> I receive several hundred emails per day and I like it that way.
> I use many email folders and many message rules.

The business of moving my set of rules was very frustrating, and kept me
on OE for far too long.

While not specifically an email client, one of the things that has worked
well for me is to run an IMAP server on my LAN.  My mail is periodically
grabbed from my ISP, and the message rules, spam filtering, virus checker,
etc all run on the server.

Now, ALL my email is available in a consistent set of folders etc. from
any client, even my phone, and since the sorting, virus checking etc. is
done back on the server, opening up the email client is faster.

Another big advantage is that exporting my email from OE was a real
challenge.  The export to Outlook isn't great, and to most other clients,
nonexistent.  By putting up an IMAP server, then simply dragging messages
from my Outlook Express folders to the IMAP folders within Outlook
Express, all my emails were now available, and better yet, in a
non-proprietary format.

Most IMAP servers use one of two standard formats, and if everything else
fails, my old email is readable with a text editor.  I really hated the OE
proprietary format, especially early on when OE went to a new,
non-compatible format every few years.  That finally stopped, but it
bugged me to have my email locked up by M$.  And the earlier formats were
at least documented, in fact, I had written programs to pull off my old
emails into text files for archiving.  Never did find documentation on the
current format.

Once you have you mail off on an IMAP server, if you try Thunderbird and
don't like it, you can move to another client with no hassle; all your
email is still there, you rules for sorting into folders are unchanged,
life is good.  And you didn't loose any of your old emails in the process.

Oh yeah, I'm currently using Evolution; not sure I'd recommend it.  I'll
probably go to Thunderbird when I find one of them round tuit thingies.

--McD


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