Maybe I was spoiled by Pine.

Here's how you read your mail us­ing it:

• Press I to go to the in­­box mes­sage list.

• You will see the first un­read mes­sage.

• Press R to re­­ply, F to for­ward, D to delete, I to go back to the in­­box.

• Re­­peat un­til you have no more mail.

Yes, this is sim­plis­tic, and it's nicer to be able to see the mail­box at the same time as the mes­sages, but you can go through a lot of mail this way.

It's old fash­ioned and crap­py in many ways, but it seems done by peo­ple who ac­tu­al­ly read mail us­ing it.

I am lik­ing kmail well enough for the last year or so, but I de­cid­ed to check al­ter­na­tives, just in case I was miss­ing some­thing.

I had heard good things about Claws, a fork of Sylpheed, and it does the same crap­py thing most oth­er GUI mail clients do:

• Open the IN­­BOX.

• Click on the mail you want to read.

• You can for­ward or re­­ply.

• But if you want to delete... the mes­sage list shows that you shift­ed to the next mes­sage, but it won't dis­­­play. You need to press en­ter, then wait un­til it shows (no dis­­­con­nec­t­ed IMAP?).

Dude, let me go through my mail fast, please? It's per­haps my most im­por­tant task of the day, I need to do it ev­ery 30 min­utes, I need it to be as fast as pos­si­ble. I want a queue. I want triage.

I see a mes­sage, I must ei­ther:

• Delete it be­­cause it's use­­less

• Re­­ply

• For­ward

• Tag as im­­por­­tan­t/­­for lat­er/todo/what­ev­er.

• Save to an­oth­er fold­er

That's it. It's not a dif­fi­cult work­flow!

And I need to do this with­out wait­ing for the mes­sages to down­load one at a time! If I want­ed to work that way I would use a freak­ing web­mail.

Kmail lets me do these things. So far, it's the on­ly GUI IMAP client that does.

Any­one has a sug­ges­tion for a light­weight IMAP client that works that way?

And no, I am not go­ing to in­stall evo­lu­tion just to see it I can do the same thing us­ing a larg­er pro­gram that drags half of gnome along :-(