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Free E-mail Clients

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An e-mail client, also referred to as a 'mail user agent (MUA)', is a program which receives, sends and manages e-mail. E-mail clients are usually thought as either being a POP client or a IMAP client. It's also fairly common for a client to support both POP and IMAP. But they usually only use these protocols to receive messages. In virtually all cases the client uses SMTP to send e-mail's to an MTA.

Likewise, although it is not a standard practice, most client will automatically format messages into MIME. A client which does not support MIME is severely hampered, because most e-mail's are now sent MIME formatted. Some other essential features of a client are being able to encrypt messages, edit HTML and filter spam.

A good majority of clients are free, and a list of the most popular is provided below,

Resources: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/most-popular-email-clients/9340/, http://www.email-standards.org/clients/, http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Email_Clients_and_Patches