This is the most popular e-mail program for Linux. Evolution has many great features and is a good choice for business users who need to work with Exchange servers. You can also sync easily with your PDA. Evolution is a doppelganger for Microsoft Outlook, so Outlook users will feel comfortable with it. If you do not need the extra calendar and PIM features, you might want to think about one of the smaller dedicated e-mail programs.
KMail
Great
Great
Lots of mail programs give you more features than you'll ever need to use. KMail reduces the number of features to the ones you are more likely to use. The program is quick and efficient, and is a great choice for any KDE user who wants to stick with the seamless KDE scheme, users of KDE's Kontact, or anyone who wants to have an e-mail program that keeps it simple.
Mozilla Thunderbird
Great
Great
This is a great program for anyone who wants a simple yet extensible dedicated e-mail program. The base of Thunderbird trims out all the extras to give you a clean and usable e-mail experience, but the program has great flexibility in its layout and in adding extensions. The spam filtering in Thunderbird is currently unsurpassed by other e-mail programs. Enter prise users will not be able to use this program with Exchange servers, though.
Pan
Great
Good
Pan is probably the most robust dedicated news reader program for Linux right now. It is a GTK/GNOME program, but it also has KDE bindings. The program speeds up slow news tasks such as downloading binary files by allowing for multiple connections.
KNode
Good
Great
Although it is not as powerful and complex as Pan, KNode is a solid program with a nice interface. The basic newsreader functions are there in a prettier package, but this might not be the news reader for anyone who downloads lots of binary files or wants a lot of custom options.