Recommended email clients

[Phil Reynolds]

I'm currently using Outlook Express 6 as my default email client on Windows XP, simply because I'm familiar with it and it's there and it's pretty uncomplicated. However, the one thing that I find slightly irksome is that it doesn't allow me to compose messages in my preferred text editor, and I reckon I probably ought to think about installing an email client that suits me better. So: any recommendations? I know Eudora has lots of fans, but what's Thunderbird like? Anything else I should be looking at? My criteria are that an email client must:

• be free to download (and preferably open source)
• allow me to compose/reply to messages in an external program of my choice
• be reasonably lightweight
• allow me to import all my existing mail folders and contacts

[Charlie Reams]

I do everything in Thunderbird and have done fairly happily for 4 or 5 years. It meets all of your criteria (well, the 3rd one depends on what you consider lightweight -- it's pretty lightweight compared to OE6), although I have no idea whether it will let you use vim. There's probably some extension that would support that, at least.

[Matt Morrison]

I'm sorry I can't be much help Phil (been using full Outlook for many years), but I was just wondering: out of interest, what is it about using vim to compose e-mails that is essential to you?
Only I remember the only e-mails I've had from you all being plain text, i.e. it's not formatting.

[Kai Laddiman]

I use Hotmail

[Phil Reynolds]

I do everything in Thunderbird and have done fairly happily for 4 or 5 years. It meets all of your criteria (well, the 3rd one depends on what you consider lightweight -- it's pretty lightweight compared to OE6), although I have no idea whether it will let you use vim. There's probably some extension that would support that, at least.

Thanks Charlie. I've downloaded Thunderbird and begun playing with it. I found an article in the Mozilla help forums which said that, to use an external editor, you need to customize the toolbar in the compose message window to include an external editor button, which you can then configure to use gvim or emacs or whatever. Unfortunately, when I try to customize said toolbar, there is no external editor button available. Anyone know where I go from here?

[Matt Morrison]

Anyone know where I go from here?

Looks like this ought to be useful.

[Phil Reynolds]

I'm sorry I can't be much help Phil (been using full Outlook for many years), but I was just wondering: out of interest, what is it about using vim to compose e-mails that is essential to you?
Only I remember the only e-mails I've had from you all being plain text, i.e. it's not formatting.

Yes, I prefer to email in plain text (you can take the boy away from UNIX, but you can't etc). But who says plain text can't be formatted? I sometimes want to include bulleted lists in plain text emails (for "bullet" read "hyphen"), or numbered lists with hanging indents, or tabulated columns of data. Or ASCII art. All stuff you can only do with a proper editor. And, even with ordinary emails, if it's more than a one-liner I usually change my mind about what I want to say (and the best way to say it) a dozen or more times before I hit the send button. A decent editor makes that process much more bearable.

I also like to reply to long, multi-point emails the old-fashioned way - i.e. quote a bit, reply to it, quote the next bit and so on. When I open up a window showing the message I'm replying to with angle brackets down the left hand side, vim lets me pick out extracts from that text and automatically rewrap it with the angle brackets adjusted if necessary so they're all still in column 1. Neat.

I've been using first vi and then vim as my editor of choice for nigh on 30 years, and over that time - particularly in the 10 years or so I've been using vim - have amassed a huge number of macros, shortcuts and whatnot that let me do the stuff I do every day quickly, easily and with the minimum of keystrokes. For instance, apart from composing email messages, I do all my website creation and maintenance in vim using a suite of macros that let me add and format most HTML elements with two or three keystrokes. I couldn't be without it quite honestly.

[Phil Reynolds]

Anyone know where I go from here?

Looks like this ought to be useful.

Matt Morrison, I worship the very sod upon which you walk.

[Matt Morrison]

Glad you enjoyed the link Phil. Hope it was as helpful as it looked.

After I asked you about Vim (apparently it IS capitalised) I went and Wikipedia'd it - twas one of those computery things I'd heard of by name but knew nothing of. After a look at the Wikipedia article I pretty much got the impression it was a text editor for programmers who couldn't bare to think for a moment that they weren't programming, and your description kind of agreed with that. They also bigged up the macros side of things, and yeah I can understand if you've been stuck in your ways for 30 years then there's no reason to look to get unstuck.

I'd like to think I can do all, or at least most of, the things you mentioned just with Outlook. Apart from perhaps the line-rewrapping of plain text multi-part replies, which I admit would be useful if I was into in-line replies, but I don't think I've sent one in over 5 years. As a rule, I'm not a fan of plain text e-mailing at all - colour, font, and HTML-style formatting are all very useful in aiding readability if you ask me, and considering 99% of e-mail clients don't have a problem with HTML, compatibility is no longer the issue it once was as e-mail developed from plain text to rich text to HTML.

p.s. I'm glad you've taken your boy away from the eunuchs. Or something.

[Charlie Reams]

I'd like to think I can do all, or at least most of, the things you mentioned just with Outlook. Apart from perhaps the line-rewrapping of plain text multi-part replies, which I admit would be useful if I was into in-line replies, but I don't think I've sent one in over 5 years. As a rule, I'm not a fan of plain text e-mailing at all - colour, font, and HTML-style formatting are all very useful in aiding readability if you ask me, and considering 99% of e-mail clients don't have a problem with HTML, compatibility is no longer the issue it once was as e-mail developed from plain text to rich text to HTML.

How does changing the font aid readability? It makes a lot more sense for the receiver to choose what font to read in, rather than the author.

Also, does Outlook let you write macros?

[Matt Morrison]

How does changing the font aid readability? It makes a lot more sense for the receiver to choose what font to read in, rather than the author.

