I’ve recently been dragged into a sterile discussion about Xubuntu’s default email client, which is currently Thunderbird. Apparently, some people would prefer to have Claws Mail instead, as it’s more lightweight.
Feature-wise, Claws Mail has, in my opinion, nothing to envy to Thunderbird. However, from this discussion, which took place both on Xubuntu’s forum and mailing-list, it appears that Claws Mail has some major problems:
- more crashers than Thunderbird (bugreports for Claws Mail, Thunderbird) in the 2.5.0-rc3 version. These are either fixed in later releases, or not pushed upstream.
- no GUI for Thunderbird import
But more importantly,
- Features that don’t exist in people’s mind (like « leave mail on server »)
- Not working as expected (whichever the expectations)
- Such a move would require to migrate 3 (three!) packages in the « Main » repository, and have a real maintainer instead of some person with zero knowledge of the package doing buggy uploads and not bothering to fix them when told.
So, it looks like Xubuntu will continue shipping Thunderbird as a default mail client, and by looking at the feedback this discussion brought, I’m happy with this choice. Trying to content people who don’t really want Claws Mail but a rewritten Thunderbird is a useless goal to pursue, whereas trying to content our user-base who do like Claws Mail’s « philosophy » is a much more enjoyable task.
Bien dit :-)
C’est un peu idiot de leur part, mais bon… Ce succès de Thunderbird et Firefox en est parfois inquiétant. Je veux dire, une réflexion comme « il n’y a pas de GUI pour importer les mails de Thunderbird », ça me fait penser à l’ultra-dominance d’Outlook, à la paresse qui va avec, au non-respect des règles, au prétexte qu’une majorité de gens ont un logiciel défectueux.
Par exemple, Thunderbird ne sait pas gérer les entêtes de mailing-lists. Du coup, certaines listes positionnent un reply-to pour plaire à ces messieurs-dames utilisateurs de thunderbird et s’assoient sur les règles en usage. Sur une liste qui ne positionne pas le reply-to vers la liste, l’utilisation de thunderbird est carrément pénible. On se dirait : mauvais outil ? changer d’outil (ce que j’ai fait, dès que j’eus compris la situation). Mais non. Il faudrait que les gestionnaires de la liste se débrouillent pour que ça marche bien avec thunderbird. ??a a comme des echos avec le web et IE, cette histoire. En moins grave, mais pénible quand même.
> Claws Mail has, in my opinion, nothing to envy to Thunderbird
Claws Mails has no « tagging » like in TB. The five « labels » are not enough.
And you can’t see smiley pictures instead of « :) », « :-) »… no, I not mean HTML mails, the feature is in text mails too
anonymous, it looks like you’re the perfect example of someone looking for a rewritten thunderbird. Smiley pictures, sure!
Oh noooo! This is only for you eye. And you don’t have a blue background color if you prefer a brown one? Don’t you?
Please answer the 1st(!) example. Why can’t I tag my mails in Claws Mail? This is _really_ useful. I can collect mails from John and Marry in their folders, but « tag » some mails of them for « Project X » if the wrote something about « Project X ».
Yes, a MUA is not a project planner. But there is no interface between Planner and Claws Mail and tagging is a lot easier to organize my emails.
If I have a Mailing List with informations that would be helpful for « Project X », I can tag this mails too and have them saved in the correct folder, « Mails from John » and « Mails from Marry ».
Or for some ebay things: I have no ebay software under linux. If I choose some tags « open auction », « to pay », « paid », « to send », « finished » I have a workflow with « tags ».
Only with 5 labels, I can’t do « Project 1-3 » plus my ebay auctions.
One other thing: I have some restrictions in one account. I can fetch mails only after a 15min pause on one account.
My other accounts are fetched every 5 min. In Claws Mail, I can only set the time for _all_ accounts and not for every single account.
Concerning the auto-fetch delay limitation. Indeed, that could be useful. Concerning the tags: sure, 7 (not 5, that’s TBird 1.5’s limitation) color labels are not enough for the case you describe. But the case you describe is solved as well, if not better, by folders.
anonymous:
It seems to me that by ‘tagging’ you are talking about thunderbird’s Label feature, which consists of 5 Labels, which have configurable colours and configurable text (label names).
In Claws Mail we have 7 labels, which also have user-configurable colours and text. You say, « Only with 5 labels, I cann’t do “Project 1-33″ plus my ebay auctions« , well, 7 labels makes that a bit easier.
