Thanks guys.

I suppose this is a stupid question, but as I haven't used it much (so far, I've just used webmail on my NIT, rather stupidly) but finally decided that that's dumb and I need to start using a client, SO:

What's so bad about the built in email client? I know it's regarded as bad, but why?

In my case, the built in client did not work at all with to Google Accounts, one POP and one IMAP.

There are several problems with the built-in email client, but you won't necessarily be hit by all of them. It depends on what you need.

I use the built-in client with an IMAP server, and the _huge_ problem with this client is that it ignores the 'read' flag of IMAP. In other words, if I read the message on my desktop IMAP client it's still marked as 'unread' on my N800. The only way to deal with this is to systematically delete messages when I'm done with them.

The other issue that I'm hit by is that it won't display html-formatted messages and the like, it'll just indicate the content as an attachment. This is not a huge problem for me though, at least I've been alerted to a new message and I can, if I want to, read it by other means (e.g. claws-mail or web mail).

There are a few more issues that could have been improved on, but other than that it's actually an excellent client for me. The UI is straight forward and intuitive, screen real estate handling is good (there's an option to un-show most of the header, for example). It'll only show the IMAP inbox - which for me is a feature, as I configure the central IMAP server so that messages I'm not likely to want to read on the road are filtered off to other folders. For others this is actually a bug, so it all depends on your usage pattern.