I tried it but as you said - not easy to setup.

I went with Fetchmail, Postfix, Dovecot and Thunderbird

Looks like i'll be following you... back to TB

I looked at Cone which is the only other text emailer. Very fast,
easier to set up but i can't send - i've got a "novalidate-cert".

But having a look at TB on mozilla this afternoon it looks as if the
new version is going to have Muttator - addon vim keybindings.

Thought you may be interested if you haven't spotted it already.

Not that Thunderbird is a bad choice!

There are several good alternatives. The new Kmail based on QT4 is great. If you
want speed and flexibility, Claws is a great choice and it is GTK. Both Claws
and Kmail have many plugins to integrate with other programmes (Spamassassin or
Bogofilter for example). Kmail has full html support, but I am not sure about
Claws.

I was hoping to find an email client that had Vi or emacs keybindings
in order to speed up my response [and reduce time] to emails, along
with some way of saving important emails to disk drive. So far TB is
the only one that provides saving to disk through ImportExportTools.
Using the maildir format i was hoping some of the unix ones might have
what i was looking for. I tried claws but didn't like it. Balsa is one
not mentioned often and that is a nice layout... should be worthy of
the frequent package description phrase 'fits nicely into the ubuntu
desktop' (i find it rather irritating!).

As i said before TB with the plugin muttator will be what i'll end up
with. No one has ever said what they do with important emails that
they want to keep... I've no complaints about webmail googlemail -
just that i want to speed up response, gmail only allows 100 messages
per screen which is slow i find.

Found out this afternoon was Mr Shuttleworth uses for email...
Thunderbird - so why is evolution the default?

Found out this afternoon was Mr Shuttleworth uses for email...
Thunderbird - so why is evolution the default?

Evolution is the default because it is part of GNOME, the desktop environment
used by Ubuntu. The Canonical philosophy is not to re-invent the wheel, so as
far as possible they use KDE and GNOME as it is out of the box, adding as
necessary, but not removing.

The release schedule of Ubuntu is timed to coincide with GNOME updates. That is
how integral it is to Ubuntu.

I tried evolution for a while and it just seem unstable. It would hang,
it would run super slow, the filters were difficult, it doesnt handle
spam ... I just dont understand why anyone would use it - unless they
had to.

TB is THE way to go

It has never let me down. However, I like Kmail a lot and may
switch. It has some features lacking in Thunderbird.

I think that people want something that has a built in PIM like Outlook and are
drawn to Evolution for that reason. You can get some features in Thunderbird
with Calendar Add-on. I am not into time management as I am retired and my time
was managed all my work life. My rebellion in old age. Kmail integrates with
Kontact and

There is Spicebird which is still in beta for the more adventurous in need of a
bit more than email. It works with Google calendar.

Hi As a user of TB for some time now I like it, but if I wanted to
how can I take my current email files and convert or import back
to either Outlook express or the bigger Outlook?

Just copy them back to outlook. TB will just read them... evolution doesn't.

Ok, how? They are different format. In Outlook you have a file with
a .pst, in TB you have a full directory structure. If I copy the
directory structure from the TB subdirectories onto the Windows
Outlook area nothing happens. It looks to me like I need to use
export from TB into a data structure, then import that file or
files into Outlook. Nothing in the help of either covers it as
far as I can see.

I can only assume you are using POP rather than IMAP - if so haven't
you used the switch leave files on server. That would have made life
easy. The imported folders should be in a directory called outlook.sbd
in a funny named directory like pr4qpneu.default. Don't know where
your .pst comes from.

In TB imported files are at
thunderbird/profiles/pr4qpneu.default/mail/mail folders/local folders

kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail

alternatively use the ImportExportTools and you can export as mbox or html.

Failing that why not stay with TB [ver 3 just out and thus more up to
date than outlook] - i've just spent several days looking at different
mail clients and come back to TB.

Yes I use POP and keep my mail on my laptop. I like TB
and like the option of switching TB between $W and Linux. I would
just like to know how to keep the mail files I choose to keep if
I was to want to go back to either Outlook or Outlook Express.
Now if I can just figure out how to get my windows laptops on
our wireless network to see the printer attached to the PC with
Ubuntu I can then leave the Ubuntu up all the time. I would then
think about converting my laptop to the Ubuntu and get off of Vista.
I will keep trying, my next attempt will be to bring up
the Ubuntu system and play with cupsd. I have had people tell me
that out of the box they were able to have access to their printer.
I expect theirs is not a USB cable printer, mine is, and I understand
there may be a challenge with that.

Sorry i can't help further. Even if using POP if you ticked the box
"keep on server " you should just be able to do a fresh install of
Outlook and it'll download all emails. I gave up on windows two years
ago now. Even so just to keep a copy of your emails use the
ImportExportTools addon/plugin and you have a t least a copy. Looking
at your last message i see you use gmail so why not just use IMAP. I
thought without checking you used a provider that didn't offer IMAP -
if you'd used that email address for a good while you wouldn't want to
change perhaps.

IMAP is the way to go to be honest.

When i changed to googlemail two years ago i decided to use google on
webmail and just use TB to download and archive using
ImportExportTools. Mainly because as a teacher i was reading email on
a school machine or on one of my two at home.

Just recently due to the volume of email i've decided to go back to
TB. The amount of time it takes doing the bottom posting and editing
messages has led me to find out if it's possible to use an external
editor like Joe or Vim to edit emails to save time. It is and i'll be
doing a post in case anyone else is interested later this w/e.

Another reason for using IMAP which i forgot to mention is that if you
have a lot of mail - IMAP only downloads the headers and then
downloads the messgae when you read it. With POP it downloads the
whole message - when you only want to read several messages out of
umpteen you are using up quite a bit of your broadband allocation
unnecessarily.

Thank you for your help and comments. Just to recap (as this thread
has got quite long) i had wanted to use a text editor to speed up
answering emails and considered Mutt and Emacs. I had used Thunderbird
for sometime and liked the app. A text email client seemed the answer
but i wasn't that impressed by Mutt.

However, i'm not as knowledgeable as some and setting up Mutt was ok
but still involved quite a bit of work. I got it all working and did
appreciate your help.

Yesterday i came across a Thunderbird addon Muttador (still beta stage
- vi editor) and today came across a non-mozilla TB addon called
Exteditor...
http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=2
some v.clever person has developed an external editor addon instead of
the TB editor. It allows emacs, vi, joe, gedit or whatever to compose
emails. Should be of interest to anyone who wants to say goodbye to
the mouse while editing emails.

Just in case someone was interested.