Last I tried Claws on my N810, it still felt like a full-screen Linux app shoehorned on a portable Linux device. If I want to check my IMAP email, I have to flip between 3 screens (folder view, message list, message view). If I want to change my preferences, I have to navigate through a preferences window that looks like it wasn't changed at all for lower-res screens.

I'd rather something rather faster/cleaner than Claws on my NIT. Something that integrates cleanly (if possible), easy to use (check my email, let me respond, notify me of new mail), and feels like it was designed for the NIT's screen. I don't care if it's distributed with OS2008/2009 or a third-party app.

Claws may be feature-rich, but it isn't user-friendly. The difference between Mail and Claws (to me) is analogous to an iPod and a Creative Zen Xtra. One "just works" (although maybe at the expense of features), the other is a pain.

I wouldn't go as far as to say claws is a pain, its a great feature rich client, but the way modest integrates with the OS and the existing contacts etc really makes the great difference. Plus its much simpler to use.

I have claws-mail set up with imap for my work mail, and this works ok. I added a second account for gmail+imap, because when I use 3G my network is so bad that the web interface is almost unusable - I figured downloading to a local client would be better. Setting up the account was no problem, but whatever I do I can't get it to load my gmail account - it always connects to my work mail. Maybe it's just me, because I always have huge problems with using the claws-mail UI - for some reason it's totally non-intuitive to me (which isn't necessarily a fault of claws-mail at all, it's just not what I'm used to I think). In any case I 'clicked on everything' and tried all combos I could think of - no luck. Either nothing happened or it loaded my workmail, even if I had selected the gmail account.

That's strange, claws works here with my home imap account as the primary one and gmail as the second one.
It isn't a speed demon, but I have a large number of folders with many messages.

Yeah, as I said - it could just be me. But if it is, then that's probably a good enough reason to switch to another client, because so far I've had to fight at every step of the way to find out how each operation is done in claws-mail (sometimes when it's been showed to me it's easy enough - it's just that the particular way to do it never occurs to me by itself). As opposed to, for example, the built-in client. I and claws-mail, we don't go well together when it comes to user interface, for some reason.

EDIT: I would like to add that that's one of the greatest things about open and, in particular, open source platforms: There are always alternatives. As opposed to platforms that, if the particular paradigm doesn't work for you, you're still forced to use it. Instead, here we can often just try one alternative after another until we find the one that fits like a glove.

Agreed. My goal for the IT is to make it an easy and quick to use mobile laptop replacement. That doesn't mean I need every single feature imaginable, though. The majority of my mail interaction is simply reading what's new and replying to a few (especially work emails which need a little higher priority). Claws is just huge. It also suffers from overload problem when working with my gmail account.

The built in mail client almost does what I need, but it doesn't seem to handle my folders appropriately. It also doesn't seem to have IDLE support, which I pretty much need. Idle connection over BT to the phone on GPRS use practically no battery - turn on polling and suddenly battery consumption increases.

In all fairness to the claws people, it seems to be a really well featured application and if the IT were just a little bit more (faster, bigger) it would suit my needs perfectly, I think. It's just not really designed for the tablet. As another example besides the general complexity, nothing is designed for finger tapping instead of stylus. Too many features packed into too small a space running on too slow a processor...

Being able to limit headers (not message bodies) by date range and to hide folders (this is gmail's fault, not honoring subscriptions) would go a long way towards making claws acceptable.

I don't know about you guys, but I've kind of changed the way I look at things these days.

I used to hack the crap out of everything and install a ton of 3rd party apps on every gadget I had. With the tablet, I started that way. Now, I'm more interested in making the internal apps work the way I want them to. I suppose that's why I started the Jablet Jabber server... I suppose that's also why I've got the default media player now submitting played tracks to last.fm... and perhaps why Modest just sounds so good to me right now.

Modest sounds good, agreed. I'm looking very much forward to try it. Hopefully it'll be the replacement for the current built-in emailer we're all hoping for.

I'd be happy to host a build of Modest, but I don't have any resources I can use to build it right now at work. Plus, I want to try it!

Any takers?

Aleksandyr, send me a PM with your e-mail address and I'll send you some debs (about two-three weeks old).