Adam Hewitt wrote:
I apologize if I may have already asked this, however I was just wondering what mail apps people are using that actually work (ie. filters can be applied to IMAP accounts, new folders can be created on IMAP accounts without jumping through hoops etc) and are free to use?
Mozilla Mail. It's a bit buggy :-( but extremely powerful. Mutt (a character-based mail client - should run on OSX) is also a popular choice among power users, and I use it for some things.
As for filtering - you shouldn't /need/ to filter an IMAP account - that's the IMAP server's job if your IMAP server is half-decent.
I have a filter script that does all my filtering server side. All mail is pre-delivered into mailboxes without ever touching my inbox; Mozilla just checks the various mailing list mailboxes for new messages as well. This makes reading mail over a slow (128k) link to work much more bearable, as the client need not download and filter hundreds of messages I don't want to read right now anyway. It also means that no matter where I connect from, and which client I use, my mail is always correctly filtered.
Unfortunately, I don't believe that filter configuration was included in the IMAP standard, so MUAs don't generally know how to set up your server side filters.
Of course, this does require that you have a decent IMAP server, and access to the server-side filters. Cyrus IMAPd (which I use @work and which hosts my account) provides a simple scripting language called sieve for filtering, and can provide access to it for users via a file in the home directory or via a special update program called sieveshell. Other IMAP servers vary; some even have web-based filter configuration.
IMHO client-side filters are a last-resort fallback - with them you lose one of the bigger benefits of IMAP mail.
Craig Ringer
