What email client are you guys using?
What email client are you guys using?
I just can’t find a decent email client that looks like it’s from the last 20 years. Geary and Evolution both appear to be pretty modern but something about using Gmail with a Yubikey just doesn’t work and neither of them will connect to my account. Both on Fedora and OpenSUSE. Thunderbird works but it’s so old fashioned and Betterbird doesn’t look much better. What’s everyone else using?
Thunderbird all the way 🙌
I have used Thunderbird for years. HOWEVER:
- I don't know why Thunderbird can't get a reliable, functional search ability. It's such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
- The problems connecting to gmail are also so frustrating. Yes, they are Google's fault but if you make an e-mail client you maybe need to add a workaround for the world's most popular e-mail provider. It's totally fixable because you can apply those fixes manually.
I don’t know why Thunderbird can’t get a reliable, functional search ability. It’s such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
Maybe see if Betterbird's search works better for you
Thunderbird for desktop computer, K-9 mail for mobile phone.
Did you know K-9 mail is soon to be thunderbird mobile
true
Sort of. They are going to keep maintaining K-9 mail with the current branding but there will also be a version of K-9 that is called is called Thunderbird for Android that will be themed like Thunderbird desktop.
Thunderbird is fine.
Maybe I have too much grey in my beard - I don't care how modern it looks.
Nah it has nothing to do with your beard colour.
I like it a lot and I'm almost as old or as young as Thunderbird is.
A lot of modern ones force you into the horrible 3 column layout and refuse to render the message under the message list.
I like the 3 column layout on larger monitors. I'm forced to use Outlook at work, and the 3 column layout works well on my 32" monitors. And as bad as a lot of Microsoft stuff is, they do a decent job with Outlook. At home, using a 16" laptop, Thunderbird with the traditional layout is my favorite.
Thunderbird. Hate the redesign. If it ain't broke dont fix it.
K9 for phone
I still have pgp signs, but no one has used it to encrypt back to me in years. Don't know why I keep those on there and active
Thunderbird + K9 Mail are my way to go, too.
Though I mostly do like the redesign, since it fixes some long standing issues with Thunderbird (e.g. not being able to select a multi line message view ("cards view"), instead of the traditional table view.) The search bar being always on top annoys me each time I open it, so I understand a more long time Thunderbird user might have more nitpicks. Almost all of the changes can be reverted through settings, which I find awesome.
I still have pgp signs, but no one has used it to encrypt back to me in years. Don’t know why I keep those on there and active
Me too. I mean if I got an email with someone's public key attached I'd send an encrypted reply. One day the person you're emailing will eventually do the same lol. (I mean I do get people sending me encrypted emails sometimes, but most of the time it's "wtf is this .asc file you've attached to this email")
The redesign is actually what convinced me to switch to Thunderbird. Otherwise I would've never used it since for me it was an eyesore!
The refactor fixed a ton of issues
Thunderbird on desktop, although I don't love it.
FairEmail on Android.
FairEmail is fucking awesome. If it were a sentient being or object, I'd pound it so hard. With consent, of course. Does everything I want and then some: fast, strips everything down to text, lets me appear to send from any address on my domains, blocks trackers, is constantly (almost literally) updated and improved, custom notification handling per folder, custom colors for messages/folders...
I'd pay for it again to get a desktop version, no hesitation about it. TB is /fine/ but... that one meme with the guy looking back at the other girl
Just installed it and woof, this is very good looking. I was waiting for K9 mail to get a few more updates before making it my daily driver, but this works really well already.
Also love an app with an FAQ that actually answers questions I'm thinking lol
Thank you for mentioning FairEmail, and thank you @[email protected], for elaborating on what makes it great.
Thanks to your recommendations I installed it last night and paid the $6 one-time license fee to unlock the advanced features. Being able to set custom notification sounds per sender is a feature I've been wanting on my phone for years. I finally have it now and it's already changing my life for the better.
^__^ yay! I'm glad to hear it. I've been using it for... 4 years, I believe, and it's just been fantastic for me, so I like to spread the word whenever it comes up.
I love fairemail. I had an issue with some mails I was getting regularly not rendering properly and the guy was so helpful that I donated again even though I already had the paid one (which confused him!)
Thunderbird. Idk what you mean by old fashioned. It works fine, and you can style it with gtk themes.
On Android I use K-9 Mail, which looks modern to me.
