I had one too many prob­lems with kmail from KDE4 in my eee with Kubun­tu, and sylpheed-­claws is just un­us­able in a small screen (the huge wid­get­s! the non-hid­able things all over the in­ter­face!) I de­cid­ed to get old fash­ioned and try a con­sole mail read­er.

I was a pine us­er for many years, and a mutt us­er for a while, and I was deeply dis­ap­point­ed that the last three years have been bad for these pro­gram­s.

Just be­cause you run in a ter­mi­nal, there's no rea­son to be hard to con­fig­ure! Af­ter spend­ing 20 min­utes try­ing to get a de­cent IMAP ac­count set­up (just two IMAP ac­counts) in alpine and an­oth­er 10 won­der­ing if mutt re­al­ly had no place in the UI for ac­count con­fig­u­ra­tion (and whether the De­bian/KUbun­tu de­fault "com­ment­ed" con­fig file is the prod­uct of hard drugs), I tried Cone.

It was blis­s. It was all I re­mem­bered from pine years ago (on lo­cal ac­counts) on­ly over IMAP.

Easy to con­fig­ure, easy to use, quick, ca­pa­ble. I was in love all over again.

While I will keep us­ing KMail on my main note­book un­der Arch Lin­ux where I had no re­li­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems what­so­ev­er, I have Cone con­fig­ured in my server's shell ac­count and in the eee.