I’m not planning to start a flame war here, honest, just looking for straightforward advice. I am using Gmail as my main service but also pull in mail from some other servers via pop3 to my Gmail account, as well as log in to my workplace’s Exchange server (spit) via IMAP, and copy mail from there to my Gmail account with a filter. I have been using Thunderbird 2 on my main home machine and Evolution on my main work machine (because of its direct Exchange connectivity) but I’m not terribly happey with either of them (especially not Evolution which is rather clunky and slow with IMAP and I’m running it under KDE4 anyway).
So I thought I’d take the opportunity of the switch to openSUSE 11.2 (64bit) to cast around for a new solution, especially as I’m not keen to use a beta version of TB3. The main candidates at the moment are KMail and the Opera mail client. I know little about the latter although I browse with Opera extensively, and not much more about Kmail. There are also other considerations which I won’t go into here (integration with calendars and tasks, syncing with a PDA and so on). Put as straightforwardly as possible, my question is:
What are the experiences around here of using KMail and/or Opera with IMAP, especially with GMail’s slightly quirky implementation of it? What would you recommend? I’m leaning heavily towards KMail because of its KContact integration and the possibility of using eGroupware for various purposes but would like advice before I leap. I could, of course, also wait for TB3 and make do with TB2 as under 11.1, for now…
Surprisingly, I don’t think there is a good email client. KMail is working towards integrating akonadi, but until that is completed there are a lot of bugs that will likely remain. I haven’t used Opera mail in a years, but I was unhappy enough with it to try out other alternatives.
On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:06:02 +0000, gminnerup wrote:
> So I thought I’d take the opportunity of the switch to openSUSE 11.2
> (64bit) to cast around for a new solution, especially as I’m not keen to
> use a beta version of TB3. The main candidates at the moment are KMail
> and the Opera mail client. I know little about the latter although I
> browse with Opera extensively, and not much more about Kmail. There are
> also other considerations which I won’t go into here (integration with
> calendars and tasks, syncing with a PDA and so on). Put as
> straightforwardly as possible, my question is: What are the experiences
> around here of using KMail and/or Opera with IMAP, especially with
> GMail’s slightly quirky implementation of it? What would you recommend?
Kmail is just great.
It only has one small defect (dunno if this is now completey corrected in
the newer versions) that is HMTL rendering (not for displaying but
creating, forwarding and replying e-mails). Under kde 3.5.x HTML support
was just terrible so I had to switch to Thunderbird.
As for Opera mail, I find it a bit limited on its options, configuration
and setup. Also, IIRC, it also has a very litte support for html e-mails.
So, if you are using kde and do not care about html formatting, just go
with KMail. You will find it has all the features you can think about…
and many more 
Greetings,
–
Camaleón
On 2009-11-27, gminnerup <gminnerup@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> I’m not planning to start a flame war here, honest, just looking for
> straightforward advice. I am using Gmail as my main service but also
> pull in mail from some other servers via pop3 to my Gmail account, as
> well as log in to my workplace’s Exchange server (spit) via IMAP, and
> copy mail from there to my Gmail account with a filter.
And your company allows that? Given Gmails reputation with privacy, we’ve
even banned the use of Gmail from inside the company.
<snipped some>
> would you recommend? I’m leaning heavily towards KMail because of its
> KContact integration and the possibility of using eGroupware for various
> purposes but would like advice before I leap. I could, of course, also
> wait for TB3 and make do with TB2 as under 11.1, for now…
Been using Kmail since longer than I care to rember, and it’s allways been a
good little client.
–
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.
Thanks for that, but I take it this is based on Kmail running under KDE 3.5? I don’t use HTML in email myself but of course often have to reply to it, so it would be good to know that this doesn’t persist under KDE4.
Well they allow IMAP access from outside so once the messages are in my desktop client they don’t know where they go next. Try banning Gmail access at a university;)
I take that as a vote in favour then…
On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:36:01 +0000, gminnerup wrote:
> Thanks for that, but I take it this is based on Kmail running under KDE
> 3.5?
Yes, I was talking about kmail in kde 3.5.x series. Dunno about the html
support under kmail in kde 4.3.x series.
> I don’t use HTML in email myself but of course often have to reply
> to it, so it would be good to know that this doesn’t persist under KDE4.
There was no problem for replying to html based e-mails. Just the
original formatting of the messages gost completely lost.
The other problem was about inserting “inner” links, that was not
possible at all. Neither embedded images was available.
If html formatting is not a big deal, just go with kmail.
Greetings,
–
Camaleón
I guess I’m the odd one out, but I’ve been using Evolution as my mail client on 11.1 / GNOME for years and it does the trick for me. One caveat is that I am running a trial of Evolution on 11.2 with KDE, rather than GNOME and while it’s working there are some oddities (some icons are missing).
Thanks, will give it a whirl. With IMAP it’s low risk…
Are you using it with IMAP? If so, do you also find it annoyingly slow? And is it possible now to reorder the local folders?