Email under Linux is quite an adventure. I started out with using Mozilla (or Netscape) as an email client. But it never made me entirely happy. I used elm for some time, but that one I did not like at all. After some time I discovered Evolution which is an Outlook clone for Linux. I used the program for quite a long time. It was nice to have the folders and all the click-and use features. At some point I got tired of this beast as well. The connections to the IMAP server would get sluggish and my many mails in my inbox did not really help avoiding the sluggishness. Well, I started looking around again. And finally I think I found a mailer that I will be happy with. MUTT (also see my pages).
I just like this tool. You can have all the hooks you want, it supports IMAP, lets you configure whatever you want, is fast and the best feature is that I can use VI to edit my mails!
The next problem I faced was managing my addresses. Coming from a Windows world, I had like 500 addresses that I needed to import in whatever tool I would use under linux. Well, I found lbdb which is kind of like a middle-ware for managing addresses. You have a querytool (lbdbq) which you can start from within mutt. The backend can be all kinds of files. mutt-aliases files, LDAP servers, abook files, vcard files, and even your PALM And the vcard file is what I use to access my old contacts from the Windows world.
There are some more things I use. For example isync to sync my imap server with my local copy of the emails which I edit. This makes it possible to use mutt in an offline mode. Really nice!
To manage my addresses I just use abook. Which is linked into lbdb.
