Desktop Mail Client Requirements

[GMail](http://gmail.com “GMail: Google Web Mail”) has been getting slower and slower for me over the past few months. I have been dealing with it because I love the features they offer. Thier web based client is nice, albeit a bit slow lately, they allow me to use one account for all the email address’s I have(about 5) and let me send out as those email address’s from the same account. I don’t want to have to deal with 5 different POP connections, or even worse 3 POP connections and 2 IMAP connections, it would get to confusing. I only receive about 6% of my mail at my other email addresses as well, it seems like to much work to go through just to get a few email when they can simply be forwarded. I submit the following list of requirements for a desktop mail client. If anyone know of a client that supports all these features please let me know.

* Quick, no memory/CPU hogs
* Custom From: headers based on what address the email was sent to(automatic preferrably)
* Good filtering – I am on a lot of mailing lists and I like to keep my inbox pretty empty, having to move a bunch of emails to thier respective folders annoys me
* Pretty – not a requirement, but it would be nice
* Standard MUA features(folders, unread counts, spell check, etc)

Back when I used linux as my desktop OS I used an MUA called [mutt](http://mutt.org) and it was absolute heaven. It was terminal based, and thus very quick. It was configurable and scriptable to no end. There was nothing I wanted it to do that it couldn’t do. Unfortunately I have since lost my mutt configuration file, which took me initially a day and a half to write, reading through the manual, and months and months of tweaks beyond that. Also being a pure MUA, it does not do any retrieval or sorting of messages. I had a combination of [fetchmail](http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/), [procmail](http://procmail.org), and [ssmtp](ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/mta/) setup to retrieve all my messages, sort them all out into thier respective folders, and set out emails to the correct smtp server based on who the email was sent from(configured in mutt, not ssmtp). That was all alot of work that I do not wish to replicate again. It was very fun to learn, and if I ever used linux again I would have that same setup, but I tried getting those working on OS X and I just had headache after headache. So if anyone knows of an application for OSX that meets those requirements, please let me know by leaving a comment or [contacting](http://irgeek.net/about/contact/) me via email.

BTW … blogged from TextMate =)