Can anyone recommend a nice, lightweight email client for xp… OR which ones to avoid like haemorrhoids?
I installed Thunderbird, and found it annoying. It takes literally DAYS to download all the emails from Gmail, doesn’t support Hotmail and stores all the emails from all your accounts on your drive, taking up MASSIVE amounts of space.
Sorry for the downer!
Thunderbird seems popular but im using windows live at the moment and finding those same problems annoying. Maybe those things are fairly universal.
You can try Sylpheed which is indeed very lightweight, but may be short in features…
There is a fork of Sylpheed called Claws with some extended features, but I don’t know if there is a native client for Windows.
I use Thunderbird mainly because, back on 2003, it was the only software which was able to import my emails from Eudora 1.5, which I used until then 
yes, it’s not really “lightweight”, so I would not recommend it if you are looking for light software, but apart from this I’m quite satisfied.
THUNDERBIRD!
That many resounding pushes towards thunderbird make it seem well worth a look. Ill try other options if it works out badly.
Thanks all.
I’m using Thunderbird 3.0b1 atm, and I find it alot nicer then the 2.x one, no stability issues that I’ve noticed at least and I got 4 POP3, 3 Hotmail & 2 GMail accounts in there. As for Hotmail, Yahoo and a bunch of others, support, go to http://webmail.mozdev.org/ , works like a charm. And if your thinking of trying the 3.0beta you might need the nightly tester tools as well, it’ll give you the option to load plugins that isnt yet supported (works for firefox too, if you need it).
I was looking around for a replacement not long ago as well, but I couldnt really find any mail app that I liked, so I came back to the ol bird in the end again.
magOwl: What’s the big benefits in your opinion with the 3-beta release? I haven’t tried it myself, I’m just curious. I guess Lightning is even better integrated than in 2?
I’m a big fan of Thunderbird myself (and compared to Outlook it is imho indeed lightweight). The only thing I hate about it is it’s annoying repeating “enter password”-box when it fails to connect to a server (the server could be down or some other situation that you have no control over). But I know I’m not alone about being irritated by that issue and I hope they will make a more elegant way out of handling it.
Thunderbird…Its a nice piece of software…But what I HATE from mozilla is that show passwords option 
, it totally ruins it. I don’t like to know other people’s password when they accidently hit remember password…
When you don’t want to download full emails on the HD, try using IMAP (if supported offcourse)! It will leave the data on the server.
I use The Bat for several years. It is good, but I tried not much programms to compare it with.
+1
Once you go beyond POP, you don’t stop. Or something like that.
I just find it more sleek and less clunky in general, they’ve done some nice little things here and there like redesigning the header bit when you read an email, and brought back the rightclick an account and you got check new mails in the popup. It’s mainly just little things like that. I dunno how it integrates with lightning tho cuz I dont use it, but I agree with the “enter password” crap, annoying as hell hehe.
Well, thats what email clients DO, isn’t it?
As email clients go, Thunderbird is pretty good.
Not necessarily, as above stated, IMAP mail protocol gives an oppoturnity to preserve mail on a server and synchronize only needed mail folders on account. GMail should support this too, since it IS a webmail service.
All my mail is belong to server.
Oh yes, this was posted already but just as reminder:
http://webmail.mozdev.org/
will integrate webmail into Thunderbird.
And especially for GMail:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.p…12806&hl=en
Why I’m doing all the research for you? 
I live with all my mail accounts configured in GMail (4 accounts at this time). I just got used to GMail interface and now I think it is the most confortable UI I’ve used in mail clients. Keyboard shortcuts kick ass!
I think it’s pretty lightweight, but it is not a real mail client (can’t go offline).
I used to use Eudora on Windows, then later moved to Thunderbird but these days I am more than happy with Outlook Express.