Recommendation for e-mail client for several accounts

BooJewels

I just typed all this out and the forum lost it when I hit preview.  So apologies if 2 threads appear.

Gradually migrating from a Win7 machine to a Win10 one.  Using both side by side for now, with low-load processes on the old machine, largely e-mail (Windows Live Mail) and spreadsheets.  

I now need to migrate e-mail to the new machine too, as a server upgrade by my web hosts won't allow the old machine to send domain based mail as I need to use IMAP now and it doesn't have the security chops for their new mail server.  So I'm trying to set up mail on my Win10 machine - I suppose I'm a bit old-fashioned and set in my ways and like things a certain way.  I also receive mail on Android devices and I like to get everything on each device, but prefer to handle them differently, on a per device basis - so IMAP requires a new way of thinking and it doesn't really fit with my earlier practices - so I need to start thinking differently.  I have a number of mail accounts from my domain business ones, POP3 accounts with aliases etc.

Was recommended Thunderbird by my web hosts, but for reasons I can't really quantify, I just don't like it.   In the process of getting set up on it last week, it dumped about 70 messages from my inbox that I was in the process of filing and archiving.  They're on the old machine, but it's still an irritation.  Luckily, the bulk of messages still on the server that it downloaded, I'd archived in one folder en masse out of the way, so still have those.  I want to trust it, but don't feel that I can - although it might have been a server issue I suppose.  It was all gone when I logged in to a webmail page through my control panel.

I'm just trialling The Bat! which looks very well featured, but has also had issues too - like a couple of big crashes and it just will not remember some settings or mail marked as read/unread and I just cannot find some information in the help pages etc.   But it's favourite at the moment and costs about £60.

I've also previously tried eM Client and Mailbird, but both were too phone-appy for my personal taste.  I use and like AquaMail on my Android devices, but it's not available for PC.  Outlook is probably the de facto business standard client  but I've never even seen it in use and it's quite pricey and I don't want or need everything else that comes in the 'Microsoft 365' package.

Any other recommendations for me to look at?  Software that you like that might fit my needs.

Neil_Jones

Thunderbird can be configured to look like Outlook/Windows Live Mail - the "dumping" of messages you refer to is probably because you set the account up as POP3 which will download and then remove the message(s) from the server, which IMAP doesn't.

J_B

BooJewels said:

  So I'm trying to set up mail on my Win10 machine - I suppose I'm a bit old-fashioned and set in my ways and like things a certain way.  I also receive mail on Android devices and I like to get everything on each device, but prefer to handle them differently, on a per device basis - so IMAP requires a new way of thinking and it doesn't really fit with my earlier practices - so I need to start thinking differently.  I have a number of mail accounts from my domain business ones, POP3 accounts with aliases etc.

Was recommended Thunderbird by my web hosts, but for reasons I can't really quantify, I just don't like it.  

I've used Thunderbird for many years now (12?) I have five accounts that function fine on it using pop3

I also use K9 Mail on my Android phone with pop3 for much the same reason as you

What don't you like about Thunderbird?

BooJewels

Neil_Jones said:

Thunderbird can be configured to look like Outlook/Windows Live Mail - the "dumping" of messages you refer to is probably because you set the account up as POP3 which will download and then remove the message(s) from the server, which IMAP doesn't.

Nope, very definitely set as IMAP - that's some of my issue, the new mail server won't let me set it up with POP3 - I tried that later and it just fails to communicate with the mail server.  I can use it as POP3 on my Android devices, which means I can manage mail differently without impacting on my other devices.  But the Windows machine it wants as IMAP.

The mail disappeared from Thunderbird and when later checking, were also gone from the mail server.  I went to bed with several screenfuls of message headers in my inbox (I never use preview panes) - I seem to remember there being either 84 or 87.  The next morning, there were 13, which included several pieces of new junk that had since arrived.  I think around 73 - from a 9 day period - had vanished.  Even when using POP3, I tell my software to leave a copy on the server, as I want to be able to see it in more than one device.

A few days before, despite previously using POP3 for the life of the mail account, I initially downloaded over 1200 messages - what remained since I last had a clear out - all downloaded fine and I just archived all of them older than about 3 weeks, out of the way and was sorting through the ones that were still active and I might need to refer or reply to - by making new folders and organising them.  It was this intervening batch - not archived and not yet sorted, just sitting in my ibox that vanished overnight.

BooJewels

J_B said:

BooJewels said:

  So I'm trying to set up mail on my Win10 machine - I suppose I'm a bit old-fashioned and set in my ways and like things a certain way.  I also receive mail on Android devices and I like to get everything on each device, but prefer to handle them differently, on a per device basis - so IMAP requires a new way of thinking and it doesn't really fit with my earlier practices - so I need to start thinking differently.  I have a number of mail accounts from my domain business ones, POP3 accounts with aliases etc.

Was recommended Thunderbird by my web hosts, but for reasons I can't really quantify, I just don't like it.  

I've used Thunderbird for many years now (12?) I have five accounts that function fine on it using pop3

I also use K9 Mail on my Android phone with pop3 for much the same reason as you

What don't you like about Thunderbird?