I mean everyone has their preferences, but personally I don't use email clients because I want to look at something pretty—I use them to read my emails. Thunderbird mostly matching my gtk theme is more than enough for me.
I don't know if you were aware of this but K-9 Mail has joined up with the thunderbird developers and will at some point transition to thunderbird for mobile devices
Woah, that's cool. Yeah I had never heard that but I've read the K-9 blog posts about it now. From the sounds of it, K-9 Mail is just going to continue developing along the same trajectory they were going on but are just going to change the branding to Thunderbird. Which is cool with me.
Thunderbird had a redesign not too long ago. I mean, maybe you still consider it old-fashioned, but did you check you're on the latest version?
Switched from the default win10 mail app to thunderbird about a year ago when the mail app started forcibly updating to the outlook and broke some shit on my windows installation to use a whole lot of resources. I quite liked the old mail app of the windows, but Thunderbird is quite enough of a replacement at default settings and much more customizable after fiddling. K9 has no difference than Gmail on default settings, either.
Why is Thunderbird old? It recently had a major redo and was rebranded with the supernova branding. Try the flatpak version.
I use Thunderbird and I don't think it looks old, specially after recent updates. You can also change the colors which is pretty cool.
Mutt.
What do you find "old-fashioned" about Thunderbird? Do you not consider an interface "new" if they don't change it and hide all the common features every five minutes like Microsoft does? It's an email client, you read your emails in it. How would you do it better?
"needs more whitespace and rollover disclosure on invisible icons"
Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that's definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.
What's even better is that Thunderbird somehow managed to do better branding and marketing than Microsoft. Outlook (new) is the dumbest name I have ever heard. And that's compared to Thunderbird supernova
Thunderbird with the conversations add-on. It's a game-changer that makes it much easier to transition from Gmail.
Interesting extension, didn't know about it, thanks!
Oh hi Jure of KDE fame ;)
How is KMail these days? I haven't used it in years. It always largely worked, but never really exceled at anything.
Wasn't it supposed to become Thunderbird for android?
You are mistaking KMail (desktop client by KDE) and K-9 Mail (Android client that is being rebranded into Thunderbird for Android).
You are thinking of K9
Thunderbird, much like Firefox, is the best because it's the least bad.
I just use Protonmail's web client. Fast, sleek, similar polish to gmail imo.
For an actual desktop client, Thunderbird with Dark Reader addon and some tweaks for theming.
Honestly though, I just prefer the web client from Proton, it's really nice.
Web browser
Despite all the other answers, I suspect Web Browser is the most popular. As web apps for email got better, development of desktop clients stalled.
Fast search through a lot mail takes some considerable resources to build, store and search an index, and web-based systems do that really well.
I’ve used about all of them over the years: Pine, Mutt, Thunderbird, Evolution, K-Mail and some others.
I eventually threw in the towel and use web UIs now. Fast, available everywhere and good keyboard support, especially when paired with a browser extension like Vimium.
mutt, because it looks like it's from the last 20 years. Of the 20th century.
Thunderbird. It's familiar to me and I like the calendar too.
Honestly there isn't a good one, Thunderbird is as close as it gets but it's buggy with things like CardDAV and it's slow.
Evolution. It works with MS Exchange.
I have an elderly and rather unloved Gmail account for testing and spam reception only and a couple of Yubi keys so I'll see what I can do with them. I probably ought to use the Gmail account more but I'm concerned that Google will kill it off 8) I got it when the G stood for gigabyte because everyone else set quotas in the 10s or low 100s of megabytes. "Do no evil" Google were as cool as fuck but that was a long time ago. Sad really.
I set up Evolution for my work office365 account. It worked exactly for 2 days. Now, it constantly keeps asking for password again and again and nothing shows up. I'm trying out Thunderbird with Owl plugin (trial) and that works flawlessly. Any tips on getting it to work on Evolution?
Am I the only one using Evolution here? I really like everything about it. All in one, simple, responaive.
I've switched my mum over to Evolution a few years ago, because it does some things better (message list can be configured to be less dense, which has been solved with Thunderbirds redesign). It's a great email email, but has it's own quirks because of how much it does, just like Thunderbird. Since I've used the latter for longer, I've no reason to switch.
Evolution is so great, if it was on Windows, if use it there too. Best email client IMO
Web browser and Proton mail app on my phone.
Claws-Mail is still alive and well and works great. Lots of plugins, you can write your own post processing actions, custom powerful filters, customizable interface etc.
