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Comparison of email clients

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The following tables compare general and technical features of notable non-web-based email client programs.

General

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Basic general information about the clients: creator/company, O/S, license, and interface.

   No longer in active development
More information Client, Author/Developer ...
  1. [N 1]
    Or LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-GPL: "Any later version accepted by the membership of KDE e.V. (or its successor approved by the membership of KDE e.V.), which shall act as a proxy defined in Section 14 of version 3 of the license."
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Release history

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A brief digest of the release histories.

More information Client, First public Date ...
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Operating system support

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The operating systems on which the clients can run natively (without emulation).

More information Client, Microsoft Windows ...
  1. [N 1]
    Development stopped in 2008
  2. [N 2]
    Packaging planned
  3. [N 3]
    Free Software project, source available.
  4. [N 4]
    Free Software porting tangible provided OS has web browser.


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Protocol support

Communication and access protocol support

What email and related protocols and standards are supported by each client.

More information Client, POP3 fetch all messages (RFC 1939) ...

Integration protocol support

More information Client, IMSP () ...
  1. [N 1]
    Becky! requires FRNews or BkNews plugin installed for handling NNTP.
  2. [N 2]
    i.Scribe / InScribe requires a plugin to handle LDAP.
  3. [N 3]
    KDE supports Newsgroups (NNTP) by the use of KNode
  4. [N 4]
    Pegasus Mail can convert Newsgroup messages and/or RSS feeds to emails through the use of free add-ons.
  5. [N 5]
    Selective Download filters can skip/delete messages on POP3 server based on header (sender, recipient, subject, etc) information, this doesn't require to retrieve the full message body from the server.
  6. [N 6]
    Message Dispatcher allows the user to decide which messages should be retrieved, deleted or skipped based on the header information (sender, recipient, subject, etc) displayed to the user.
  7. [N 7]
    The Bat! requires MyGate plugin installed for handling NNTP.
  8. [N 8]
    Becky! requires BkBlogReader or BkRSSviewer or B.F.R or BkRssReader plugin installed for handling RSS and ATOM.
  9. [N 9]
    RSSyl plugin is required to read RSS and ATOM in Claws Mail.
  10. [N 10]
    vCalendar plugin is required to handle iCalendar in Claws Mail.
  11. [N 11]
    The evolution-rss plugin (provided as a separate package by many distributions provides the RSS functionality in Evolution.
  12. [N 12]
    Studio Blog Reader is one RSS reader application for IBM Lotus Notes. IBM Lotus Notes version 8.x introduced a native RSS reader.
  13. [N 13]
    KDE supports feeds by the use of Akregator
  14. [N 14]
    KDE supports iCal by the use of KOrganizer
  15. [N 15]
    Support of feeds is available in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Earlier versions require RSSPopper plug-in.
  16. [N 16]
    Microsoft Outlook support of iCalendar varies by version.
  17. [N 17]
    iCalendar is supported with an extension.
  18. [N 18]
    Mozilla Thunderbird only supports SimpleMAPI.[citation needed]
  19. [N 19]
    The Bat! versions prior to 6.3 required rss2mail or rss2pop3 plugin installed for handling RSS and ATOM. The Bat! versions 6.3 and later have built-in support for RSS.

Authentication support

More information Client, Regular ...
  1. [N 1]
    Description: RFC 1734
  2. [N 2]
    Description: RFC 2195
  3. [N 3]
    Description: RFC 2554
  4. [N 4]
    Minimum Mac OS version 10.11. Minimum iOS version 11.
  5. [N 5]
    Professional Edition.
  6. [N 6]
    Windows 10 required.
  7. [N 7]
    Zimbra Desktop supports SMTP auth, not sure about collaboration suite

SSL and TLS support

More information Client, Secure POP3 ...
  1. [N 1]
    Online Certificate Status Protocol - Description: RFC 2560
  2. [N 2]
    Certificate revocation list - Description: RFC 3280
  3. [N 3]
    Description: RFC 2595
  4. [N 4]
    Description: RFC 2487
  5. [N 5]
    Opera Mail does not support STARTTLS command on special ports, like 995 for pop3 connection
  6. [N 6]
    Since version 4.2, The Bat! supports two modes of X.509 certificate handling: Internal Implementation and via Microsoft CryptoAPI. CRLs and OCSP are only supported in the latter mode during TLS connections.
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Features

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Information on what features each of the clients support.

General features

For all of these clients, the concept of "HTML support" does not mean that they can process the full range of HTML that a web browser can handle. Almost all email readers limit HTML features, either for security reasons, or because of the nature of the interface. CSS and JavaScript can be especially problematic.

More information Client, HTML email ...
  1. [N 1]
    Citadel plugs Mail into SpamAssassin
  2. [N 2]
    Eudora requires a plugin to handle PGP.
  3. [N 3]
    First release 6.0 (September 2003), enhancements introduced in release 7.0 (August 2005)
  4. [N 4]
    Although Thunderbird supports UTF-8, its handling of line wraps causes problems with long lines of text that don't contain spaces, which essentially makes it unusable for certain languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
  5. [N 5]
    Mozilla Thunderbird adds this feature in Thunderbird 1.5.0.4
  6. [N 6]
    Using PGP in Thunderbird before version 78 requires Enigmail.
  7. [N 7]
    PGP/GPG and S/MIME support require a free (included) plugin.
  8. [N 8]
    Using PGP in Outlook Express requires a plugin.
  9. [N 9]
    Outlook Express does not display PGP/MIME signed messages.
  10. [N 10]
    Sylpheed has some limited ability to show HTML email. It can show the plain text that's left after stripping away all the HTML tags. Sylpheed has no ability to compose HTML.
  11. [N 11]
    The Bat is not able to display inline images.
  12. [N 12]
    The Bat! supports two modes of S/MIME: Internal Implementation and via Microsoft CryptoAPI.[47] CRLs and OCSP are only supported in the latter mode. Internal implementation only supports Aladdin eToken Pro or Rainbow iKey1000[48] tokens and can import certificates (from PKCS#12/PFX format) which were created outside The Bat!. CryptoAPI supports any kind of tokens and smart cards which have a corresponding Cryptographic Service Provider installed.

