Comments on: Claws Mail vs. Thunderbird - A comparison

By: upendra

upendra — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:58:09 +0000

Using dillo to show html emails. I am on amd64 and claws-mail is 64bit, GTK+ 2.14.4 / GLib 2.18.2
Locale: C (charset: US-ASCII)
Operating System: Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r1 (x86_64)

I also have this problem when someone send email with .doc attachments

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:53:23 +0000

I run Claws in Ubuntu but I don’t experience any of the HTML problems you describe.
Which plugins are you running?

By: upendra

upendra — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:22:01 +0000

Hi Guys,

I am Claws-mail - email client user . Version I use is : version 3.6.1 on gentoo.

I am very much satisfied with the way claws-mail works for me - i use GPG and calender mostly. It is very fast. I have some issues with claws-mail -

1. vcalender plugin is not as good as thunderbird may be. does not show a sidepanel like the calender in thunderbird shows - don’t like vcalender plugin much.. can not import other calenders like my gmail calender.

2. I find it extremely annoying when I receive an email with html format or a doc attachment in it. It takes forever for claws-mail to download that email- eventually I have to kill claws-mail client and check that email on web interface for our email server. I delete that email from web interface because then if I re open claws-mail client it again takes forever to do anything with client, client is open but keeps on working on that email forever and I can not even browse through other folders or stop anything. I kill it.

I wonder if other users of claws-mail also have this issue..

Installed versions: 3.6.1(21:10:47 11/12/08)(crypt dillo doc gnome imap ldap session spell ssl xface -bogofilter -gnutls -ipv6 -kde -nntp -pda -spamassassin -startup-notification)

Thanks

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:26:39 +0000

I don’t remember with the version I used to compare but version 3.5 has a plugin that will give you the option to create an account to be used for RSS.
Personally I don’t use it, I prefer a separate reader.

By: Howard

Howard — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:01:59 +0000

What about RSS? Handling RSS in Thunderbird seems much more natural than using a web browser and is my preferred method of reading RSS. Does Claws Mail handle that?

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:09:47 +0000

David Russell says:
The reason Claws Mail is so fast is that it doesnât really do much.

Excuse me David, but you talk shit!
I guess that you haven’t tried Claws Mail.

Peter, a few enhancements to your comments…

You talk about ‘native support’ for GPG and anti-spam. Since the Claws Mail team maintains and ships these plugins the line between native support and non-native support is quite blurred, imo. The main difference is that you have to initially load a plugin. 8 plugins are packaged with and built at the same time
as Claws Mail, dependencies allowing, with 16 other plugins being packaged separately as ‘Extra Plugins’.

Archiving: You can also Lock messages. In addition to folder-specific Processing, you can set Pre-Processing rules, which are global and are run before Folder Processing rules.

Mail Listing (sic): You can activate the option ‘Reply button invokes mailing list reply’ so that replying to a mailing list message just does the ‘right thing’ without need the specific Mailing List submenu items.

Spam: You don’t have to install SpamAssassin on your machine, the SA plugin can communicate with a remote SA. Yes, SA is a bit slow, bogofilter is quicker and just as effective once it has been well trained.

Reading Email: you don’t need a plugin to be able to read HTML mail. The option ‘Render HTML messages as text’ will strip the tags from the html and display it as plaintext, respecting linebreaks and stuff.

You didn’t even mention the powerful Actions feature, which opens up many possibilities!

By: Lang

Lang — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:31:13 +0000

The spam issue was a breaker for me. I use IMAP exclusively and couldn’t find a way to easily replace the junk mail controls of Thunderbird. I like to try different programs, but seeing that even after blocking most spam at the server, about 1/2 of the mail that actually makes it through is spam and by this point Thunderbird catches about 90% of that.

I wish the junk mail controls were a little better. I’m all for the one tool for one job unix philosophy, but in this case I make the exception.

Nice write-up by the way.

By: zygfryd homonto

zygfryd homonto — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:29:58 +0000

David, where are you from ? what are you talking about ? you are not serious - are you ?

By: David Russell

David Russell — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 14:05:25 +0000

The reason Claws Mail is so fast is that it doesn’t really do much. I could write a tic-tac-toe program right now that will run faster than the one included in Gnome. That would be because it would be text-only, have a horrible interface, and lack most of the features people have come to expect. Much like Claws Mail actually.

By: Arun

Arun — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 10:22:51 +0000

Nice comparison. As you said CM is super-fast and i like it. However availability of “Extensions” for almost anything is a big plus for thunderbird.