Mail Programs: Time for a Change?

It used to be the case many years ago that I would try just about any E-mail program that came into the market.  To give you some idea, here are some of the mail programs I have used:

1. MM (TOPS-20)
2. BABYL (TOPS-20)
3. Mail (VMS)
4. Mail (UCB)
5. Mailx (UNIX System V)
6. MUSH
7. Mutt
8. Elm
9. Pine
10. Babyl (GNU Emacs)
11. VM (GNU Emacs)
12. Z-Mail (A Program written by Dan Heller based on MUSH, probably the first pseudo-graphical MIME program)
13. Andrew (CMU)
14. dmail (written by Matt Dillon)
15. Some really zippy MMDF mail program
16. MM (Columbia University)
17. Outlook
18. Outlook Express
19. Eudora
20. MH
21. Mozilla
22. and for about the last eight years: Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been great to me.  For one thing, it’s had a very extensible architecture that has lasted quite some time, with plugins and everything.  For another, it’s done quite well handling the gigabytes of mail that I process.  The filter systems are reasonably flexible and it supported client-side certificates when I needed them.

Eight years for me is a pretty good run.  I am, however, noticing that my trusty Thunderbird is showing its age and I really have run out of time to help (not that I really helped much anyway).  For one thing:

• Later versions try to index my entire collection of mailboxes (all 50GB of them) and this never completes.
• The composition component is no longer sufficient to my needs.  It’s not handling fonts correctly when I wish to send multi-media messaging.

And so I ponder a change.  The question is, “to what?”  Apart from all of my needs above, I have one more need: to be able to migrate from what ever I migrate to.  This probably isn’t a problem, because one can always use IMAP copying in the worst of cases, but that can be slow.

First task, of course will be reducing what I can to ease transition.  Wish me luck and do let me know what mail program you like, these days.