I have spent a bit of today playing with the various email clients on Linux today. I use GMail with IMAP for all of my email. Why you ask, especially when there are so many other options? Easy, convenience. I don’t have to set anything up, works with my phone, computers, TV, and then some. I also like how my calendar, contacts, and email are all in one place, and can be viewed, edited, or used from all of the devices I just listed above without having to install a single application. Convenience. I wanted to see how the desktop clients were going these days in regards to email so I played with Evolution, Kontact/KMail, and Thunderbird.

All 3 left a bad taste in my mouth. They all connected with GMail just fine, without having to do more than giving it my GMail address and password. Evolution was probably the fastest on the initial import of email out of the 3. KMail was by far the slowest. Evolution took about an hour, Thunderbird was about the same, and then there was KMail. It is now 19:00 and I started the KMail one at about 16:00, so almost 3 hours. Once KMail got up and running, you would hover over a message and a popup would display with information pertaining to the email. Everything was correct except for the body. The body was for an email in some other folder who knows where. Other than that, they all did what they are supposed to do with GMail.

Well how about with Google Calendar or GMail Contacts? Yeah, not so great. One would work great with contacts, but suck with the calendar, or one would work great with calendar or suck with the contacts, or one wouldn’t work with either. So, I have concluded thus far for me, that Mutt combined with a script or terminal command worked better than the GUI solutions. So I guess the Mutt slogan is 100% true then:

All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less

I just went in and did an apt-cache search gmail and this is what it told me:

Each red dot in that image signifies a GMail notification application. Well, it seems the Linux world has plenty of GMail notification applications and no GMail application. I think it is maybe time you stop being opportunistic with the notifiers. I wish I had some more time, as I would love for something like sparrow or Mailplane for Linux. If you want to be opportunistic, there you go. I think an application like either of those 2 would be great.

That’s all, just wanted to have a little fun today and it has been a while since I blogged, so I figured I would bother you all really quickly 🙂

EDIT: I Google’d mac gmail and realized they are as bad as Linux when it comes to the notifiers too. I didn’t Google windows gmail because they don’t matter anyways 🙂