[orca-list] Accessible email clients; really need an alternative to thunderbird

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
I know I have written about this before, but I never really found a 
satisfactory alternative. So as a last try I will try and be very 
specific in what I am looking for.

OK, as many will know I really am not happy with the quality of 
accessibility in Thunderbird, Mozilla just don't seem to be able to deal 
with the problems and accessibility requirements seem to be a second 
rate citizen (justification: Some of the accessibility issues are so 
obvious and critical to use, that should a non-disabled user be faced 
with such issues they would never make a release of Mozilla products, an 
example being Orca echoing the text being entered in edit fields, would 
non-disabled users stand for not knowing what they typed, why should 
we?). There are other quality issues I have with Thunderbird but we'll 
leave those for now.

Now to the positive look on things, what alternatives are there? 
Evolution normally is the obvious one. Yes I have used it back in the 
past (back in the gnome 2.18 and 2.20 days. While I could use it then, 
to me it always felt like its usability lay somewhere between difficult 
or clumsy. Some of the specific issues were finding attachments, being 
able to open individual messages in list digest messages as an 
attachment (like I can in Outlook Express on windows or Thunderbird) so 
I can reply to individual messages rather than the digest one and also 
evolution can feel like its interface is just a bit cluttered as it has 
calender and other features I do not tend to use (see below for what I 
really would want from an email client). If anyone could point me to 
good documentation on using evolution (particularly as an orca user and 
using evolution from the keyboard, may be my problems with evolution 
could be overcome as I might be able to use it more efficiently.

Another alternative which has been suggested to me is balsa, but I never 
really got to grips with that.

I know that another alternative might be to look at text based clients. 
The only ones I really got on with were pine and cone. Anyway, I feel 
text base clients may be off the cards as I feel Orca isn't great with 
text based software. Speakup would be my preferred choice for screen 
reader with text based software, however it just doesn't load on the 
computers I would install Linux on.

OK, here is what I am looking from the email client:
Accessible with Orca: As I noted speakup doesn't work on my Linux 
systems so Orca is what I will be using, so in my opinion that rules out 
the text based clients.
Simple interface, focused on what is wanted: I only really want it for 
mail, things like calenders are just a waste of space to me. The main 
places I use in the email client is the folder/account tree and the 
message list. More than that in the main view is more than I want, I may 
find search useful but I don't mind going to the menu for that.
Multiple account support: It should support more than one account, with 
different outgoing servers for each account.
Ability to access the individual messages in a mail digest: I have most 
of my list subscriptions set to digest (eg. that is how I have the orca 
list set) but I have it set to mime for the format. This means that in 
Outlook Express on windows and thunderbird on Linux I can access each 
individual message sent to the list by viewing the attachments of the 
main digest message. This works quite well to keep things tidy. May be 
rules could help here and that I could receive separate messages and use 
rules to separate them into folders, but unless that is done on the 
server I need to set up those rules on every computer (undesirable 
thought) and I am unsure whether I could set these rules on the server.

I think that covers the main things. Any suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Michael Whapples