blog: Found a New Email Client

I've been an uncomfortable user of Mozilla Thunderbird for some time now. Ever since switching to Linux, I've been see-sawing between Thunderbird and Evolution every few months.

Evolution I didn't like because of evolution-data-server, which forced me into the command line before I was OK with that. And Thunderbird, well...

I live in a world of plain text. My ideal desktop, which is, happily, very close to what I have set up, consists of three programming language interpreters. The first would be Bash; the second, markup (HTML, CSS, and Javascript), the third, emacs-lisp.

I have most of my digital things living inside these three worlds. In each, I handle multiple instances of the interpreter; I run GNU Screen to handle an arbitrary number of Bash shells, use Firefox's tabbed browsing to handle as many HTML documents as I need, and Emacs, of course, uses the buffer abstraction to make dealing with huge numbers¹ of documents trivial.

In addition, I can mix-and-match between these interfaces trivially. I use emacsclient to get text in and out of Emacs from the shell, and the It's All Text Firefox extension to get text into Emacs from textareas. Likewise, I keep a bookmark to file:///tmp/firefox into which I pipe information from the shell, or simply append to using Emacs. The setup is consistent, and effective; for any text I get into Emacs, for file or service management I'm in the shell, and for the world of markup, I'm in Firefox.

Unfortunately, Thunderbird sticks out like a sore thumb. I can't tell you the number of times I've pressed C-p to try and go the previous line, only to have Thunderbird bring up a print dialog box (which, of course, eats my next couple words). Getting text in or from an email involves crude copypasting, with lost formatting and, worse, semantics, especially when line breaks are involved. In addition, my other user interfaces - Firefox, Bash and Emacs - all have heavy keyboard use; I use keyconfig in Firefox, and the other two are completely keyboard-based. Thunderbird is an unpleasant and clashing contrast.

So, I've been in the market for a new email client. I tried mutt for some time earlier this year, but ultimately couldn't learn it; now that I've had some more experience with Emacs it may be worth a try. Of course, in the same Emacs vein there is also Gnus, but I am worried about performance - I have well over a gigabyte of mail that I need to be able to search through, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to have the rest of my editing environment frozen or unusably slow while a search was ongoing. There is a third issue; I like being able to switch between applications by hitting my ratpoison modifier key twice in quick succession. Not being able to switch in this way between my text editor and my mail would be unpleasant, so I'd rather have an external application.

After significant soul-searching² yesterday, I found that there was one more mail client I hadn't heard of, but sounded pretty good: Sylpheed-claws, or as it's know known, Claws Mail. While GUI-based, it is fast, and lightweight, in the way that Thunderbird isn't. Soon after installation, I found that the version in Ubuntu's repositories is bug-ridden (don't use it!). It got segfaults just for connecting to an SMTP server with an invalid certificate. I installed with the upstream packages³ instead, and that bug was gone.

I'm impressed with Claws Mail, and if there's anyone else looking for a good, UNIXy mail client that is a step up interface-wise from the terminal, I'd highly recommend this. That's not to say it was flawless. While a Python script for converting Thunderbird mailboxes is provided, it did something very bad indeed - it seemed to work, without actually totally working. I didn't notice for about a day that a lot of mail was missing, while some tiny mail messages were 6+ MB - apparently, they weren't split properly in the mbox file. I still haven't got that resolved, but fortunately it's all just archival mail, and I have time to sort it out.

Claws Mail has what I would describe as a powerful interface. It's heavily keyboard-based, and while not as extensible as Firefox, has a plugin API that is apparently decent enough, seeing as there are a good number of plugins for it. Even better, it allows you to use an external HTML browser for HTML email, and - this is important - an external editor. I've configured it for emacsclient, of course, and now I can write my email in emacs and let Claws Mail pipe it back into the message.

Besides the mail script mishandling, the other thing that has turned me off about Claws Mail is it's heavy use of dialogs. For dialog boxes, they're pretty well-designed, but dialog boxes are just evil to start with. I recognize that not every app can be Emacs, though. In all, it's a solid mail client that fills a rather large void between terminal client and Thunderbird for the GTK+ environment⁴.