Messages features

More information Client, Label messages ...
  1. [N 1]
    It's a frequent problem for people dealing with Cyrillic/Russian in email messages that the message is not encoded in the encoding declared in its headers and thus can't be read. With such a message (with a wrong declaration of the encoding), it well might be the case that it passed through several incorrect recoding stages while it was being sent and delivered; thus it's not possible to correctly render it and read it if one uses the common type of the interface for choosing the encoding (such as the menu in Mozilla Firefox). An example of such a complex case of a wrongly declared encoding: a message was entered through a webform in the windows-1251 encoding, but the web interface incorrectly assumed that it was in latin-1; based on this assumption, it performed the recoding from latin-1 to utf-8. The result of this operation cannot be correctly decoded through the common encoding-selection interface; it can only be decoded through a two-stage recoding: first from utf-8 to latin-1, then from windows-1251 to utf-8 (assuming that one works in a Unicode environment). After it is decoded, it is desirable to store it in the recoded form instead of the original, in order to be able to read it easily afterwards, and to quote it for replies.
  2. [N 2]
    i.Scribe / InScribe supports full integration with GNU Aspell, which is its requirement for spell checking.
  3. [N 3]
    i.Scribe / InScribe requires libjpeg.
  4. [N 4]
    i.Scribe / InScribe requires libpng.
  5. [N 5]
    Entourage can link a message to a note.
  6. [N 6]
    Configurable to start replies at top or bottom, with separate configuration of signature position
  7. [N 7]
    Thunderbird requires SL8TR extension.
  8. [N 8]
    Starts replies with cursor at top, but is configurable regarding whether to include a blank space at the top for replies or not; some interleaved-posting users prefer starting the cursor at the top so they can trim the quotes
  9. [N 9]
    The recoding engine and interface extensions that would solve the described recoding problems have been developed as a patch for Pine; it is to be found in the package pine-4.58L-alt4.src.rpm Archived 2011-08-27 at the Wayback Machine(ftp) for ALTLinux (under the name pine-4.58L-alt2-0.4.1.diff). Its essential feature is to enable to forcibly recode messages, save them in the recoded form, and quote in replies.
  10. [N 10]
    Pine supports full integration with GNU Aspell or other external speller, which is its requirement for spell checking.

Database, folders and customization

More information Client, Message file format ...
  1. [N 1]
    Fragmented messages make it possible, for example, to send a large audio message as several partial messages, and still have it appear to the recipient as a simple audio message rather than as an encapsulated message containing an audio message. RFC 2046
  2. [N 2]
    Search Folders are virtual folders that contain views of all email items matching specific search criteria. Search Folders display the results of previously defined search queries.
  3. [N 3]
    Editable keybindings is part of GNOME, provided "Editable menu accelerators" is enabled in GNOME's "Menus & Toolbars" control applet.
  4. [N 4]
    Via nnir backends such as Notmuch[51]
  5. [N 5]
    Fragmented messages are called truncated document in Lotus Notes.
  6. [N 6]
    With Entourage 2008, you can use AppleScript and various internal/external scheduling mechanisms to create timed backups of Entourage Data.
  7. [N 7]
    With Entourage 2008 and later versions of 2004, you can use the Spotlight data to search what's in the Entourage database via regular expression in the file system in Terminal or via Spotlight's ...interesting...version of "regular expressions".
  8. [N 8]
    supported since Office 2007.
  9. [N 9]
    Thunderbird's interface can be user customized via the use of themes (which can reposition and skin controls)
  10. [N 10]
    This is for Mulberry's 'offline browsing' capability, which is turned off by default. In the default configuration no local copy of the mail is created.
  11. [N 11]
    Mulberry is a dedicated IMAP client; If the IMAP server has these abilities, Mulberry can use them.
  12. [N 12]
    Via Notmuch or other indexers.[54][55]
  13. [N 13]
    Because MH stores each letter in a separate file, it is trivially easy to (externally) search them with grep. This ease is shattered when non-raw encodings are used, such as base64.
  14. [N 14]
    The Bat! Pro support two methods access to program when database is encrypted: password authorization and token authorization; Voyager support only password authorization and encrypted database is default and only available storage method.

Templates, scripts and programming languages

More information Client, Message templates ...
  1. [N 1]
    Thunderbird supports HTML templates with "Stationery" add-on.
  2. [N 2]
    The Bat! supports JavaScript in message templates with the JavaScript Macro plugin.
  3. [N 3]
    The Bat! supports VBScript in message templates with the XMP plugin.
  4. [N 4]
    The Bat! supports PHP in message templates with the XMP plugin.
  5. [N 5]
    The Bat! supports Python in message templates with the TBPyxie plugin.
  6. [N 6]
    Weak "stationery" system that only accept pages done with Word.
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Internationalization

The Bat! supports Email Address Internationalization (EAI).[58]

As of October 2016, email clients supporting SMTPUTF8 included Outlook 2016,[59] mail for iOS, and mail for Android.[citation needed]

See also

Notes

  1. Including Office 2021, 2019 and 2016

References

External links

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