[Discuss] FOSS email that doesn't suck -- does such a thing exist?

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

I've spent a fair bit of time over the past few days trying to find a
FOSS email program that isn't a steaming pile. So far? No luck.

I've long since given up on Thunderbird. I know that many swear by it.
Just as many swear at it. Thunderbird has some fundamentally broken
design flaws that it inherited from the Netscape code base. Notable
among these are that it is written largely in lazy C++ and that it uses
databases for mail summaries instead of JWZ's fast, light, robust code
and caches. Never mind that the UI has been a train wreck since version 3.

Putting a pretty coat of paint on a shoddy framework won't make the
building hold up any better. I'm pointing my finger at Postbox and
Eudora OSE. Some nice enhancements there but enhancement is not the same
as improvement.

I've been using Claws Mail for a while. It has some good ideas, sure.
It's what Thunderbird could have been and is often touted as a viable
alternative to T-bird's bloat. Except that it's worse. Despite the
claims, Claws Mail is not cross platform. It requires GTK+ which isn't
available on Macintosh unless you compile it yourself. The build system
for Windows requires Mingwin but won't work on Windows with either MinGW
or Cygwin due to hard-coded defines in the sources so it has to be
cross-compiled on Debian or Ubuntu. Some plugins that work on Linux
don't work on Macintosh; some plugins that work on Linux and Macintosh
don't work on Windows; some plugins for the Windows version don't work
on anything else. The nature of the build system makes it extremely
difficult to fix broken plugins. And the UI is worse than Thunderbird's
with modal dialogs appearing under interface panels and blocking the UI
and just general ugliness.

I gave Sylpheed a spin today. Claws Mail started life as Sylpheed's
development branch before becoming an independent fork. Sylpheed is
nice. Much better UI than either CM or Thunderbird. But it has a couple
of deal-breakers. The Action mechanism -- a means of running external
programs against Sylpheed folders -- doesn't work on Windows. Filtering
rules cannot use IMAP folders as targets.

Evolution... is awful. It's not an email client. It's groupware. Which
means it's not about making email reading a pleasant experience. It's
about checking off bullet lists assembled by a committee with no clue
about mail handling. Never mind that it isn't actually portable, either.
I used Evolution for a while at my previous gig until I figured out how
to get my mail off of the Exchange and into something usable. It's also
part of Gnome which makes it not portable across operating systems.

I've tried Mulberry and Mahogany in the past but I found them to be
missing critical features. One of the two can't handle more than one
mail account at a time; the other has no SSL wrapping of POP or IMAP
connections.

I'm dubiously eying Zimbra Desktop. It comes pre-loaded with the
groupware stigma. I'm not sure if I'm even going to try to install it.

I ask all of you: is there a FOSS mail program that's genuinely
cross-platform, handles multiple mail accounts elegantly including
cross-account message filtering, and doesn't suck mud through a straw?

-- 
Rich P.