Monthly Archives: July 2012

Which email client for Linux?

Linux, ,

I've been a thunderbird user since firefox was named firebird. I was happy with it, I like the way you can easily search over all accounts, how you can archive messages in folders by year by simply hitting the "a" key, I like the threads and even the "gmail" conversations extension even if I don't use it.

One problem with thunderbird is it became unusable when I added an old account which was accumulating mail up to over 170k messages. I know 170k messages is not realistic and no one should have so many messages in inbox but still this made me look for something better.

First let's see what I'm looking for in an email client:

  1. Easy global search like thunderbird
  2. Archive folders and 1 key hit like thudnerbird 🙂
  3. Easy to mark messages as Spam/Junk with a single key hit, would be great to be able to mark multiple messages with a single key ( thunderbird doesn't have this )
  4. Message threads
  5. And last but not least, be able to handle a lot of messages in a folder, don't have to be super fast but at least it shouldn't lock

Here's what I tested so far:

Evolution

This was a nice surprise.
Pro: Evolution downloaded 87k message headers in just a few seconds and had no problems with selecting all and moving around.
Cons:

  • No archives
  • It has global search but it's a bit harder to access
  • Harder junk marking ( shift+ctrl+j instead of just j )
  • Always asks if I want to accept a certificate that's not issued for the exact domain of my email server ( at startup )

    • I could accept all the cons except for the lack of archiving.
    Anyone knows of a plugin that does archiving like thunderbird ? Please let me know!

    Kmail

    Becomes almost unusable with a big inbox ( 87k), hard to select all messages

    Pro: message list groups messages by year ( but this still doesn't beat yearly archives )
    Cons:

    • very slow with a lot of messages, takes a lot of time to fetch message headers
    • adding an account doesn't show it immediately in the accounts list, unless you restart kmail
    • no archives
    • no keyboard shortcut for junk/spam marking ( seriously ???)
    • global search harder to access

    sylpheed

    Pro: It's fast an lightweight but that also means it lacks what I want
    Cons:

    • No archiving
    • No keybboard shortcut for marking junk mail
    • No global search

    Conclusion: there's no client that meets all my needs so I'm going to have to stay with Thunderbird and just use evolution when I want to open a big folder.

    What email client are you using ?

    MacOSX command line tricks

    MacOSX, , , , ,

    Here's a list of MacOSX commands I had to search for all over the internet because I needed to use them lately and I'm sure I'm going to forget since I'm not a big OSX user. So here they are for when I'll need them again ... 🙂

    In linux when you want to know which ports are opened and what applications listen on those ports you use netstat -lnp
    In MacOSX you get the listening ports with this:

    1.  

    Want to see what system call am application is making use strace, for MacOSX thats:

    1.  

    Here's how to install an application that comes packaged in a .dmg:

    1.  

    uninstall a package

    1. span style="color: #ff0000;">'\n' '\0'

    pidof required by some mysql scripts

    1. span style="color: #ff0000;">"{if (\$5==\"$1\") print \$1}";
    2.  

    remount with noatime

    1.  

    More to come ...