[techtalk] X Mail client recommendations

[Rik Hemsley]

Hi Dan,

You might be pleased to hear that for the last year I've been
working on a mail client called 'Empath', based on the Qt and
KDE libraries.

Bad point:
* It isn't finished yet. Looking to make it beta when KDE 2 arrives.

#if Dan McGarry
> Up till now, I've stayed with MS Outlook Express because of laziness (and
> several hundred MB of stored messages). Some recent problems with it have
> sent me looking for a decent X-based mail client. I'm looking for:
> 
>     * Something that isn't netscape mail.

Yes.

>     * Supports multiple user accounts on multiple servers.

Yes. I made a policy decision at inception to support only Maildir
format boxes for local mail, but much merging with kmail may take
place, in which case mbox will be supported too. I might even do
MMDF and MH if enough people care. Empath is designed to make adding
new mailbox formats trivial.

>     * Supports kill-files, or has a scripting interface that allows
> spam-blocking.

Done via filters. Filters can have funky actions like 'delete' instead
of just 'move to folder.' The filtering interface is pretty logical,
easy to understand etc but not currently designed for maximum power.

I originally intended Empath to be targetted at users from newbies
to 'average' users. I think I'm going to stick to this, so you'll
probably want to investigate using something like 'maildrop' to
do filtering for you. Check it out - it's more powerful and easier
to use than procmail.

>     * Allows channeling of incoming traffic into multiple folders.

Yes.

>     * And, for bonus points, is threaded.

Yes. Does threads like no other client, i.e. _properly_ ! No faking
it using subject. No bogus parsing of In-Reply-To etc.

Empath is currently under _heavy_ development. I keep getting distracted
by $$ work but all my free time is spent on it.

Teams of programmers, faster computers, OO designers who can understand
RFCs etc would all be appreciated, if you have them spare :)

Rik

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