I'm getting depressed with KMail, it seems to be almost as woeful as Outlook. Evolution is so much better, but I'm not sure how it's going to operate under KDE, so does anyone have any recommendations for other mail programs, or should I just try Evolution?

evolution will run fine on ubuntu
have you considered thunderbird with the lightning calendar add on
you will have to use the nightly builds for lightning for it to run in the latest thunderbird
but with the lightning nightly builds updater installed it works very well as a lightweight PIM

i have it running/working on ubuntu, openSUSE, OS X and win XP …

Whoops, probably should have mentioned that I'm running openSUSE 11.2 atm., having a mess around with it.

I could install Evolution, but then I don't generally like running programs designed for Gnome in KDE.

then try thunderbird its about as cross platform as you can get …

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

Evolution will run just fine under KDE - YaST will simply install the relevant Gnome libraries and runtimes.

If I might ask, what are your beefs with KMail? I don't use it myself so I'd love to know

It seems painfully slow, and it takes almost as long as Outlook to sync my Gmail folders. It seems to take 10x longer doing it than Evolution. As above, I try not to run Gnome software under KDE if I can help it, I'll look into Thunderbird instead.

Fair enough but.....

... the system is designed for you to do that

In fact you are already if you use GIMP or Inkscape

Let us know how it goes

Yeah I know it is but I generally find that such programs are unstable (or at least not as stable) and it adds unnecessary bulk to the system. I'll certainly report back.

Unstable?

This isn't Ubuntu you know - (joke)

The applications, not the OS.

Although emesene seems to despise SUSE 11.2 for some reason.

What's wrong?

Well this time around it's crashing upon opening. I get around 10 seconds of jumping icon and then....nada.

Last time there were some theme issues that prevented you from logging in (but I found a work around for that).

I know it's not the same but have you tried Kopete?

I much prefer it to be honest

Yep got Kopete, don't tend to use it though - don't really know why either.