What email client are you guys using?

twinnie@feddit.uk to Linux@lemmy.ml – 164 points –

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?

182

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

Wow very interesting thank you! I like that it can be run side-by-side from the same profile to test it out. If search was fixed I would have never migrated so much of my e-mail to gmail.

Are you taking about the semi recent rewrite or the old discontinued version?

All versions over the past decade including the latest one

Thunderbird for desktop computer, K-9 mail for mobile phone.

Did you know K-9 mail is soon to be thunderbird mobile

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.

I gotta tell you... If you're almost as old or young as Thunderbird that makes you a graybeard. Do me a favor. Next time you get out of a chair, try not to make a noise. We all find out we've turned old somehow.

Just so its clear this comment is coming from a loving place I love Thunderbird and you seem nice and I enjoyed your comment. Just razzing you a little bit as someone else who's also around the same age as Thunderbird

I don't have a beard yet but sure.

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!

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 @wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world, 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. It's great

I am not sure how to make it look shitty like Gmail, maybe you could theme it to wast a ton of space.

Seriously, do you want a useful email client or not?

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.

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.

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.

Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.

It is but the "holy trinity" of Ui/UX design Apple, Google and Microsoft have been pushing this for years now.

My eye twitches anytime I go onto a webpage that's just a phone app in the middle of my screen with two blank voids on either side.

Information density MUST be suitable for humans. Usability and productivity both have nothing in common with amount of clicking and scrolling required.

Just imagine making your font size something about 5px. And 1.0 as a line height. Sounds good, isn't it? There ia so much information displayed on the screen.

If you need less information on screen, they invented a great thing for that in the 90s: resizable windows. And later, HiDPI-aware interface scaling.

That is the right way to control information density. The user can control both of these however they like and set it to whatever they work best with, and it applies across the system. You can’t do that with usually custom written interfaces that insist on putting like two lines of text worth of whitespace between every UI element.

Agree. But we could say tthe same thing in the opposite direction: if you need more information on your screen, just use scaling and font settings :)

Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn't work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I'm not sure how that's supposed to increase usability.

That's great. And if something is comfortable for you to use, it doesn't mean it would be comfortable for the majority of other people.

Maybe you use large screen(s). Maybe your information is not important and/or the interface doesn't require actions. Context matters.

As a user of 13-inch 2560x1600p screen, I definitely can say that apps need more whitespace to be usable. I've also been using 2 monitors 27-inch each some time ago. And yes, such a configuration allows for a greater density of information on the screen.

That's why I say (again): information density must be comfortable for humans. In their contexts of course.

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

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.

Why is Thunderbird old? It recently had a major redo and was rebranded with the supernova branding. Try the flatpak version.

I'm using KMail (part of Kontact PIM suite)

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).

Old school here, I use mutt. :P on android I use FairEmail and really like it.

FairEmail is great! One of the best email clients I've ever used.

It started struggling a bit with a large mailbox though, so I switched to K9 Mail (which I've heard will eventually become Thunderbird for Android)

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.

Web UIs rarely support everything one needs; usually they support their own system and maybe a little bit of bonus.

Outlook web for hosted Exchange won’t even do multiple mailboxes in a unified Inbox, even on the same account!

Right. I’m glad there are options. Despite their flaws, web UIs for email are massively popular.

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 was surprised to see it doesn't suck anymore, I'm using it with my mailbox.org and old gmail account. The state of Wayland native email clients isn't great, I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when I eventually switch to Cosmic.

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?

I'm not all in on MS online yet so I can't help you. We run Exchange on prem. I am the MD of my company and have views about the way forwards (and it won't involve MS)

The owl plugin for Thunderbird is very good. I have bought a paid subscription to that. Everything works fine with Thunderbird now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thunderbird. Being on Plasma, I would use Kontact / KMail but it randomly refuses to send emails for me.

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.

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 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

Tuta's web client.

It gets the job done and I don't use email much any more.

Proton web and Android app

The desktop app (Electron) works well FWIW

Thunderbird on Fedora Kinoite and GrapheneOS ;) even though the Android version is still named K-9, based on Android Mail and waaaay smaller.

Thunderbird. I even use it as my RSS feed reader. The only problem it has is it does not have any tray icon to indicate new unread mails (I wrote my own program for this). They are working on a tray menu, if I'm not mistaken. I have 5 mail accounts from different providers. Backing up is easy, and on a new OS installation I just need to copy over the entire directory and its like I never left my system (same for Firefox).

