| From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:52:21 -0500 | I'm beginning to like Thunderbird. It replaces fetchmail, procmail, sendmail, | mutt, and vim for mailing. I miss vim, though. I'm interested in improving my email routines. I spend a lot of time with email so any improvement would be useful. So: what do you use? Why? Here's my answer. It is not a recommendationo. Most of us in this household use Alpine. Thats a venerable text-based-GUI mail user agent. I've been using Pine/Alpine since the early 1990s (when I switched from Berkeley mail (like mailx on Linux)). As you can tell, I'm quite conservative. I used to say that I changed MUAs every decade, but I'm behind now. Why do I like and stay with Pine? - inertia - modest subset of EMACS keystrokes - stable but well-maintained - works well through SSH - I'm very comfortable with it - has most features that I know that I want. - Alpine does not hold my mail hostage: ordinary UNIX text tools can get at it. (Alpine supports various formats but I use mbox.) Molly (my wife) uses Thunderbird. - she's used to WIMP GUIs - she does not use any advanced features - dislikes and avoids updates Thunderbird: - seems attractive - was busted by a Ubuntu update that I had to diagnose and back out of. I pinned the version of Thunderbird and the library at fault. Nothing said by Ubuntu folks convinces me that it is safe to unpin (archived mail is very important). - I don't know how to export the Thunderbird mail archives (but I haven't put my mind to the problem) - future looks precarious. Mozilla seems to have cut the Thunderbird project loose GMail: - seems to be taking over the world - I'm sometimes forced to use it. - runs well on smart phones - someone else does the maintenance - But: I want control over my mail. I don't want it in the cloud. I don't want it to go through Google's hands (we run our own mailserver). - I want painless offline access to mail archives