Date: 03/31/05 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: templates, software, html, security, virus, spam

I'm really dissatisified with the current state of e-mail and news software, so I've come here to ask for suggestions based on certain requirements.

I only have one general requirements between the two of them (e-mail and nntp software). They should be free (as in beer) or preferably open source. If I must I will pay.

E-mail
*Fast, fast, fast - if it's slow on my 2Ghz P4 then something is wrong.
*OE (Outlook Express) or The Bat! like interface. I don't want to do 2983492384239482 billion tweaks to make it right.
*Should be able to effeciently and "stable-y" (to recover from corruption/crashes and in terms of not redownloading the same messages.) large mail boxes with tens of thousands of messages.
*Effecient support for said mailbox via IMAP.
*Multiple account support
*Good support for contact lists
*Should include built in HTML viewer, not rely on something like MSIE's HTML display control. It should also be smart enough to only display basic stuff, with the option to disable displaying of "external" (non-embedded) images.
*Relatively easy to use plug-in support. Preferably something procmail like that executes external programs for each program or something even more effecient (like a dynamically loaded library that is persistent in memory). This will be used for external viruses and anti-spam crud. (Note: while built in anti-spam stuff is nice, I'd rather rely on the much better external anti-spam stuff and AFAIK there isn't any e-mail software that can mark messages as spam and auto-send them back to an external anti-spam program).
*Built in procmail like stuff is good too.
*Support for mail message templates (i.e. different ones for forwarding, replies, etc...)
*Should include advanced searching and filtering options like in The Bat!, except less crappy.
*Good S/MIME and OpenPGP support that is actually compliant with the standards and can decode messages in place (not just launch an external program to view them).
*Ability to sort messages by various factors.
*Good mail message import/export ability for backup. Compression is nice, but I can always do that manually.
*High configurability in general is good.

News
*Fast, fast, fast - if it's slow on my 2Ghz P4 then something is wrong.
*Should be able to handle large newsgroups, on the order of tens of thousands of messages well.
*A fast OE like interface with a preview pane that can show images.
*Same thing as above about HTML viewing.
*Good binary/encoding support is ok, but I'm not using it for porn so it's not a big deal.
*Ability to sort messages by many different factors

It should be obvious, but security is important in the implementation.

P.S. Spare me what you think the obvious answer is. I won't bash specific clients, but lets just say some are just plain stupid in design and remain popular despite crap for features or crap for a user interface/configuration methodology.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/648358.html