..and i continue

I had another thought today (don't be shocked) to do with my Email client problem. I have my suspicions that the whole email client problem is holding back the deployment of Linux in the business environment.


Think for a while, we have Microsoft Office with 

• a word processor (Word)
• a spreadsheet app (Excel)
• a Database app (Access)
• a presentation app (Powerpoint)
• an email app (Outlook)

Now spot the one thats missing in Open/Libre Office? Yup, you guessed it - an email app. So if you wanted to switch to an alternative Office suite you have a problem. From my previous report, there is only one app - Outlook (in my opinion anyway).


So, I wanted to deploy Linux in an office environment what do I need

• The O/S - Sorted, Windows or Linux
• The Office Suite - Libre/Open Office (multi-platform) or MS Office (Windows Only)
• Browser - Firefox or Chrome, both platform independent
• Authentication method - AD works under both platforms (from my simple experiments)
• Email App - ah, the free suites don't have one, lets have a look. Hmm we really need Outlook, ok, we need MS Office, ok we need Windows.

And so Linux thereby gets omitted from the equation, because of one application problem. I am not going into the email app debate, as that was on yesterdays post.


My point? Sort the email app out and you might get a look in.

Linux Email Clients

I have recently been trying to find a replacement for Outlook under Linux, after all whats Linux got if it doesn't have a decent email client. My current client is Outlook 2010 64-bit and its good, very good. I love the way it works, the conversation view and the way it handles emails. But there must be another client as good, surely?

A bit of background info, we use Google Apps, and the Google Apps Sync App with Outlook and it works very well - more on this in a separate post.

Here is my evaluation

Evolution

On the surface, it looks and behaves as good as Outlook, and supports lots of functionality, but, and its a big but, it fails at the final hurdle. You setup your email account, and it supports POP or Outlook. If you tell it the account is a Google one, it also adds in Calendar and Contact synchronisation. So then it adds the account and begins downloading emails from your mailbox. OK, so far so good. Minor point here, but you can't remove the local folders if you use an IMAP service, but thats OK.

Next we go through the settings and select the 'always View HTML' options and setup the email signature to make it look nice. Then, I want to setup the default font and size for outgoing emails. This it seems you can specify and looks ok. But when you send a HTML format email, it strips out any font information, not only from the email, but also from your pre-formatted signature you setup in HTML. It seems the font specification is only for viewing emails, and not sending them. The actual font the email ends up in is the choice of the recipient software, with is usually times new roman.

OK, this is open source software, so there must be a fix? Well you would think so, but it appears not...

Here is the main bug report here which includes other references to the main issue. You can see the question was raised in 2009 and is still outstanding. The main issue here is I, and many others want to have nice looking emails, are ruled my company policies, and at least replicate functionality from the main competition (Outlook). If you trawl through this you will see various comments from the developers more or less indicating "thats the way it is - live with it".

How do you expect anyone to move away from Outlook with this attitude? How do you expect to penetrate the business world with this attitude? Or is it I am missing the point? Are they only after hobbyists who don't care what the emails look like and are happy with whats given? Its certainly holding me back.

Another issue is an Evolution/Google issue. When I delete an email, it removes the label from the email, which potentially lives lots of emails I don't want lying around and taking up space. I did try to tweak the Google IMAP options, but I believe this is something to do with the way Google deals with IMAP. Not quite found an answer to this one yet...

OK, and also the Google Calendar and Contact synch don't work and I can't find out how to change the settings so its not good either.

Thunderbird

When I found Evolution to not suit my requirements, I turned to Thunderbird as i have heard so many people like this. Well again, its not quite there. You can specify the outbound font, but not specify a size. You have the choice of small, medium, big, bigger and large. Not quite but i wanted, but getting there. The Google Calendar synch and contacts synch, were add-ons that i never got round to installing...

The problem here was the application kept crashing. It would download emails from my mailbox and then have an error and stop. Only a restart would correct it but I don't seem to understand how a widespread application like Thunderbird crashes???

The next issue it seemed to have a problem with my labels/folders. I have my folders underneath my inbox such as Inbox/Internal Emails and Inbox/Suppliers but when I tried to move an email in Thunderbird, it assumed it was INBOX/Suppliers - which didn't exist and so the move failed.

It looks like this issue has already been discussed here

So, it crashes and has problems with labels, and the composing font doesn't have many options.

Opera Mail

We move on now to Opera, which has an email client built in. I used v11 and found it to be a good fast browser (Until Chrome 9 came along, but thats another story...). After trying the other clients, I thought i would give it a go - I had nothing to lose!

You can setup an email account, and it has some specific instructions for setting up Google (here) and its not bad - you can view emails in HTML format, and its inside your browser - great!

Well again, the format of outbound emails fails again. When you reply to an email, it puts your response at the top, and appends your signature at the bottom. Thats not good? Can I have my signature with my reply please? No, and the forum entry went on to say, it should always appear at the bottom of the email, and not after the reply and Outlook is doing it wrong. So far this is not an option.

Microsoft Outlook

Well Outlook - what can I say? It works, and doesn't crash (like Thunderbird), It allows you to specify font particulars and other HTML functions, and then doesn't strip them when you click send (like Evolution). OK the signature placement is fixed, and Outlook possibly changed things to suit itself, but it works, its fast and it does what its supposed to - generates nice looking emails. You have to consider that rather than following anyones lead, it makes the rules up itself (or themselves - Microsoft) and some apps try to follow.

Conclusion

Well Outlook -its great, and there just isn't anything that comes close. Sorry, I would love to say the others are great too, but I can't. And the attitude of the developers of the other packages isn't helpful. Saying Outlook does things wrong and thats that, is not productive. Just make it a configurable option and let us decide - the end user.

What did I do to get round this? I use Ubuntu and created a Windows 7 VM running Outlook and GAS for email and other purposes. Come on Open Source movement sort yourselves out.

Feel free to add your own comments...