Outlook easily lets you 'force' a font (typeface, colour, and size) on all your e-mails if you'd prefer that method (you could even force 9pt black Courier New on everything and pretend it's all plain text ) but yes, I find the little differences in font size between the headers and the message, and automated sensible colouring systems (black for the headers, dark blue for reply text), as well as additional HTML formatting (mainly bold and horizontal rules) really aid in reading an e-mail and breaking it down to its component parts - plain text is really a nightmare for holding a conversation in where any one e-mail contains all previous relevant correspondence. I'm talking sensible decisions here, I don't have any idiots that send me e-mails in 200pt yellow Dingbats.

Also, does Outlook let you write macros?

Missed that one off my 'Outlook can do' list as I have absolutely no need for macros myself. But apparently, yes it can. Aside from the 'instantly reformat an in-line reply' which was mentioned, I got the impression that most of Phil's Vim macros were for non-e-mail stuff, he mentioned macros being used for writing HTML. Considering e-mails are fairly unique from one to the next, I don't see how macros would help much. Not saying they wouldn't, just saying I don't see how.

[Derek Hazell]

would be useful if I was into in-line replies, but I don't think I've sent one in over 5 years.

Although you still find them useful in message boards . . .

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[Jon O'Neill]

How does changing the font aid readability? It makes a lot more sense for the receiver to choose what font to read in, rather than the author.

Outlook easily lets you 'force' a font (typeface, colour, and size) on all your e-mails if you'd prefer that method (you could even force 9pt black Courier New on everything and pretend it's all plain text ) but yes, I find the little differences in font size between the headers and the message, and automated sensible colouring systems (black for the headers, dark blue for reply text), as well as additional HTML formatting (mainly bold and horizontal rules) really aid in reading an e-mail and breaking it down to its component parts - plain text is really a nightmare for holding a conversation in where any one e-mail contains all previous relevant correspondence. I'm talking sensible decisions here, I don't have any idiots that send me e-mails in 200pt yellow Dingbats.

Also, does Outlook let you write macros?

Missed that one off my 'Outlook can do' list as I have absolutely no need for macros myself. But apparently, yes it can. Aside from the 'instantly reformat an in-line reply' which was mentioned, I got the impression that most of Phil's Vim macros were for non-e-mail stuff, he mentioned macros being used for writing HTML. Considering e-mails are fairly unique from one to the next, I don't see how macros would help much. Not saying they wouldn't, just saying I don't see how.

Where I work we send out a couple of hundred e-mails each month to the same people, but with updated statistics. It's useful here.

Also I have a macro that tells me if the word "attached" appears somewhere in the body but I've not attached anything. It comes in handy about once a day. I'm that much of a fuckup that I forget every time.

[Matt Morrison]

Where I work we send out a couple of hundred e-mails each month to the same people, but with updated statistics. It's useful here.

Mail merge stylee?

Also I have a macro that tells me if the word "attached" appears somewhere in the body but I've not attached anything. It comes in handy about once a day. I'm that much of a fuckup that I forget every time.

Haha yeah, I know that one. It's available for Outlook too. I remember almost installing it, and then decided I'd try and have a little more faith in my own ability to function normally. It probably would have benefited me too, I think perhaps 1 in 20 of my attachments doesn't get attached.

[Phil Reynolds]

Aside from the 'instantly reformat an in-line reply' which was mentioned, I got the impression that most of Phil's Vim macros were for non-e-mail stuff

They are; the formatting of inline replies doesn't require any macro functionality. For email editing, I do have some abbreviations defined that get instantly expanded to full names of people, companies etc that feature in my emails frequently. But most of the whizzo stuff that helps me compose emails more easily is built in.

I particularly like the auto-completion of words based on previous text; type a couple of letters of a word, then hit <ctrl-P> and Vim completes the word by looking for the previous word in the text beginning with those same letters. If it's not the one you wanted, hit <ctrl-P> again and it continues the search. So, if I'm composing an email in which the word "Countdown" appears frequently, I only have to type it out once and after that "cou<ctrl-P>" saves me typing it in full each time. Yes, that's a trivial example, but it's particularly useful with long error-prone proper names.

Any of these features on their own I could probably do without, but taken collectively I've pretty much come to rely on it.

[Jon O'Neill]

Where I work we send out a couple of hundred e-mails each month to the same people, but with updated statistics. It's useful here.

Mail merge stylee?

Yeah, only a bit more complex.

[Jason Larsen]

Yahoo works for me, and I've heard Gmail sounds good.

[Phil Reynolds]

Yahoo works for me, and I've heard Gmail sounds good.

Those aren't email clients, Jason.

[Derek Hazell]

Yahoo works for me, and I've heard Gmail sounds good.

Those aren't email clients, Jason.

We used to use "Simeon" at work, but then we went over to Outlook.
At home I always used Outlook Express, but since Yahoo started letting you store unlimited messages, I haven't found a need to use e-mail clients anymore on my own computer, or at least I haven't missed using one.

[Jason Larsen]

What's the difference between a portal web site and an e-mail client, then?

[Matt Morrison]

What's the difference between a portal web site and an e-mail client, then?

You've got your terms confused a bit here Jason.

A portal web site is something like MSN which offers a whole load of different services and information in one place - news, sport, e-mail, entertainment, stock market information, etc.

When you mentioned Gmail and Yahoo! Mail before, these online e-mail management sites are usually referred to as webmail services.

The e-mail clients people are referring to here are programs that you install and run on your own PC to manage your e-mail. They download your e-mail from the Internet but they store all your e-mails, contacts, and attachments on your own PC. They are controlled via a program on your desktop and not on a website on the Internet.

Hope that helps.

[Jason Larsen]

I understand

[Matt Morrison]

I understand

Thanks Matt

[Jason Larsen]

Thank you