[vox] Claws Mail vs Thunderbird

[Rod Roark]

This is just to relate a recent experience... perhaps some others will
get something from it or have useful information for me.

I recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 12.04 (from 10.10).  Not an
in-place upgrade, but rather installing 12.04 in a new partition and
copying over configurations and stuff.

Aside from having mixed feelings about Unity, I noticed that
Thunderbird was now eating gobs of memory.  Over the course of a day or
so it would fill up the laptop's 2 GB RAM and starting getting into
swap space and slowing everything down.

Also tried Debian 7 and Icedove (Debian's name for Thunderbird) and
noticed a similar thing, though memory usage seemed to grow at a slower
rate.  Googling the problem turned up inconclusive results, some mix of
denial, stonewalling and blaming users for having too many messages
in their folders.  I use IMAP exclusively and have accumulated a bit
South of 40,000 messages among various folders.

So I started looking for alternatives and found Claws Mail, and tried
it out.

Very nice!  It seems to be stable, with a rich set of features and
available plugins, well designed and very usable.  And it's running
right now in a steady 35 MB according to Ubuntu's System Monitor.

Y'all have a nice weekend.  :)

Rod