I’m starting to get really cheesed off with mail clients.
I’ve been using KMail for some time, and I love it. It does everything I want it to (well, almost – virtual folders would be fantastic, but I hear rumours that they are on their way…). Unfortunately, my KDE 4 setup first of all decided it didn’t want to run any KDE 3 apps, and when it changed its mind KMail just stopped working. It wouldn’t do anything that involved talking to a mail server (including setting up an account, since that involves checking the capabilities of the SMTP server).
I went for mutt for a while (which was what I used when I was a console junkie). But I’m addicted to GUIs now, and mutt didn’t understand KMail’s directory structure. And I didn’t have anything to tell me if a folder other than the main inbox had email in it.
Currently, I have a dovecot IMAP server running. This works quite well in that there are no directory structure problems. A bit of procmailing brings back the filtering I love so much (although I have to run fetchmail manually each login as KDE 4 doesn’t seem to support autostarting apps by symlinking them from the Autostart directory).
I decided to go with Mailody. On the whole, it’s quite good. I like a lot of the interface. I have a few gripes: next-unread doesn’t, in fact, go to the next unread message. It scrolls down the current message. Only when you are at the end of the current message does it skip to the next unread message. This is quite irritating on things like kde-commits.
Not only that, but it occasionally tells me “the SMTP server does not support authentication” when I try to send an email (this is nonsense – the SMTP server requires authentication). The solution is to save the message, close Mailody, open it again and re-send it.
Oh, and Mailody only supports one account, so I’m back to webmail for my university account.
“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” -the creator of mutt, circa 1995
[edit] It’s KMail from KDE 3 that’s decided to stop working, not KMail from KDE 4 [/edit]
return EWTF; 
10th February 2008 at 1:18 pm |
I think the autostart thingy is already solved in 4.0.1 or trunk, but an alternative I’ve been using since 4.0.0 is putting .desktop files on ~/.kde4/share/autostart, and that works.
For example here’s my ~/.kde4/share/autostart/kmix.desktop :
[Desktop Entry]
Exec[$e]=kmix
Type=Application
StartupNotify=false
10th February 2008 at 1:51 pm |
Hi Alex,
I’d ask you to give KMail4 a chance. It is receiving a lot of love the past couple of weeks. Please come into #kontact if you have problems
10th February 2008 at 3:47 pm |
Well, I don’t know whats wrong with your kde4 setup but I’m running the new kontact/kmail without any problems. It uses the structure and rules from kde3 kmail. My accounts include one “imaps” and three “pop”.
I also needed to symlink some progs into Autostart a while ago which worked perfectly.
Seems that your kde4 setup is borked somehow or (what I did) just clean out the settings for once and let kde4 create new ones. After that recreation process most problems were gone and I copied over my maildata and some other data stuff but avoided old config files as much as possible.
greetings
10th February 2008 at 11:24 pm |
Mutt can show which mailboxes have new mail. Just use ‘mailboxes’ in the muttrc.
10th February 2008 at 11:44 pm |
@Allen Winter, drizzt
I should probably point out that it’s KMail from KDE 3 that decided to stop working (goodness knows why). I was intending to give KMail from KDE 4 a try when was a bit more stable – given your comments, I’ll try it sooner rather than later.
@bkor
I realise mutt is almost infinitely configurable, and it’s possible to set it up just perfectly. It’s just I don’t have infinite time to figure out how to do so…
11th February 2008 at 12:03 am |
[…] Mail clients I’m starting to get really cheesed off with mail clients. I’ve been using KMail for some time, and I love […] […]
11th February 2008 at 12:53 pm |
Hey, the Dovecot IMAP server supports Sieve filtering. In case you didn’t know. I have Horde set up for when I need webmail access, and I use Horde’s filtering module to create and manage the Sieve scripts. Works brilliantly.
11th February 2008 at 2:44 pm |
I’m a happy kmail user in my KDE4 desktop.
I run the latest released 3.x version of kmail & kontact without much of a problem. So it *can* be done 🙂
Good luck!
13th February 2008 at 9:05 pm |
let him use mailody 😉 Don’t give any tips / try to convince him to use KMail 4.
21st March 2008 at 6:29 pm |
does anyone knows if there is any other information about this subject in other languages?
14th April 2008 at 6:42 pm |
Hi,
Kmai4 is only avalaible in svn or i miss something ?