[charlesz]

For what it's worth, I have been using Outlook for Mac for about a year now and have really enjoyed it. Categorizing emails by folder is, well, what Outlook has always done well and search is surprisingly good.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I don't need any glitz and glam in my email client. I just want it to work and show me the email I want to see when I want to see it.

[616c]

It's all fun and games until you mirror the IMAP folder structure (what you sync with server) with local folders, break your Mac, and then import them into a new Mac and have to keep it all straight.

Or you have to make a PST export on a Mac and do it on a PC? Given my job, I am relieved but terrified I have not even had to worry about it. I just looked it up and chuckled. Not a surprise this will screw you.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-m...

Again, I said this before in another thread and stood in the middle of a minor flame. All email clients suck more than mutt.

Do I love mutt? Not so much. But the developers have the serenity to accept that which they cannot change, and that the whole charade blows. (Does a day go by where we do not pounce on those who propose secure email, as a protocol and system? Forget the clients even.) That, and I have low self-esteem and relate to people who poke fun at themselves for sucking a little less since the beginning. [0]

To relate it to a real technical issue. Mutt tries to be as nothing as possible, in terms of feature set and use case, while Outlook/Thunderbird/fat clients try to be everything.

Someone likened Outlook to Emacs (which I love ironically), which I would say is true with a caveat. Something as intimate as correspondence and personal communication programming needs to be powerfully extensible and customizable, and none of the fat clients have good interfaces for that. Not even mutt does easily, and this is the core of the problem.

Show me a world where everyone uses the same ink, pen, and paper to draft dead tree letters in the exactly style and preference and we can find an email that does not suck.

(Hint: there never was one and never will be! Let the downvotes descend upon me!)

[0] http://www.mutt.org/ I pray they never change this beautiful site and its header.

[andrey_utkin]

Greg Kroah-Hartman told me on LKML: "try mutt, you won't regret". I did try, and I don't regret indeed - I migrated to it :)

[616c]

Well, certainly he would agree. MS devs who needed to patch the Linux kernel could not even get Outlook to do git-patch properly, as the old Linus anecdote went.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9814276/git-patch-file-at...

[calgoo]

Sounds like you want Lotus Notes :) I actually wish someone would recreate something similar.

[616c]

So did they. I think its called LibreOffice now? Haha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Symphony

[snuxoll]

You're not the only one, I just migrated my email from Outlook.com to a self-hosted Novell GroupWise install (cheaper than paying Office 365 or Google Apps fees every month for eternity for three mailboxes for my family, no ads and data stays in my control) - so far I've been really happy with the desktop client and just how much I'm able to customize it. Sure, it's not super pretty, but it's not the worst.

Too many 'modern' email clients try too hard to create a new workflow for email, I get an email, I read it - if I care about it I file it away in a folder or flag it for follow-up (at which point it will show in my tasklist in GW regardless of where I move the item), if I don't care about it I throw it in the trash.