I finally got so damn annoyed at IMAP clients two days ago that I started writing my own using the JavaMail and SWT as a frontend (so it will actually be snappy). I had been using Outlook Express (which disgusts me). I'll let you guys know when I get it basically working. Right now I'm using the IE renderer from inside of SWT to display the messages, but I believe they have wrappers for Gecko too, so it should work on non-Windows pretty decently .... I'm actually modelling the app a lot after Mail on OS X (like the way they do colored/layer replies and grouped folders, like a single INBOX that you can view all of your INBOXes together in open the node and view each account separately).

Wow, the world could use a "better" IMAP client. If I could request any one feature, I want full-text searching. I'm perfectly willing to "sync" with the IMAP server once in a while and let it run for a few hours to download everything if I can then get fast, local searching.

You know that IMAP servers have the ability to do full text searches, right? I do it all the time with Pine.

Well, the cheap IMAP servers (including the U.W. IMAP daemon that we run here) don't have any acceleration structures. Searching is O(N). Ideally, I'd like to have a copy of everything on my IMAP server, stored locally, with Google-style fast queries. And, by the time you've done that, you've also got a good offline mail client.

Well, the cheap IMAP servers (including the U.W. IMAP daemon that we run here) don't have any acceleration structures.

Cyrus is free. Can you get any cheaper than that? The maintainer claimed to me today in a meeting that searching is fast.

Apple mail indexes every downloaded email for searching using their vtwin engine. It's very good and very fast. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the rest of the application.

Hey Patrick...

Try looking at these:

i.Scribe (or InScribe for more features): http://www.memecode.com/index.php
TheBat! http://www.ritlabs.com - important: IMAP4 (I use this client, but with POP3 accounts)

ABout.com lists a load of email clients... One weekend I went through nearly all of them. Including Eudora. Man, what a piece of garbage. So many versions latr and they've continued to build on such a weak foundation. Qualcomm is an IP company lacking any merit whatsoever in my opinion. It was a sad state of affairs for email clients. I didn't like Mulberry. POcomail looked very promising but I had HUGE issues with its skins. Taste issues. And some configuring options were a PITA.

I had already been using TheBat, but there were just a couple of small little things bugging me (its editor is currently free-carat - pretty powerful, but I wanted a fixes carat editor). The new betas offer a new optional editor and more features are coming. It doesn't have an equal as far as I'm concerned.

Scribe I know of because I was using a little paint program from the same author called iMage. Ever try finding a good (any?) bitmap (1-8bit CLUT bitmaps) editing program for wndows? I do mean something that isn't a complete pile of rubbish like MS Paint. I found only iMage and Promotion which are the only programs that come anywhere close to DPaint and Brilliance on the Amiga.


Bruno