I've used claws for like ten years and I have never felt any reason to switch, but OP's criticism of thunderbird is that it's too old-fashioned. Claws was more old-fashioned than thunderbird way back when I was trying out different clients, and has had no significant interface changes in the time since.
But yeah, claws is awesome. I can't speak for power users, but as someone who doesn't need a lot of features other than being somewhat idiot-proofed, it works great for me.
My work uses office365 and claws does not work with those mailboxes on its own, it took me a while to figure out the workaround. There's a libre program called davmail that will allow you to access office365 emails from any client, it's in the AUR and for Debian users I believe it's in the native repositories.
TBH I'm not sure what exactly OP wants. They like Evolution and dislike Thunderbird but they both look the same to me. All mail software on desktop has list of folders, list of messages and message view.
Yes to Claws-Mail. Absolutely wonderful...can use ProtonMail Bridge to get your ProtonMail on Claws. I use Thunderbird and Tuta, Proton apps in other contexts, but if I had to use only one, it would be Claws. The user remains in control there, stripping away HTML garbage by default.
After Thunderbird's UI overhaul I jumped around a bit and landed on Claws Mail. It's fairly old fashioned, but I personally prefer that and find it clear and logical. It's a good client.
Claws is awesome
Using Evolution for nearly a decade now.
Cannot say anything about using it with a Yubikey.
Concerning Evolution: It never let me down, always worked and is comparatively lightweight.
Thunderbird was quite slow/heavy/memory hungry many years back. KMail ate my emails, failed at integration of GMail accounts etc etc etc. In the past I also liked Sylpheed, but AFAIK it doesn't have any OAUTH support etc. by now.
When nothing big changes, I guess only Thunderbird and Evolution are good investments, because they seem to be the only clients which are stable now and have enough users/active developers to not disappear randomly.
gnus on emacs
Thunderbird. Being on Plasma, I would use Kontact / KMail but it randomly refuses to send emails for me.
Unironically neomutt
Once neomutt is set up, it just works. I've switched away from it because it doesn't support (some especially shitty) html mails well enough, which had me open them in a proper browser. Thunderbird doesn't have this issue and also works well with keyboard shortcuts.
K-9 on Android and Evolution on Ubuntu (Thunderbird is installed, too).
Def proton mail. I was using spark for my other accounts and it was pretty good. Then i got a new phone and never downloaded it agIn and i use the stock ios app.
I use the bird. Looks how I want email to look.
Betterbird, a Thunderbird fork and I installed it from AUR repo but it has a flatpak version too
Tuta's web client.
It gets the job done and I don't use email much any more.
Thunderbird on Fedora Kinoite and GrapheneOS ;) even though the Android version is still named K-9, based on Android Mail and waaaay smaller.
Proton web and Android app
The desktop app (Electron) works well FWIW
Thunderbird on OpenSUSE
Trying to get the hang of meli on my laptop & K-9 on (unGoogled) Android
Protonmail web client and Android app tbh
For work it's obviously outlook
doesn't have to be outlook! davmail (configured with the outlook client id) can provide an imap bridge for mbsync, thunderbird, etc to access in even the most restrictive O365 environments.
davmail.oauth.clientId=d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c davmail.oauth.redirectUri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oobThat's interesting. Do you know of something that can solve the contacts issue? I have 1 or 2 added contacts in Outlook but 140.000 other employees on the directory. When I need to send a mail I just type the name and Outlook web finds the person. I would really need that for a third party client. Also calendar. My company is super restrictive with this. No smtp access and no easy direct integration. I use web because Outlook (the program, but also everything Microsoft) sucks. On Android I use Outlook but I can't copy text or take screenshots, which also sucks.
i fear your best bet really is just using thunderbird or a fork of it and messing with themes.
I did have the same reaction on my first instal of thunderbird but after customizing it a bit i’ve come to like it
Betterbird
Evolution, Thunderbird and KMail, depending on the system. Though I've had only trouble with Thunderbird and gpg signing with a yubikey. The others just work.
On Android I'm using FairMail.
On Android K-9 mail is now under the Thunderbird umbrella
Betterbird (Thunderbird fork) for pc, K-9 for phone.
betterbird tray solution doesn't work on wayland, given a bug on common code (affects both, Firefox, Thunderbird and derivatives). Just in case that's one of the motivations of using betterbird. That by the way was the only feature that really made me look at betterbird, and as it didn't work, I went back to TB. And if you're wondering, birdtray doesn't work on wayland, 😑.
