ZIMBRA Desktop email - effectively manage all your emails - Gmail, AOL, Outlook or other POP/IMAP email accounts
New, modern and very easy to add email accounts.
I've been trying lots of (free) email clients lately both in Ubuntu Linux and Windows... As for now, my favorite is:
(This picture is its icon on my Ubuntu desktop)
Zimbra Desktop - you get all your emails in one place, very smart highlighting (For example, when you hover your mouse on some "today" in a message - Zimbra shows what day was that... etc.). It seems to work well and stable with lots of mail in the inboxes. Best of all, it's really smart and SUPER EASY to setup new email accounts (I used gmail-based company acoounts). I never found any email client that is this easy to setup accounts, you always had to enter repetitive things, ports, etc.
Yes, I love the simplicity that comes from "convention over configuration". (If you're a programmer then maybe you heard that phrase recently? No?)
For Windows it's super easy to install Zimbra: just download and run the installer.
For Ubuntu Linux, a little harder to install (but that's normal in Linux). Here's a small HOWTO install Zimbra Desktop on Ubuntu:
1. Download Zimbra desktop for linux (browse from Zimbra Desktop official page) to your home folder.
( in your terminal, where you downloaded the installer for linux...)
2. chmod +x zdesktop*
3. sh zdesk*
A problem I found was that, on the next boot of your computer, the Zimbra "service" (engine) didn't auto-start - if you double-click the Zimbra Desktop icon the it would show "The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost:7633" and a blank white window. The solution is to open your terminal and execute:
/home/"your user"/zimbra/zdesktop/zdesktop start
(Thanks to blog.sparkyjones.com for that tip)
To make this happen on startup in Ubuntu, go to "System">"Preferences">"Sessions", choose the "Startup programs" tab, click "Add" then choose any "name" and enter your account's variation of the above command.
I used to like/use the embedded email client that Opera Internet browser provided, but I had problems about its strage behaviors with IMAP (with my gmail account - I recall that it showed sent messages in inbox, etc...), and in POP3 mode - I also observed a few cases when some new big sized emails get lost when there are lots of messages in its Inbox... Not using it anymore now.
As for my Ubuntu Linux boot, I always liked/preferred its default email client - Evolution (and still like/use it now...). However, sometimes (OK, many times) it seems to hang/freeze for a few seconds, makes you feel in danger of a system hang - but no - just the Evolution froze a few secs. Other instabilities I found included a case where the program froze with the CPU in full usage and got hot, and a sometimes it just hanged - needed to kill the process. But those things are rare, not a real problem. Evolution would still be the number-one and most complete linux-based email client in my mind.
I also tried Thunderbird but it had difficulties in using multiple outgoing email accounts, it doesn't seem to be designed for using many email accounts in one place...
One thing I think is missing in Zimbra though, is the "new email alert/notification" feature. From what I've searched the net for this issue in Zimbra, I found out that are no new "email alerts" yet... maybe in the future releases. However, to be positive, I feel that I'm more relaxed and disciplined by the lack of this feature - no alerts to disturb your concentration from your real work/thinking - just check your email when you've finished work or having a break.
I didn't find any problems or instabilities of Zimbra in Windows, but in Linux I found two cases where it's "add new account" page kept on showing "processing" too long - hanged - and another time it hanged when browsing the "sent" folder - but they are not big problems. I just closed re-started it from its desktop icon and then it ran fine for the rest.