Hi, I tried using an email client over a year ago, and after trying almost all of them in the span of a week I gave up in frustration. Would anyone have a recommendation ? For an email client :
- That is actively maintained
- That is not controlled by a company that could pull a Mozilla on it (Thunderbird)
- That isn’t proprietary
- That doesn’t need 77 dependencies and 450 GB (WTF KMail 😭 )
- That is reasonably fast and light and not too bloated (I just want to read emails, I don’t need a full app suite…)
- That supports POP
- That supports writing HTML messages (sorry Claws, I really liked you but occasionally I kinda need to write formatted messages to preserve other people’s sanity 😅 )
- That supports reading HTML messages without showing the HTML version as attachments so that every single email has the paperclip icon and I can’t tell which messages have real attachments (Sylpheed I think ?)
- That supports MailDir format for portability (why isn’t it the default everywhere already instead of weird non-portable formats ? 😭 )
- If possible, that doesn’t have an interface that’s so awful it’s a pain to find anything (Thunderbird)
I also tested Geary and another one but I don’t remember much about it… I can’t find out whether Geary does support POP and maildir, its documentation page is… well it’s a list 8 lines long, but on a page called “Documentation” so it’s technically counts as documentation I guess ? 😅 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary/Documentation
Any recommendation would be greatly appreciated !
Thunderbird. The “Mozilla problem” is greatly exaggerated and even if so, there are forks.
Thunderbird is independently developed from Mozilla and has been since 2020. It’s driven by the Thunderbird Council which is community elected. Its only link now with Mozilla Foundation is that it’s a financial subsidiary. But as others say, there’s also Betterbird if one still fanatically hates Mozilla.
I use Thunderbird and hate it. Full of bugs and cramdowns (not sure what the right term is) where they make a bad setting that you can’t undo. Also too difficult to find too many things. And way too many non-mail features. I haven’t bothered seeking a good alternative but Thunderbird leaves a lot to be desired. Forking isn’t likely to help much. It needs total replacement.
Betterbird
Evolution.
I have used Thunderbird a lot, but finally decided to go back to Evolution 2 years ago.
Just a note: its more of a Personal information manager(it includes calender,contacts,to do,etc) rather then just a email client
Well I year ago I would have said “no way I want an email client that does email and nothing else” but after trying so many of them I’m fine ignoring the stuff I don’t use as long as it doesn’t get in the way so I’ll look it up thanks !
I basically use it only for mail, although I have set up my calender there, too. The evolution-data-server makes it possible to access the calender entries using gnome-calender which has a modern gui.
You can still accept email invites in evolution and see them in gnome-calendar. It works very well with my radical server.
And second bonus, it integrates your dates with gnome-shell. Just disable notifications in evolution to don’t get them twice. (:
tell me you are heavily neurodivergent without telling me
Aww crap and here I thought I was approximating a neurotypical post by removing my rant about the other email client whose name I forgot which had several half-empty toolbars disturbing the hell outta me by taking up space for nothing 😄
I went through this same process and research and I landed on hosting Roundcube as a docker container on a server in my home built from the guts of my old laptop but you can run it locally too.
Lmao that’s what ChatGPT recommended after I ranted about all the email clients I had tried 😂
fetchmail/getmail6 to fetch the mails via POP3 in maildir format + a local roundcube server + CLI tool to still be able to read mails outside home but I thought I might be a bit overkill 😅
lol I am as dumb as artificial intelligence. fwiw I have it hooked to my reverse proxy and can just use the roundcube website on my phone externally, it scales nicely for phone screens.
Hey it’s not a dumb idea just because AI suggested it, ChatGPT probably just pulled that setup from somewhere on reddit I wasn’t saying it was stupid but the reverse : it probably would be too technical for me to set up and a bit overkill, but it’s tempting to try anyway. If you managed to do it it’s awesome !
Personally, I use mu4e (part of the mu software) to read, organise, compose and send emails. It uses a text-based interface, and runs from within the GNU EMacs editor. Emails are stored locally in the Maildir format.
- It is actively maintained and open source, and not controlled by a company
- Apart from xapian and EMacs, chances are that you have the dependencies already installed
- Mails can be composed in HTML format, but this may take a few extra tweaks. (I do not do this myself.)
- Emails have to be stored in the Maildir format to be indexed using mu and viewed with mu4e
- Neither POP nor IMAP are directly supported. To fetch or sync emails from/with an external server, external applications can be called, like mbsync (for IMAP), offlineimap (same), or fetchmail in unison with a locally running postfix MTA (for POP)
I am not sure if I can recommend this solution, as it can be a bit technical compared with other email clients. For me, it is entirely worth it, though.
mu4e
I hadn’t heard of it, thanks for the recommendation I’ll check it out ! It’s nice to see I haven’t tried everything yet 😀
If you’re going there, give mutt a go. It’s an extremely efficient experience, once you have got the basics down.
But multi-account usage in Mutt is really… leaving room for improvement.
Oh that’s a shame, I hope they manage to improve it it woul be very convenient
Unlikely, as even NeoMutt (which could improve it) still does it quite manually.
yeah, I use Thunderbird, but it bothers me how slow it feels and the frequent little UI bugs with unread flags not updating and the delay of messages to show up in the unified inbox.
It’s nice that Betterbird has a system tray (I can’t believe how a standalone desktop app for emails neglects this, like TB does), but it still inherits a lot of the problems TB has.
I do remember Thunderbird being kinda slow when I tried it on my potato grade laptop… I assume Betterbird isn’t any faster ?
I have tried kmail, Geary, mailspring before I landed on betterbird. I’m not sure what you mean with slow, but it works without issues on my pc. It does a lot of stuff, but it’s a fork of Thunderbird, which you want to exclude based on the initial thread. There are not a lot of linux clients even worth trying. Good luck finding your jam.
I meant not too slow to load on a potato-grade laptop… Thunderbird takes a while 😅 I hadn’t heard of mailspring before, I’ll check it out thanks !
Thunderbird is great. But if you don’t like it only because of Mozilla (the interface is customizable so that’s not an argument) there is a fork which does almost everything like Thunderbird, is slightly better on some points, and slightly worse on some others, called Betterbird. It has in my point of view no interesting point, but it’s not Mozilla.
It’s both but mostly Mozilla, I got fed up with Firefox and having to go through settings to see if there’s anything weird enabled by default like telemetry and ads, and never knowing when Mozilla might add yet another wonderful opt-out feature like “privacy preserving ads”. I really don’t want to go through the same thing with my email client and my trust in Mozilla is somewhere down in the Earth’s mantle. But I guess I shouldn’t have called it “awful” since it’s very subjective, for me personally it was a pain to find anything when I tried, even after trying to tweak it. I didn’t know it had forks though, thanks I’ll check them out !
Vivaldi has integrated mail client.
