The first client I tried was alpine. I have to say setting up the program and using it was really easy. Adding accounts was a snap and it was decently performing. Sorting into threads was a bit slow but I suspect that was gmails fault. However, alpine falls short in showing me if I have new emails in folders other than the main Inbox or the folder I have open. I didn’t find a quick at a glance type view listing all the folders and an unread count next to them. Bummer, I really need this. I can’t simply open every folder to check if there’s new mail as some of them are very large and take a long time to open. Alpine gets brownie points for being able to use vim as an editor by default, but looks like I need to keep looking.

The next client I tried was cone. Cone seemed very familiar to alpine and was slightly easier to set up and get going, but lacked as many configuration options that alpine had. I also have to say the colorscheme it chose on my urxvt terminal wasn’t exactly pleasing to the eye, but bearable. I was extremely pleased that cone’s folder list did list unread message counts and did almost everything I asked of it. I could even use vim in the place of leaf if I wanted. The wall I hit, however, is deal breaking. It’s not even particularly cone’s fault but from google’s refusal to follow IMAP standards. As such, I cannot mark emails as read when using cone on my gmail IMAP account. Shame, this is all that I found on the net about it. I figured if I could just get cone to fire off \Send when it should have been marked read by gmail anyway would work but I just can’t quite grasp the internals of cone. Sigh. I tried to hack cone’s sourcecode to implement sending

but couldn’t get it working. The functions weren’t documented and my knowledge of C was lacking so I was just clobbering things together. I gave up after it would open a message and simply segfault.

Next I attempted to try mutt. Mutt seems overly complicated for my needs and I don’t think it would play very nice with over 5 IMAP accounts. It’s configuration is a nightmare and I gave up after barely just getting one account functioning.

So for now I’m still using Claws-Mail which is the best graphical client I’ve tried so far. There are times when I don’t have access to a graphical display , however, and wanted a nice email client in a terminal which is why I started this search. Would also be handy as I could ssh in from anywhere and read email with a terminal email client.

Now that I’ve wasted half a day stabbing email clients I suppose I should start reading my unread email :/

However, suddenly multiple folders failed to sync on my gmail IMAP account. I tried to refresh the account and download everything again but Evolution fails out on downloading all of my email. So I open up the debug log and see errors like

. Wonderful. After some googling around, I found this bug which describes my exact problem.

Good right? Nope! Unfortunately it looks like an ancient bug that no one cares to fix and it’s “working as intended” as far as I can tell from the responses. This effectively terminates my ability to use Evolution as my email client as I don’t have the time or patience to go through 500 broken emails and deleting them manually just so Evolution doesn’t throw a wobbly over a corrupt email.

If anyone knows a fix for this problem I’d love to hear it, but as far as I can tell I’m effectively barred from using Evolution for email without manually going in and nuking crap off gmail. Quite disappointing really, considering almost every other email client such as Claws Mail or Thunderbird does not have this problem.

The first of my complaints is the inability to cancel the current action.  Sure you can cancel some things like sending an email, but that isn’t what my problem is. My issue is when Claws decides its time to check the mail and connects to an imap server or folder and just grinds its gears forever. There’s no way to cancel this action or operation. There are some times that I want to check an email right away and wish to cancel the automatic check on startup action. Currently there isn’t a way to do this, and I must wait for Claws to either successfully check all of my mail accounts or until it decides the server has given up the ghost. This is frustrating for me as I am a really impatient person and would like to cancel its attempt at fetching new mail and do another operation. This is especially annoying when I want to exit Claws but it is deadlocked in checking all of my mail accounts for new mail and it can take up to 5 minutes for this operation to complete. Although I partially blame gmail for its excruciatingly slow imap. It still beats pop though.

My last complaint is Claws almost always steals my window focus after sending a message. I type up a message, hit send, then tab to another workspace and start something else. Claws rudely ignores GNOME and pops its window in front of whatever I want to be doing with the send dialog. Of course, cancel is automatically triggered with enter, so I inevitably nuke whatever email I was sending as I was typing in another workspace when it decided to just crash the party. This is very annoying as Claws should respect my anti-steal-focus magic from GNOME.

Granted none of these complaints are groundbreaking in any kind of way, but they are still annoying. The faster these get fixed the more stuff I can find to complain about…