I cannot believe I used xbiff in the 80s to know when I had a new email, and in 2024 the most well known and old thunderbird does not...

xbiff was usually watching a file - your mailbox - on the mainframe, which would have been updated by the mail server daemon. Heck, it could be set to watch any file to see when it updated.

Basically, you could still use xbiff if you emulate that setup using your own local mail server as a proxy. (And you're using a GUI that supports it. No idea if Wayland does.)

I remember that was an add-on for this.

I used an addon in the past, but experienced problems at some points. Also could not find any addon that supported what I want to do, supporting RSS feeds as well or better yet, Unified Folders feature of Thunderbird. Maybe it was a configuration issue, but I ended up writing my own fast solution, that also works on commandline and can be added as a widget to any environment. Why not link it here :D https://github.com/thingsiplay/peepbird

You can use birdtray for notifications

Did you mean birdtray? It's in the AUR and I try to install mostly (not a hard rule) from official repositories.

It should be in the Debian repos

You probably can install it with distrobox

That's too much. Distrobox and then installing from another distribution, different package manager and repository is not something I want to do and maintain. Just checked it, its in the Flatpak/Flathub repository.

And I remember using birdtray in the past, but uninstalled it for reasons I forgot. I think it did not support what I needed. Meanwhile I have my own custom solution, so its fine for now. Thanks for the suggestion however.

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:oob

That'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.

That's great but not that useful or needed. I need full exchange support for calendar, contacts etc. IMAP just doesn't cut it

For corporate work it's not really my stance on software that is important, it's the company's. And id rather be as frictionless as possible with company policy.

I get not wanting to find yourself in the crosshairs of IT policy people. And more so, having reverence for security measures. But, at least for the enterprise software I interact with, I don't see security implications and don't feel the effort to be frictionless is symmetric. I see the opposite. Policies increase insecure behavior and are obstacles to my job.

Methinks those making purchase and policy decisions are not those who interact with the consequences (use the software in anger). I've been on the receiving end of some sales pitches -- the users are often an afterthought, not a priority. It's hard to respect the spirit (if not the letter) of bad policies, especially when the polices are hostile to me-the-user and getting-my-job-done.

Currently grinding my gears: Why are we using MS Teams? Why does Teams block firefox (and safari, based on user-agent of all things!)? Why is IMAP disabled?

Teams because already use office / exchange and teams is integrated and "free"

We primarily use slack for communication, so I don't have to use teams much, except for meetings

It's all just tools and they work reasonably well if you use them as intended.

I don't share your views on policies though, it's important that people don't do their own security assessments and follow what the ciso / security architect has intended. If you disagree, take it up with them.

Give the aforementioned davmail main page a look! The diagram does a pretty good job showing it's capabilities. Among other services, davmail bridges to LDAP (contacts) and calDav (calendar) too!

I pull my work outlook calendar and personal google with vdirsync and khal on laptop and desktop.

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.

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, 😑.

Thunderbird and K-9 (which will soon be Thunderbird mobile). I'm not a Thunderbird Stan or anything, but I was running into issues with Claws, Seamonkey, and Fairmail

Trying to get the hang of meli on my laptop & K-9 on (unGoogled) Android

I use super boring Claws Mail for my personal email. I handle my contacts with Khard and calendars with Khal.

I don't use a Yubikey though.

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 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.

My inbox has upward of 17,000 emails and thunderbird doesn't have any issues with it. So it should be okay with it.

Guess I will have to play around with it again. I never really investigated the crashes. Just moved away from it as email isn't as important to my personal life as it is to my work life.

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.

Why do you install Thunderbird from the AUR? It's available on the official repository in Archlinux repos (and all distros based on). And updates are extremely quick. Can't say anything about the Flatpak version, because I never used it other than "native" installation. I am using it since over a decade and don't remember having crashes, maybe once in a while (1 time per year maybe fault of something else). I actually use Thunderbird with 5 accounts from different providers, plus use it as my RSS feed reader, because its stable for me.

I know saying "it works for me" won't help you, but maybe its an indication that something else is wrong. I would recommend to install it from official repository instead.

