Roo’s Ramblings

Blimey, long time, no post. Moved house recently and so it took up lots of time and had all the hassle of getting my broadband connection up-and-running once again. Anyway…

For many years now, Kmail has been my favourite email client. Recently, I’ve been using Windows more than I normally do (for a bit of win32 programming) and so I installed Thunderbird. It’s pretty darn good and has improved a lot since I last used it. However, for me at least, it highlighted three small details that keep me hooked on kmail.

1. Keyboard navigation. I think the majority of people I reckon, they will have the message list with a preview pane below - it’s true for me at least. As I’m reluctant to use the mouse, I want to be able to move between messages easily, and then scroll through a message in the preview pane if it is of interest. Kmail solves this thus: LEFT = previous message; RIGHT = next message; DOWN = scroll down current message; UP = scroll up. I think this is nice. I can navigate quickly using the cursor keys. As far as I can tell in Thunderbird, UP and DOWN moves between messages. To scroll in the preview pane, you can hit SPACE, which is like a PGDOWN. Not quite as elegant for me.
2. Missing attachments. Prior to Kmail, about 8/10 emails that were supposed to have an attachment (and directly referred to them) left my outbox rather more lighter than intended. Thankfully Kmail includes a handy check feature: when you click “Send”, it searches for terms like ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ (this list is customisable) and if there is a match but no actual attachment, it’ll flag this up. Nice
3. Tray notification. Thunderbird will put an icon in your system tray upon arrival of new messages. However, and this is extremely petty and subjective, kmail outdoes Thunderbird here. Not only do you get the Kmail icon, but it is overlaid with an actual message count. It means that you can see exactly how many unread messages you have even before you restore the application. As I say, it’s a rather small detail, one that 99.9% of people could care less about: what’s the difference between 1 or 10 messages - all you need to know is that you have new messages. Well, I can’t answer that other than to say, I just prefer it!

To be honest, I think Kmail is not always given due credit. It’s extremely well featured, responsive, robust and has plenty of nice touches. And if you want the extra groupware functionality, Kmail is properly integrated to Kontact (KDE’s Outlook/Evolution equiv).

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.