Good Email for Ubuntu

[hsfrey]

I'm considering making the switch from Win XP to Linux, probably Ubuntu.

I already use FireFox and OpenOffice which should work on Linux, but I'm stuck for an email server to replace Outlook Express. Of course, MS has stopped supporting OE.

I'd be willing to use a desktop or online email client, but I can't find any which gives me all the options of OE I can't do without, to wit:

1. Button to Send/Receive Now (rather than only on schedule);
2. Effective Spam filter like Cloudmark Desktop;
3. Ability to Edit HTML source of outgoing emails, and preview appearance .

I've looked at Thunderbird and Gmail, and neither measures up.

I welcome suggestions.

BTW, I'm also looking for a good programming text editor to replace EditPlus. Something simple. I'm not willing to drink the kool-aid and go emacs or vi.

Thanks!

[MikeTbob]

I use Evolution email, it's almost as feature rich as Outlook itself.
Evolution

[hsfrey]

Thanks Mike:

I can't test it since I don't have Ubuntu installed yet. And I don't want to install it till I know I can get the email functionality I want.

Does Evolution have the 3 things I'm having trouble finding?

1. Button to Send/Receive Now (rather than only on schedule);
2. Effective Spam filter like Cloudmark Desktop;
3. Ability to Edit HTML source of outgoing emails, and preview appearance .

It looks like it can add HTML elements with menus, but I don't see where it lets you actually edit existing HTML.

[MikeTbob]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by editting the existing HTML...I know you create an email in HTML format. (screenshot below)

[hsfrey]

Mike:

I often copy webpages to re-post on my listserver. They usually need to be cleaned up. Many attributes can't be changed by just WYSIWYG editing the text in the email client - you have to go to the HTML to, for instance, delete tables, change h1 to h3, etc.

This is easy to do with OE, since you can swap back and forth between editing either the page as it appears, or the HTML source.

If I couldn't do this in the email client, I'd have to copy the HTML into an editor, like EditPlus, edit it there, and then try to get that into the email. If I just pasted it in, I'd get an email showing all the HTML markup.

[Kornfan71]

You could try Mozilla Thunderbird. It's available in the Ubuntu repos, and you can install it right now in XP to try it out. The versions for Linux vs Windows are nearly identical.

[hsfrey]

I don't see where Thunderbird allows me to edit the HTML source.

Maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

Do you know how to do that in Thunderbird?

What's a good alternative to Cloudmark for strong Spam filtering in Thunderbird?

[Kornfan71]

IMO, Thunderbird's built-in spam filter does quite well. Sometimes it picks up on spam right away, other times you need to mark something as spam. When you do the latter, Thunderbird learns more about what you consider to be spam, and then adapts its filter to your needs.

As far as HTML editing, go to Insert >> HTML... while writing a message.
You can highlight text that you want to edit the HTML of, then go to the same place. I hope that was what you needed.

[hsfrey]

Fantastic!

That's exactly what I was looking for!

I was looking for words like 'source', 'edit', 'view', etc., but, OK, I guess 'insert' makes some sense too.

Now I have no excuse not to switch to Thunderbird!

Thanks!

[MikeTbob]

Did you check out Evolution? I don't send HTML emails but I was wondering if you checked it out, to see if it does or not. I can't imagine that Thunderbird would have this function and Evolutiion doesn't.