Comparison of e-mail clients

The following tables compare general and technical information between a number of e-mail client programs. Please see the individual products articles (if they have one) for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date.

General

Basic general information about the clients: creator/company, license/price etc.

The windows port of Claws-Mail currently lacks SSL support and IMAP support.

Protocol support

What e-mail and related protocols and standards are supported by each client.

* Description: RFC-2487
* Description: RFC-2595
* Opera Mail does not support STARTTLS command on special ports, like 995 for pop3 connection
* Online Certificate Status Protocol - Description: RFC-2560
* Certificate Revocation List - Description: RFC-3280

Features

Information on what features each of the clients support.

Note that 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. A number of articles describe these limitations per-email-client; see [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2005/11/html_email_desi.html 1] , [http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters 2] , [http://alistapart.com/articles/cssemail/ 3] , and [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2006/03/a_guide_to_css_1.html 4]

* Fragmented messages are called "truncated document" in Lotus Notes.
* with Spotlight Mac OS X v. 10.4
* Search folders is called "Smart Folders" in Mail on Mac OS X v. 10.4.
* Mulberry is a dedicated IMAP client; If the IMAP server has these abilities, Mulberry can use them.
* 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.
* Search Folders are virtual folders that contain views of all e-mail items matching specific search criteria. Search Folders display the results of previously defined search queries.
* Editable keybindings is part of GNOME, provided "Editable menu accelerators" is enabled in GNOME's "Menus & Toolbars" control applet.
* Fragmented messages makes 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
* 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.
* 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.
* Thunderbird's interface can be user customized via the use of themes (which can reposition and skin controls)
* supported since Office 2007.
* when best encryption is used, .pst file cannot be read by a hex editor.
* With Entourage 2008, you can use AppleScript and various internal/external scheduling mechanisms to create timed backups of Entourage Data.
* With Entourage 2008 and later versions of 2004, you can use the Spotlight data to search what's in the E'rage database via regular expression in the file system in Terminal or via Spotlight's ...interesting...version of "regular expressions".

Templates, scripts and programming languages

* The Bat! supports JavaScript in message templates with the JavaScript Macro plugin.
* The Bat! supports VBScript in message templates with the XMP plugin.
* The Bat! supports PHP in message templates with the XMP plugin.
* The Bat! supports Python in message templates with the TBPyxie plugin.
* Weak "stationery" system that only accept pages done with Word.
* Thunderbird supports HTML templates with "Stationery" add-on.

See also

* Unicode and e-mail
* List of personal information managers
* Comparison of layout engines

References

External links

* [http://www.albany.edu/its/accounts_email/choices/mctables.html UAlbany ITS: Email Services - Email Choices: Mail Client Comparison Summary Tables]
* [http://email.lib.utk.edu/emily/howto5.html E-mail client comparison]
* [http://www.tandb.com.au/email/clients/ T&B : Email : Clients] (of historical interest--last updated in 1999)
* [http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/index.html Remail - research by The Collaborative User Experience group] at IBM