I’m on the hunt for another email client for Windows.<\/p>\n
Here are my requirements:
\n1. It must be graphical, client-based. (Web-based is too slow; terminal apps require too much thinking and I like my cut and paste.)
\n2. It must support IMAP
\n3. It must support multiple accounts and allow sending from either
\n4. It must not only check the IMAP Inbox, but also IMAP folders for new messages. I do server-side filtering into multiple folders.
\n5. It must use subscriptions to IMAP folders; it shouldn’t just display them all.
\n6. It should be able to group by thread
\n7. It must be able to hide IMAP messages marked for deletion
\n8. It must render HTML in messages.
\n9. It must have a 3-pane interface, with folders on the side, messages at the top, and message preview below
\n10. It must auto-mark messages as read after viewing in the preview window for a few seconds (customizable)
\n11. It must allow different filtering\/grouping display by folder.
\n12. It must allow sorting by date, most recent at the top
\n13. It must allow me to define the folder names for sent-mail and drafts
\n14. It must allow setting of the IMAP folder root.<\/p>\n
Some nice to haves:
\n– Free would be nice, but this is something that’s important enough to me that I’d be willing to drop $50 or so.
\n– Redirect and bouce features sure are handy.
\n– Spell checking (pretty standard these days). This helps keep me from looking stupid.
\n– Signatures based on account
\n– A good find command. Apple Mail’s incremental search is pretty nice.<\/p>\n
Outlook Express (Windows) falls down on #11 and has this problem where it will show there are messages in a folder but when I open it, none are there. It seems to have problems downloading them. Other than that, it’s pretty well-designed and powerful.<\/p>\n
I used Outlook XP for a while, but it was very slow and clunkly, at least for IMAP. Outlook Express is way faster.<\/p>\n
Apple Mail is pretty good, except for #5 and it’s kinda slow. It also doesn’t do #4 automatically except on startup or if you “Synchronize” the account.<\/p>\n
Outlook Express allows you to subscribe to folders, but you can’t say don’t check this folder unless I open it. The interface looks like you can do that, but it doesn’t work. This is important because there are thousands of messages in my sent-mail folder and it takes a while for the imap server to check for new messages. I still want to have that folder in my list though.<\/p>\n
Last week I tried Mozilla and then Thunderbird. Both seemed to have a lot of options, but they were really slow and it didn’t support #4, an absolute necessity.<\/p>\n
Everytime a new version of Eudora comes out I try it out and everytime I’m dissapointed. At least this time it didn’t delete all my mail. Eudora is a mess of historical interfaces. I never found it intuitive, especially for IMAP. The one feature I really like from Eudora that I can’t find in other clients is default domain for sending mail. ‘@yahoo-inc.com’ is a real pain to type.<\/p>\n
The best email client I’ve used was Claris Emailer back in the day. They really understood what users wanted. So much that subsequent versions of Outlook Express for the Mac were based on Emailer’s interface after Apple killed Emailer. (I saw the product requirements when I worked at Microsoft.) It didn’t support IMAP, but I those were the days before I used IMAP, so that wasn’t a problem.<\/p>\n
I’m sure others won’t agree with my requirements, but this is how I use email. And since it’s probably the application I spend the most time in, it’s pretty relevent to my productivity.<\/p>\n
Anybody have any good suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m on the hunt for another email client for Windows. Here are my requirements: 1. It must be graphical, client-based. (Web-based is too slow; terminal apps require too much thinking and I like my cut and paste.) 2. It must support IMAP 3. It must support multiple accounts and allow sending from either 4. It …<\/p>\n