I’m using Evolution on Arch and Debian and works just fine for me.
I guess the question is, why do you need a client? I find most web interfaces to be sufficient, you can enable browser notifications, create an "app" so that it's in a stand-alone window, etc.
As another comment said, I just use the Proton web interface.
I think this is a fair question. I haven't seen anyone mention the benefits of using a non-web mail client (OP mentioned Yubikey but 2FA isn't uncommon with web mail). I would actually consider using one if it gave me clean up options (e.g. haven't opened an email in 3 days and the sender is not in my address book move to Junk/Spam). Main reason I rarely look at email is that it's 90% stuff I have no desire to read and marking things as spam is a never ending cycle.
It lets you have all of your emails offline as well. If you have to reference an older email, it's faster than loading the webpage again.
Some desktop email clients lets you manage your emails, contacts, tasks, and calendars all in one program, which loads immediately instead of loading multiple web pages. This is why I love Evolution and Thunderbird.
If you have multiple email accounts, it's easier to use an email client, rather than having to log into multiple websites.
The search function in some web interfaces suck.
Some people just don't like their email provider's web interface.
alpine
+dovecoat & postfix? :p
Just the successor to pine. It works with IMAP and SMTP.
I've tried elm and mutt many years ago back in the 90s and pine was the easiest. So I guess I just stayed there and it works over my ssh connections too. To be honest, the number of personal emails that I've written over the past several years can be counted in the dozens so it's not that important to change any more.
aerc with mbsync and msmtp and neovim for composing
Do you use it for work or personal? I have aerc installed and working for my personal email, but I found it harder to sort through HTML emails as quickly as something like Gmail. I gave up on it after a couple days, but really liked the keyboard-centric workflow.
I don’t work but I use a script using w3m to print HTML as text. You can find those in the aerc repo.
Mailspring, best client I've used in a while.
Last time I tried it, it had major issues with folders (for example, folders didn't refresh often enough, and notifications weren't shown for emails that are sorted into folders). I tried to fix it myself, but gave up after I couldn't figure out why it wasn't syncing folders properly: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/pull/2308
Agreed on Mailspring, especially if OP wants a modern interface (although I think the new Thunderbird looks fine).
The only thing missing from Mailspring for me is seeing what folders my emails are in when I run a search. Otherwise, it's the only non-CLI client I've found that let's me use the keyboard to select multiple emails and move them to a folder, something I do in Gmail. If anyone knows of others, let me know! I've tried Claws, Evolution, Geary, KMail, and Thunderbird in addition to Mutt and aerc in hopes of finding something to replace Gmail...
SeaMonkey.
Not well maintained
If anyone knows a client that can snooze mail on Proton and Gmail, I’d love to know about it. Until then I’m stuck using the web interfaces and their official phone apps.
I'm curious, how does snoozing help? First I've heard of the concept so I'm wondering if I'm missing out.
I found this addon for Thunderbird. Not sure if it's the kind of thing that will help.
My goal every day is to end the (work)day with an empty inbox. I reply to or act on messages that I can, and I snooze messages I can’t yet handle to a later date when I expect to be able to.
An empty inbox then means I’ve handled everything I could and will be reminded of everything I couldn’t yet.
I think the issue with mailmindr is that it works completely independently from the web and phone app snooze functions. Messages “snoozed” with mailmindr would not be resurfaced when not using Thunderbird which sadly makes it a no go for me. I don’t think there is really a solution to that at this time.
I was using Thunderbird, but I have had a number of issues with it. Crashing seems to happen whether I use the Flatpak or install from AUR.
I have switched back to using web clients for my mail for the time being.
I have never had thunderbird crash. Not questioning what you say but perhaps its sonsthing else? Did u try deleting thubderbird data and starting fresh ?
I will likely go back and try that. I however know just like in other email clients, if I have thousands of emails per account its bound to be slower. I did clean out each box. I plan to use Thunderbird again once I clear out all of those emails and consolidate to one email address.
I will have to investigate which directories to purge.
I am using debias as os , and never had a problem with thunderbird, did you used recently? I am not against web, but i manage 5 emails so no way the web is a option for me. Also i start to use the rss from thunder and is cool.
It was within the past week or 2. I completely understand. Thunderbird is awesome. It is likely an issue with my inbox sizes for the 3+ inboxes I have connected.
