Kia ora!
I’ve recently set up asahi linux on my macbook - it’s been probably 10 years since I last seriously spent time using linux, so I’m real out of the loop! I’ve been playing with hyprland and really enjoy it - its approach to window management and productivity is feeling really instinctual, which I love.
With that in mind, I’m on the hunt for email clients on linux - I’m open to trying a good few, because email is my bugbear and I’m invested in finding something that really works. Something that makes it easy to process them would be great - and if it’s customisable in terms of looks, even better!
You must log in or register to comment.
I’ve been using Thunderbird almost 20 years. It’s about to start having a makeover, so that could be interesting.
Thunderbird is and always has been the GOAT. The only real downside is the lack of a tray item, but this can be partially solved by installing Birdtray. I think Thunderbird 115 released with this feature, but it only works on Windows. Fingers crossed that it comes to Linux soon
What I don’t like about Thunderbird is the mbox mail format (one file per folder). It’s not a good fit for my use case — personal email where some folders can amass many thousands of messages — Thunderbird bogs down eventually.
I’ve been using Claws Mail, it’s fast and customizable, with great filtering and scripting abilities and tray notification plugin included. Claws uses MH format which is one file per message. But it doesn’t support maildir.
Evolution is another good client with the ability to use either mbox or maildir, but it stores the metadata in its own format.
mutt is the absolute best if you don’t mind a console client.
I heard good things about Balsa but last time I tried it (years ago) it was still not mature.
Thunderbird and it just got a massive makeover.
Another Thunderbird user here on Linux. Thunderbird makes it easy to enable GPG email encryption. I think Enigma is what I use.
I’m using Evolution on Gnome right now, it does the job. Still hoping for Gnome Mail to finally have a GTK4 mail app…
@jennifilm Isn’t Thunderbird open source? It worked well enough for the bit I used it ages ago.
Mutt. All mail clients suck, mutt doesn’t.
Mutt + procmail = ❤️
Clarification:
I prefer neomutt with mbsync and notmuch. Mutt wizard can help you get setup. Pandoc is great for formatting, and any browser can be used to view html if lynx is not good enough.
Mutt is a console based client, so if you have to deal with a lot of html or image laden emails it can be a hassle. There’s options for these things, mind you. You can call a text based browser to produce fairly readable text output within the client, or use an external application (browser, image viewer, etc.) to view it. Or anything in between. Mutt is extremely customizable. Just something to be mindful of.
That being said, I’m also quite happily a mutt user 😊.
Most of the time I just use the Fastmail web browser interface. I can access it over IMAP with Thunderbird butt it’s noticably slower. Depending who your email provider is you may find they have an acceptable web interface.
Oh yeah that’s a good idea actually - I use fastmail too and I don’t mind its UI, but I guess I could also play with its css to make some changes!
I use mailspring. Looks slick, it’s open source. Pretty easy to install via flatpak (and soso easy without flatpak)
mbsync/isync + maildir utils/mu4e + emacs
I used mutt and neomutt for years, but then I found aerc and I’m in love with it
This is great, thank you - I’ve been leaning towards mutt or neomutt, but this looks like a great solution!
This is great, thank you - I’ve been leaning towards mutt or neomutt, but this looks like a great solution!
This is great, thank you - I’ve been leaning towards mutt or neomutt, but this looks like a great solution!
