Good email client to use with Dovecot?

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 14:11:45 +0100
Jochen Bern <Jochen.Bern at binect.de> wrote:

> On 11/17/2016 08:48 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> > When I use an email client, its purpose is as a window into my
> > Dovecot IMAP, and as a mechanism to reply to and send emails. I
> > don't do filtering or calendaring on my email client (filtering via
> > procmail direct to Dovecot).
> > 
> > What email clients are all of you using to look at your IMAP
> > email?  
> 
> Plaintext or HTML mails? 

I like the ability to see some sort of representation of the links in
incoming HTML email. I would never send HTML email.

> OpenPGP? 

I don't use that today, but probably will in the future.


> S/MIME? 

Not necessary.

> Do you like to see your
> e-mails arranged into threads, or just sorted by some property (be
> that sender, date, or whatever)? 

I could live without the ability to thread. It seems to not work right,
probably because of various senders' misuse. When I want to look at a
thread, I usually just sort on subject.

> What's your archiving system, many
> or few folders, flat or hierarchical? 

Archiving is achieved in my Dovecot Maildir tree. For fast moving
folders like INBOX and my local LUG (GoLUG), every year I move this
year's messages to, for instance, OLDFOLDERS->GoLUG->2015. I have
somewhere between 75 and 200 folders, and tend to go about 4 levels deep
in the hierarchy, although most of my most active folders are 1 level
down from the account itself. For backup, I use rsync to a backup
server, and back up the whole Dovecot tree.

> Do you work remote, 

Sometimes. Through a pinhole in my firewall, via dynamic dns.

> how good's
> the connection to the IMAP server, 

Varies.

> do you need the capability to work
> on a local cache while the server cannot be reached ("detached IMAP",
> I've seen it called)?

No. If I can't do email at a particular time, I'll go somewhere else
where I can.

> 
> I switched from tkRat (a.k.a. ratatosk) to Thunderbird when I had a
> need to do "detached IMAP" (and tkRat repeatedly trashed my entire
> INBOX when I tried).

Did the corruption happen when you messed with it to try to work
offline, or do you mean that usage during failure to connect caused
corruption? Did it corrupt the IMAP you were trying to connect to, or
just a cache? 

>  tkRat had interesting features (preselected
> primary archive folder per folder you're reading, "folders" that
> actually are views of a local database, minimalistic enough to bridge
> the distance with X11 instead of IMAP), but hasn't seen further
> development in ages.
> 
> With Thunderbird, 

Here's why I can't use Thunderbird:

[slitt at mydesk Maildir]$ find ~/mail/Maildir | wc -l
625262
[slitt at mydesk Maildir]$ find ~/mail/Maildir -type d | wc -l
1241
[slitt at mydesk Maildir]$ 

I have over 620K emails in over 1000 folders. This turns Thunderbird
into an all day affair, just to refresh its caches.

Thanks,
 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
November 2016 featured book: Quit Joblessness: Start Your Own Business
http://www.troubleshooters.com/startbiz