I sort of covered it when I said I couldn't really quantify it, I just don't like it.  I don't like the interface, I don't like that it seems to like to tell you how to lay out messages, even when you've chosen something different.  My husband uses it on a laptop and I often type messages for him and by the time you're done, you have several fonts and different line spacings.  It drives me bonkers.  Clearly it's well liked by others and must be pretty capable by how widely it's used and recommended.  I don't like it and would prefer to use something else.  I gave it a try and it let me down in about 3 days.

I want something that I can use with comfort and confidence and Thunderbird has made me nervous now, as has The Bat! to some degree.

I've seen one since I posted called SeaMonkey, which seems to share some pedigree with Thunderbird, but I like the look of the interface, so I might try that too.  Looks like a browser suite, so hopefully the mail can work without the rest.  And another called MailSpring.

Petriix

There's no reason why pop would work on one device and not another. The mail server doesn't know or care what operating system you are using. I wouldn't use pop on your phone if you want the emails to be available on another device; that's probably why they disappeared. 

BooJewels

Petriix said:

There's no reason why pop would work on one device and not another. The mail server doesn't know or care what operating system you are using. I wouldn't use pop on your phone if you want the emails to be available on another device; that's probably why they disappeared. 

I really don't think that's it.  The messages that disappeared in Thunderbird had been downloaded onto my phone, 2 tablets and my other desktop about 10 days before I even installed Thunderbird on the Win10 machine. They downloaded, some were still in my inbox, some I archived into a sub-folder (and they're still there) and the ones in the inbox disappeared overnight a few days later in Thunderbird and on the server.  When I installed The Bat! to try it, only the mail still in my inbox downloaded to that.  Those 70+ emails are now gone.

RumRat

I take it you don't like the W10 email app?  I've used most of the others you mention and just found the inbuilt one simple and efficient, so, stuck with that.
The old clients like TB just look really dated to me, but, each to their own.

J_B

I wonder if perhaps with TB that you had inadvertently ticked the box 'remove from server after x days' and/or 'empty deleted on leaving' perhaps?

Anyway, good luck ... :-)

BooJewels

RumRat said:

I take it you don't like the W10 email app?  I've used most of the others you mention and just found the inbuilt one simple and efficient, so, stuck with that.
The old clients like TB just look really dated to me, but, each to their own.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll look at it again.  Either it has changed or I've mis-remembered, but I tried it on my early Win10 laptop and I seem to think it wouldn't either handle the variety or number of accounts that I have, so I hadn't even tried it this time.  But searching for details, it might well be able to now - so I might re-visit it.  I don't think I liked the interface, but I'll at least look at it again, thanks for the reminder.

@J_B I did carefully set up TB to not do things like that, immediately I added a mail account and checked later that I hadn't, when the mail disappeared.  They were an arbitrary selection too - it wasn't a fixed number of days - some disappeared from the 4th June and some were still in the inbox and they were deleted from my inbox, not deleted messages.

Sometimes with things of this nature, it can be an odd combination of settings that causes things to work in an unexpected manner.

I think The Bat! has put itself out of the running, it just will not keep the view the same - I've come to it this morning and the preview pane that I'd knocked off has re-appeared and it if I contract all the folders in the account tree, next time I look they're all expanded again.  I set it to show the inbox with date separators, but these contract, every time I do something different, like look in another folder.  So these are deal-breaking irritations.  Which is a shame, as I was getting to like it.

BooJewels

Just to close this off, I think I've ended up sticking with Thunderbird.    I did try Mail on Win 10 @RumRat - but it really was way, way too simple for my needs.  Might work well with one email address, but wasn't for me.

Two things have now swayed it for me with Thunderbird in the end - firstly, I think some of the unpredictability was being caused by my main domain email account being set up as IMAP.  I can fully grasp the benefits of this format, but it didn't really work for me, as I handle mail differently on different devices.  If I used the same client on different devices, it might work well, but I'd got a system that simply worked for me and IMAP seemed incompatible with my personal methods.  When I removed that account and re-installed it as POP3 (I'd missed the manual configuration link first time around that allowed this option), it seems to be behaving rather better.

Secondly, when I first tried working with Thunderbird, none of the Add-ons were available as it was a new version and they weren't seemingly compatible.  A couple of weeks on, many have now been updated and are again available.  This has significantly improved the functionality for me - adding in tasks that I just can't work without, like the ability to quickly insert phrases and sigs - using an Add-on called Quicktext.  This was a feature that I really liked in The Bat! but that crashed spectacularly once too often and ruled itself out at that point.  Another Add-on called Identity Chooser allows me to choose the account to write or reply from before I start typing and I've colour coded them with delicate shades to reinforce the selection.

I think working with POP3 rather than IMAP suits me better and Thunderbird somehow seems more stable and the Add-ons really improve functionality, especially where using lots of different accounts for different aspects of my life.  Now I need to set up a honed down filing system for my mail and start as I mean to go on.  My old system evolved over a lot of years and is perhaps now unwieldy.