I may have misspoke, I use an AUR helper to install many programs and utilities, and am not at my computer to view the actual source. So I took a gamble and guessed AUR. My apologies.

It could have been other instability, as I mentioned in another comment I didn't really look too deep into it since it wasn't so important. And by no means am I blaming Thunderbird (regardless of source) for the issues I have had. It truly is a great email client.

Edit: It is from official source, not AUR. I have the same setup on my personal laptop. It came from Extras, and not AUR.

May have to investigate a bit. May have to figure out each directory to purge, do a pacman -Rnsu thunderbird

Then purge directories related, then reinstall.

I see. Well Thunderbird is not the only mail client, there are other good alternatives. Hope you find something that works for you. Who knows what the actual problem is, sometimes one can't figure it out and has to use an alternative.

I want to investigate it. I know it works well on my laptop, which the big difference in the 2 is that one is an Nvidia GPU and the other an Intel Integrated. So it could be video related. Who knows.

Thank you all the same!

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.

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 guess the question is, why do you need a client? I find most web interfaces to be sufficient

Clients like Thunderbird download the mails for a local copy. That means, you can a) read and search your mails offline, b) backup all mails. That's not all. Such a client also: c) allows a unified interface to all different mail accounts from different providers in one view, d) better integration into your system, such as tray icons for notifications.

Everyone does their thing, so not saying you are doing it wrong, just giving you reasons to use an offline mail client; as you asked why.

Those are all totally fair considerations, just not requirements in my workflow. I'm coming at it from a personal use case, where I don't need offline access to my personal email, and I only have one email account to check (my Gmail is forwarded to my Proton mail).

My question was more to lead OP down the requirements gathering path, to evaluate their actual needs and if a client is actually required or if it's more of a "nice to have".

Thanks for laying out some of those advantages to a client though. Every user has their own needs and if offline access, multiple accounts, consistent UI, etc. are desired, then a client is certainly a great option.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’m using Evolution on Arch and Debian and works just fine for me.

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

Notifications on folders a have been added (I sort all my mail into a plethora of folders, keeping my inbox empty, so for me this is non-negotiable), and they all sync with a single f5 now.

Might be worth checking out again?

Interesting... Which email provider do you use?

Can you choose which folders use real-time push vs which folders use polling?

Fastmail.

Can you choose which folders use real-time push vs which folders use polling?

I'm afraid not. I'm pretty sure the entire account uses polling. I'll usually open the app and hit F5 to quickly poll for results, otherwise I'm waiting for the next sync.

Having said that, the unread counter works fine for sub-folders:

Edit: I was wrong, Mailspring uses the IMAP IDLE extension to wait for new mail delivery. Still doesn't stop me from spamming F5 when I'm waiting for new mail to arrive.

I was wrong, Mailspring uses the IMAP IDLE extension to wait for new mail delivery

The reason I was asking about the folders is that IMAP IDLE only works for one folder at a time. If you want real-time push for 10 folders (for example), it has to open 10 separate IMAP connections. Because of this, clients usually either only enable push for the inbox, or let you choose which folders to enable it for.

Aah, now I understand.

There is no such setting that I'm immediately aware of - but I am automatically getting messages for my folders. So I'm assuming it's doing something in the background: most likely a periodic sync for the entire account.

Definitely doesn't sound like the behavior you wanted, my bad. But, at least there are notifications on the folders once mail is received. 😅

Edit: In the repo for their sync engine it explains:

Mailspring uses a fairly basic syncing algorithm, which runs on two threads with two open connections to the mail server. Within each thread, work is performed synchronously.

Background Worker: Periodically iterates over folders and (depending on the supported IMAP features) uses CONDSTORE / XYZRESYNC to check for mail or performs either a "local" or "deep" sync of part of the folder's UID space.

Foreground Worker: Idles on the primary folder and wakes to syncs changes. Also wakes to perform other tasks, like fetching message bodies the user clicks.

So the foreground worker only idles on the primary folder, but it does slowly iterate over all folders in the background.

No settings have been added for this functionality (that I'm aware of).

Edit 2: Went back and read your original comment; hadn't noticed the PR was yours. If that's the case then you're probably aware of how the sync works anyway. My bad if I've posted stuff you're already aware of.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

If exchange servers and outlook.com weren't total dickheads about their very special and proprietary Auth methods I'd literally never use outlook as a client

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.

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 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 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

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.