I'm using it on Windows at work and I was also surprised how often it just gets stuck. Deleting the database did help for some time, but then it came back every time I'm sending an email.
I wonder if it has to to with the email provider or something? It isn't fast for me but it gets the job done and is stable and predictable even with thousands of emails
Begrudgingly 2 of the 3 are Google email addresses, and 1 is a Microsoft email address. I will however be ditching both of those providers for something a bit more privacy focused soon and making those addresses burner addresses.
mu4e+mbsync+msmtp
I'm using Thunderbird.
On my work computers, I don't want the email to be stored locally since they back up the entire system to the cloud for retention and compliance purposes, so I'm using Roundcube (webmail app) hosted on the email server itself. I self-host my email server.
I know it's not an answer you expect but I just use the official web client. I hate how there's 2+ sidebars and a lot of features I don't need in standalone clients. I just need inbox, spam, trash and probably search.
Tuta Mail for personal
Thunderbird/K-9 (mobile) for my work's gmail since the gmail website is garbage
Proton web and mobile client. Also thunderbird
A combination of thunderbird and mutt.
And bluemail on android...
I'm lazy - just gmail pinned in a tab on my browser on my Linux desktop, the browser is always open anyway. Default mail client on iOS/iPadOS.
I've used Thunderbird in the past. The redesign was nice but it's still a bit cludgy to use somehow, compared to gmail web.
Don't know if this has been said but you are not supposed to use the yubikey on your mail client. Google recommends you use an application password for email clients. As someone who has 5 yubikeys for different services I know this sounds unsafe but is the only way I've been able to use some of the mail programs with Google. The other option would be to enable another 2fa (maybe auth codes with Yubico Authenticator) and use that on the mail programs.
For Google I ended up using web client and fido2 (and another yubikey as backup and another as auth code generator) and my work requires Outlook but they also ask me to change passwords each month and input them on different platforms that don't support f2 and that breaks a few things for me so I opted for Yubico Auth and use my yubikey instead of Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator.
The webmail interface and the app of my email provider (Tuta).
I use eM, it has tons of options and the mail rules are next level.
No Linux version 😔
Thunderbird on my pc and the default ios app on my phone for my non proton mail email accounts I just use the proton mail website when I use my proton email
i still have to use windows occasionally, and just run thunderbird on that. When on linux i use aerc because i way prefer terminal applications in general, but also i am lazy and the setup took about three seconds vs. mutt which requires a bit more work.
Thunderbird, k-9, and aerc
Vivaldi M3 on desktop, K9 on mobile.
I recently (months ago) switched back to Evolution from Thunderbird. I used both of them several years. I had a webmail phase in between. Thunderbird has/had enoying issues displaying mail threads.
For calender I switched to gnome-calendar, because it looks very modern.
I’ve been wanting something too! What I really want is something that interfaces natively with Exchange server as well as integrated inbox for multiple accounts.
The one product that exists is Blue Mail which is pretty nice except that half its functionality is broken. I’ve been in contact with their support multiple times over many months and eventually they just gave up. Its functionality is limited by arbitrary glitches and unknown limitations which they simply don’t want to bother fixing.
Thunderbird is working on enabling exchange, and meanwhile you can combine it with TBSync plus its provider for exchange AcriveSync extensions. And given TB hadn't care so far about tray, to at least avoid TB dying by mistake, you can also add Minimize on Close extension. Mail would still be IMap, so it'll work as long as the outlook provider enables IMap support, but for the company I work it's enabled. But such support is coming up on TB. Not sure if its solution would be 100% open source, but I hope it is, otherwise, I'm not sure if everyone will want to have a blob proprietary binary inside TB...
That’s interesting that they’re working on it now. But I guess better late than never. Anyway I’ll check it out, thanks!
I flip flop between emacs and Thunderbird I use protonmail and both work great Integration with protonmail calendar and drive either is poor or non existant, but I don't use/care about those features anyway
Thunderbird is very nice and lightweight compared with outlook. Picks up email settings more quicker and is much simpler to use than outlook. Recommended to all my clients.
Icedove (Thunderbird) works well enough for me. Maybe the reason it's "old fashioned" is because it works well enough that it doesn't need to be changed that often.
In the proprietary software world we're used to UI's being redesigned on a regular basis for no user benefit.
Thunderbird with the Proton Mail Bridge on desktop, Proton Mail client on mobile although I'd prefer to have all my mails on K9 since I have multiple mail accounts and haven't fully migrated from gmail.