Windows Email Client

Can anyone recommend a Windows email client?

We've been using Eudora for as long as I can remember, but it's been out of development for years and is starting to show its age. I tried Thunderbird, but was pretty much blown away by how horrendous its UI is.

Anyone have any experience with anything else?

13 thoughts on “Windows Email Client

    1. cleek

      not really comfortable with having Google, or anyone else host my stuff. plus, i have like 15 years of mail stored locally and i don’t want to maintain two mail databases.

      1. John Weiss

        Hmm. Sir Cleek, each to his own. I think that there’s a snakey way to port your database of emails to Google. You might enquire. Good luck and good hunting,

        JW

  1. Another Scott

    I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years (on Winders and OS X and Linux) and don’t have a problem with the UI. YMMV. What don’t you like about it? Have you tried a different theme? (Note that many aren’t compatible with TB 7.0.)

    (There are ways to use GMail with local storage – http://office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=768 – but it’s not ideal.)

    I turn off the Preview tab (F8) but otherwise haven’t customized TB much, myself.

    One thing I wish they would do is allow multi-row tabs…

    Otherwise, there aren’t too many choices any more because free/web clients killed them.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

    1. cleek

      “What don’t you like about it? ”

      just that top toolbar / menu / buttonbar is enough to make me wonder WTF the designers were thinking.


      img.

      1. Another Scott

        Ok. Granted, it’s a little non-standard, but it doesn’t bother me much. I do most of my stuff from the keyboard:

        F5 – check mail
        ctrl-n – write new message
        ctrl-r – reply to highlighted message
        ctrl-Enter – send message now
        alt-F4 – exit TB
        etc.

        Good luck.

        Cheers,
        Scott.

  2. mikej

    When I’ m not using gmail i still use mutt. Not an answer if you like active dev or a ui that does much.

    1. cleek

      well, i use earthlink’s web mail when i’m not home, but i really do not like web based email clients. i don’t like not owning the data. i don’t like not being able to search the raw data files. i don’t like having to rely on someone else to not lose the data. the features of any web mail client are all inferior to most desktop clients. etc..

      1. Rob Caldecott

        I once wrote an email client that we used in-house. It did POP3/SMTP and looked a lot like Outlook but had features like zipping attachments automatically before sending, etc.

        I even implemented a feature that reminded you if you forgot to add an attachment and the message body contained the word ‘attachment’ or ‘attached’. That feature was added in 2002 and GMail added it last year.

        It was an MFC app. Do you want me to build a copy and send it to you?

        1. Rob Caldecott

          BTW it uses mbox as the file format – one mbox per-folder. So importing messages was quite easy.

          People at my company loved it and were quite upset when we were acquired by a big US company who forced Outlook on us.

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