Ok, so I installed Sylpheed, and I played with it. I run my own web/mail server, so I just leave whatever mail I receive on the server so that I can get it whenever I want it by IMAP. My local client already knows what it’s downloaded, so it’s not like I have to download the full 30+ megabytes of email every time. Sylpheed quite quickly downloaded the 4000+ messages that were on the server, and didn’t have a single problem displaying every single header in the inbox when it was done. Filtering messages was processed blisteringly fast and without error - other mail clients sometimes have issues with my filters - and making filters was easy. Navigating between folders was fast, quite frankly I can’t get over how fast this client is, it’s great!
Now, there’s some things that just annoy the hell out of me. Sure, text-only emails are fine, I use them nearly every time I’m sending emails because it’s a smaller message, it’s readable by any client so on and so forth. But a lot of the email lists I’m on have HTML emails, and they are useless without it because of the fact that they are either auction, forum or other “lots of visual information” sites. Sylpheed’s HTML rendering sucks. I couldn’t work out if it was a settings issue or something else doing it, but it was horrible, nasty and didn’t render anything properly. There was only one setting I could find, and that was “render HTML as text” which basically showed you the raw html.
Another problem I had with the program was the font used to display the contents of an email. I couldn’t find any settings to change it, which could have been my fault or reliant on Gnome’s default settings or something, but damn! It’s something horrible like 18 point courier new - huge and hard to read!
The “Junk Mail Filtering” option was a bit of a worry - if you turn on the “filter when it receives” option, it’ll also - from what it says in the option box - delete the messages it thinks is spam off the server. This is a worry for me, because junk mail filtering’s always a bit wrong to start with, and every time it’s wrong, it’ll be deleting something off the server that I wanted. Not nice! There’s another option in the menus allowing you to filter the junk mail out of the folder you’re currently in, but no matter what I tried, it wouldn’t actually do anything other than make the program slow and hang a bit while it was doing whatever it was doing.
Ok, so it’s fast, it’s clean, it’s relatively easy to do some things, it’d be great if I didn’t get so much porn spam, and it’s really ugly to look at. That’s what I think. I’m going back to Evolution until something else comes along.