What OS & mail client do -you- use?

Tue Oct 28 10:48:29 PST 2003

I used Mail for a long time.  Then I found elm in 1991 or so.
Lived on that.  It was like "Mail" but understood that I was
on a CRT, not a TTY.

I used NeXT mail and gave it up reluctantly when a job onsite
meant no NeXT.

At a job, I started to use ZMail (related to mush, but with a GUI.)
And it ran on MacOS and Windows and Unix/Motif.  I used it to show
that "Unix mail" worked fine on Mac and Windows.  (I showed it at
a demo using a Powerbook 180 attached to a POP server on OS/2 just
to hammer home "open standards" not (just) unix).

ZMail was lovely.  Didn't ever get to IMAP and was sold off
to be part of a TCP/IP package for Windows.  Nice filtering and
I could write "buttons" with Z-Script.  WRite a letter and press
the FAX button - it would popup a dialogue box for the phone number
and (unknown the user) email it to the nearest Hylafax sender box.
UK Faxes would go to the UK and get Faxed, calif. faxes would go
to the SF office to be sent, etc.  Gimme a SPARC 1 and a telebit
modem (both scrap at the time), and I had a fax server.

But I always came back to elm when I needed non-GUI mail.

Then I played with this new Mutt.  Was ok.  Did POP.  Did color.
Did easy PGP.  Did threading!  That nailed it.  I found a muttrc
that made it close enough to elm that my fingers didn't have to
change habits and have run it for 6 years.  Once I had that rc, I
changed over in 10 minutes.

My huge archived mail gets procmailed into message/file so I can use
glimpse and grep easily.  mutt reads it.

My IMAP server does message/file and mutt reads it fine.
So does Apple Mail (using some) and Mozilla mail (used lots cause
I could sync up and go offline, sort mail into folders, go online
and watch it move all the mail.

Mulberry is lovely (though the config is breaks many GUI guidelines
about overloading functionality and modal dialogues within dialogue
boxes).  Mom uses Eudora.

IMAP means webmail is trivially easy to setup for users.

Best part: they can use multiple IMAP clients.