Eric Shubert wrote:

Craig White wrote:

On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 17:20 -0700, Jim March wrote:

When I mean "big", I mean out past 2gig in a matter of a few days.  I
have somebody who wants to convert who is likely THE biggest EMail
volume user that anybody's ever seen.  And somebody literally famous
enough that if she jumps to Linux, the news will make Digg and Reddit
in a matter of days.

She also need to deal with multiple accounts.  She's on Outlook now.
I'll almost certainly be her them to Ubuntu Intrepid, although Jaunty
in beta is looking SO good right now...

Anyways.  Suggestions welcome.  I know for a fact she'll overload
Thunderbird if we try that!  Would the latest Evolution work, or
should I be thinking of a text-based reader, or...???

----
Evolution looks/feels like Outlook which may provide comfort. I have
used it for many years and I'm comfortable with it and I am on a lot of
mail lists and often get 1000+ e-mails a day.

I find that less important than the actual e-mail program used is how
e-mail is stored because if you have a LOT of e-mail, local stores of
POP3 account e-mail in mbox can really drag down the performance and
make it hard to move from program to program.

I know some will think this is overkill but I think that the only way to
go is to run your own IMAP server, use fetchmail or getmail to retrieve
e-mail from various accounts if you have to and use dovecot or
cyrus-imapd to provide IMAP to mail clients. This way, you can use
whatever mail program you want or try them all and from various
computers and your mail is already marked read/replied to/deleted etc.

Once a serious e-mail user catches on to the value of having your own
IMAP server, they will never give it up.

Craig

PS Dovecot and cyrus-imapd use similar but different 'Maildir' format to
store mail (never use mbox).


I whole heartedly agree. Having your own IMAP server is great. I believe 
that's a more important/significant decision than which client to use.

P.S. I expect Personal Servers to be more and more common in the coming 
years. Why wait? Build your own today!

I know this probably sounds like a commercial for Google, but you can easily setup a gmail account to fetch mail from other mailboxes, and then use the gmail web interface as well as access gmail via IMAP. That way if there is a 2GB inbox and your IMAP client is choking on it, you can just use the gmail web interface to go in and deleted stuff, and also take advantage of gmails excellent spam filtering.

That being said, my line of thinking is that someone who has never used linux before, is in no way ready to setup and run their own IMAP server, spamassasin, etc. Its certainly good to learn those things, but I have seen hardcore MS users get the "deer in the headlights" look just from seeing a bash prompt. You don't want to scare her away with a steep learning curve. Even if you set it all up for her, just the perceived complexity and lack of understanding of whats running the backend can make it seem daunting to a newbie.

If you are prepared to setup everything for her and be her support person 24/7 and all she knows is "I click this icon and I am supposed to see my email", then I wish you luck and success.