some bizarre reason, to do so you need to select the folder in the mailbox sidebar, then there is a *menu item* (under "Mailboxes"?) that lets you set it as the sent folder.
As for alternatives: Webmail? Mutt?
Posted by: Mike on July 12, 2005 10:06 AM
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