Smiley pictures? This is your sense of humour, right? You are not seriously suggesting that this is a feature that would make you choose one app over another??
You hit upon the Auto-fetch delay, which is global in Claws Mail, but an individual Account setting in thunderbird – yes, as Colin said, this could be useful, so we will consider it. I don’t ever recall any request for such a feature, though.
You may find some other things that thunderbird has and Claws Mail doesn’t, but you’ll find a lot of things that Claws Mail has and thunderbird doesn’t. A huge memory consumption is one of the things that I am told thunderbird has that Claws Mail doesn’t.
Have a look at TBirds 2.0beta or rc.
There are a lot of ***tagging***
> But the case you describe is solved as well, if not better, by folders
Hm, I want to sort all mails from John in Johns folder. Now, John wrote me something about Project A, Project B and a joke.
Now, where should I sort this mail? In Johns Folder, in Project A, Project B or Jokes?
In TBird 2.0, I save Johns Mail in Johns folder and tag this mail as Project A, B and jokes…
In TBird 2.0, I have *unlimited* tags…
well,
right yesterday it happened that my office-mate has « lost » her e-mails… (she has around 333MB Inbox on Thunderbird-1.5.0.9 (running on Windows XP). Actually, mails are still there (as size has not changed), but she can « see » only some of them…
and I’ve got 274MB Inbox (15k mails) – never had « lost »… We’ve got LTSP Setup in our place, so all LTSP users are using claws-mail these days… switched from thunderbird… Does the difference…
kj.synack: Nice to learn such things :)
Did you use the wizard pre-filling feature for your LTSP deployment? (http://www.claws-mail.org/manual/claws-mail-manual.html#deploying )
Colin: Actually no, somehow I was not involved in this personally, my junior systems engineer did that (first time he heard about CM). My part was to introduce claws-mail as an alternative for thunderbird. And as I said – it really make difference, below is snapshot of memory usage from our LTSP server:
Memory usage
31.4 MiB + 9.2 MiB = 40.6 MiB Thunar
32.2 MiB + 9.4 MiB = 41.6 MiB xfdesktop
122.0 MiB + 10.5 MiB = 132.5 MiB claws-mail (6 users)
181.2 MiB + 70.6 MiB = 251.8 MiB soffice.bin (7 users)
558.8 MiB + 21.1 MiB = 579.9 MiB firefox-bin (9 users)
Private + Shared = RAM used Program
uptime:
13:42:52 up 23 days, 39 min, 12 users, load average: 0.11, 0.22, 0.29
Well , I have been using CM for sometime now , first of all its unbelievably fast . Now i have many different mail accounts , and one mailing list subscription which contain heavy traffic, CM just fits in my scenario , i created the rules once , and all the appropiate messages are routed to appropiate folders. What i found that other mail clients have poor mechanism for routing or too complex or strange names and they don’t work unless you select the whole folder.
At some stage i was wondering if linux platform have any decent mail client
I hope it becames the default client for ubuntu .
Besides speed and features, I believe integration is another key issue when talking about « default mail client ». Xfce’s mail checking panel plugin would not recognize claws’ MH folder structure. Simply because claws would maintain the .mh_profile, .mh_sequences files.
Claws is always my favorite email client. And xfce 4.4 is my new desktop environment, I would love to see Claws becoming more integrated into xfce and eventually turns into the default.
@scubajeff:
True. On the other hand I don’t think it’s up to the MUA to create .mh_profile (and Claws handle the .mh_sequence Unseen sequence). Moreover, Claws has a trayicon plugin that does the same as Xfce’s mail watcher :)
on my system with Claws Mail 2.81 on Ubuntu 6.10, claws doesn’t maintain the .mh_sequences file, the file was created and touched everytime claws fetchs mail, but the length is always 0.
scubajeff: right, Claws doesn’t update the .mh_sequences file in the currently opened folder (for performance reasons). it does as soon as you leave the folder, though. Probably I should look for an optimisation to be able to do it fast in the current folder too.
Or maybe the xfce4-mailwatch-plugin author could incorporate the Claws mail checking mechanism, by checking .sylpheed_claws_cache or .sylpheed_mark file in the mail directory. I have seen some other mail checker tools can do that. Maybe they got some help from you.
Anyway, would like to see this being implemented. Althought it’s a relatively small feature.