I've been using Netscape 4.7x on Windows 2000 (and previously on NT 4.0) for several years now, but I'm somewhat sick of its limitations and bugs, so it's time to move on to other things. I tried transitioning to Netscape 6.2, but it's still decidedly incomplete in many aspects, and doesn't materially improve in others.

So, I'm up in the air about my other options and I realized this is the right (read: geek) crowd to ask for advice.

My requirements:

- Must let me store my mail on an IMAP server
- Must have some kind of support for HTML e-mail (I get several of these things every week and it's nice when they format inline)
- Must be secure against typical annoying e-mail worms that plague Outlook
- Must run on either Linux or Windows (my computer runs Win2000 natively and Linux via VMware, displaying apps with XWin32)

Stuff that would be nice:

- Emacs integration (so I can hack it upside down and backwards)
- Offline support
- Fast searching / indexing support

For the past day, I've been playing with Ximian Evolution 1.0. It works remarkably well for a 1.0 product, although it's definitely a bit rough around the edges. I'm currently hacking up a Perl script to convert my Netscape mail filtering rules to Evolution. Evolution can be extremely slow for some operations, particularly when it's never seen a folder before. But, it's a strong contender.

The tool I'm most intrigued by is Gnus. The manual, particularly how it describes the IMAP integration, is pretty weak. Does anybody here have experience using Gnus? It seems like such a nice idea, although I'm not sure whether I want to shift from my normal "mail reading" paradigm to Gnus's "news reading" paradigm. Years ago, I ran Mew, another Emacs mail reading, MIME-aware, front-end for MH. Mew rocked, but I had to drop it when I transitioned to the IMAP universe. It's not entirely clear whether Mew can work with IMAP or not since all the documentation is in Japanese. There are other Emacs mail readers as well (e.g., Wanderlust, VM, RMAIL, etc.) with which I'm even less familiar. Post about your favorite!
Also, for what it's worth, I use Outlook pretty extensively for my calendar and address book needs. I've considered using Outlook for reading my e-mail, but Outlook 2000, at least, crashes when I point it at my IMAP server. It sees all the folders and subfolders and just seems to go kaboom. Anybody have experience with Outlook XP? I'm not intrinsically opposed to using a Microsoft product, although the security issues with them are definitely bothersome.