Comparison of mail clients

[Jem Berkes]

My 2 cents.

There's also my JBMail, http://jbmail.pc-tools.net/
Not freeware, but trialware. Trialware meaning, you don't have to pay for
it (doesn't expire) but the free version is limited to one account.

Three main reasons for JBMail: (1) portability, the whole thing is under 1
MByte, standalone, and can be run directly rather than requiring an
installation. You can run it directly off a CD, USB drive, or diskette. (2)
It reads the mail directly from a POP3 mailbox instead of downloading
locally, so mail remains on the POP3 server. Because of this it can also be
used in conjunction with another mail client, perhaps for screening bad
mail or handling suspicious mails. (3) Security: full support for SSL/TLS
encrypted POP3 and SMTP connections, SSH-style certificate checking.
Further, all HTML is stripped to harmless plain text and scripts/images
will never be executed. Attachments are decoded on demand only, not decoded
in advance so there is no accidental execution risk. Even Pine isn't so
secure.

Version 3.3, which should be ready around December/January, should have
much improved spam filtering capabilities.

 

[Golliwocky]

Antonio Donatiellowrote:

HI,
I'm one of the two authors of Pimmy.

Pimmy 3.5 is very stable and no crash bugs were reported from our users on
all Windows versions (9x... XP).

Indeed. All reports I've read so far are very positive. Good work!

We work hard for stability and stress Pimmy with massive and multiple
downloads before releasing a new version. Pimmy is multithreaded and can
download messages from all accounts at the same moment. We need stability
for this purpose

Pimmy uses file system to store folder and emails. Each Pimmy folder has a
corrispondent disk folder and each singular email is stored in a single
eml file. In such a way is extremely difficult to lose emails and is quite
impossible to lose a folder.


Nice. This is one advantage over the common mbox format which is one

massive file which risks corruption. However, to be fair, the mbox
format is very widespread and stable enough in its history. This is
one factor in its favour.

This file oriented structure is also useful, I think, for incremental backup

Another plus point!

Pimmy 3.5 has a *very very* powerful filtering system.

You can manage complex rules on headers, body, attachment names, use regex,
and/or operators in any combination (e.g. "subject is x and (from is y or
from is z) and body contains w"). Pimmy automatically downloads the body
message if and only if a rule asks for the body. See the manual for more
details.

Great. I'm very impressed by the regex support etc. as I'm used to
having it in my mail client since ages ago. So far so good. However,
what about the crucial security aspect? Does Pimmy provide the user
with PGP/GnuPGP encryption support? How about secure mail retrieval
as in SSL? These features are absolutely necessary to a road warrior
who travels regularly and logs in to his mail provider from all over
the world. I would say that especially for a portable mail program
like Pimmy, security features should rank high among the list of
abilities.

I cannot stress enough how important security is to anyone who moves
from place to place. Unfortunately, I did not see Pimmy offering any
measures in this area the last time I tried it. I also did not find
any IMAP support, which, IMO is nearly as important to a traveller as
security.

If I'm wrong in any part of my evaluation, please correct me.
Otherwise, I'd encourage you to consider my comments and possibly
incorporate them into your to-do list.

Regards,

* Posted via http://www.sixfiles.com/forum

 

[Antonio Donatiello]

However, to be fair, the mbox
format is very widespread and stable enough in its history. This is
one factor in its favour.

Mbox file has *efficiency* issue: if you have mbox with 10,000 emails and
want to delete one of the message you have to rewrite the entire file. So
some programs, Thunderbird for example, has an index file in association
with mbox.

But index file is not mbox standard and so if you delete a message (index
file is updated but mbox file is not) and open mbox with another program
you will get also the deleted message. Not a big problem, a pack operation
is sufficient.

Pimmy 4 will support mbox file for reading and import operation. It will be
possibile open "at fly" a(n) mbox file in our message list window.

Does Pimmy provide the user with PGP/GnuPGP encryption support?

No. Pimmy 3.5 does not support PGP and this feature is not planned at this
moment.

How about secure mail retrieval as in SSL?

Pimmy 3.5 does not support SSL but Pimmy 4 will do, I think in beta 2.

I cannot stress enough how important security is to anyone who moves
from place to place. Unfortunately, I did not see Pimmy offering any
measures in this area the last time I tried it. I also did not find
any IMAP support, which, IMO is nearly as important to a traveller as
security.

We have already developed IMAP support and it will be released in Pimmy 4
beta 1.

Otherwise, I'd encourage you to consider my comments and possibly
incorporate them into your to-do list.

Your considerations are welcome. PGP support is in our to-do list but I
have *incremented* its requests counter

Thank you very much.

 

[Auntie Em]

Recently switched over from OE to Thunderbird ,also have downloaded
Eudora 6.1 (sponsored).
Would you please give your opinions regarding the advantages and disadv
of these and other clients like Pegasus,Pocomail or others.
Would you suggest a website where results of such comparison have been
shown.
The Jan 2004 issue of PCW compared diff mail clients and put Pocomail on
top with Eudora and Pegasus behind.Tb was not there in the top three but
that was v 0.2( I guess).
Thanks in advance.

I like Calypso best of all.

Em
Be careful what you wish for....