In search of a good mailer

Dear Lazyweb,

in the 10 or so hours i have available for Fedora and Red Hat business a week, it seems i spend about five of them wrestling with Zimbra to go through mailing list traffic. I've noticed a bunch of personal emails have gotten lost in the stream. It's obvious i need a better tool to work with. I'm sure many of you have your own personal favorite email reader, which you would just love to rave about. I'm open for something new, provided it can do the following.

I need something that can filter and process email *fast*. Whether it has some magic code that enables it to do IMAP at lightening speed, or maintains a local cache and pushes updates to IMAP in the background, i don't care, so long as it is fast.

I need the ability to label emails with more than one label at a time. This is important for two reasons. One, i label things with Todo and Priority flags based on filters. Two, conversations can cross mailing lists, i want a single thread to have two labels.

Finally, i need the ability to view a discussion by thread, and not just as a series of single emails. Zimbra is really bad at this, and evolution is only marginally better. Unfortunately, either working with the Zimbra web client or the Zimbra connector for Evolution are both recipes for disaster.

As extra credit, any scriptability in Python is definitely worth some serious extra credit.

Any recommendations?

3 flames:

initcrash zei

"all mail clients suck, but mutt sucks less"
i was really sceptical of the whole console application thing, but after developing a really strong hatered against evolution (just try to use a search folder with a custom expression - good luck!)
also workst really great in tandem with "offlineimap"
you won't find _any_ faster or more stable mailer.
and of course its scriptable with any language of your choice.

toto zei

I really love gmail and even if is a web client it offers all the functionalities you are looking for!

Yankee zei

unfortunately, i'm not allowed to use gmail at work for work related email. i've been using it for years, and it lets me keep all my fedora related stuff organised, but not the work related stuff involving fedora.

i've been working with mutt and offline map lately. just using 'limit' and having the POS zimbra just dump all my mail in one folder has made life really easy.