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!
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I’ve been using Thunderbird almost 20 years. It’s about to start having a makeover, so that could be interesting.
I am also using Thunderbird since many years. I used KMail for some time but run into problems too often.
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.
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.
I am on the Claws Mail bandwagon. I didn’t like it at first, but after a few years I am used to the way it works.
Another Thunderbird user here on Linux. Thunderbird makes it easy to enable GPG email encryption. I think Enigma is what I use.
Mutt. All mail clients suck, mutt doesn’t.
Mutt + procmail = ❤️
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 😊.
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.
I use mailspring. Looks slick, it’s open source. Pretty easy to install via flatpak (and soso easy without flatpak)
I used Thunderbird for a year but I don’t recommend it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a competent email client, but I’ve found that the lack of tray notifications is unbelievably annoying. That means you can’t really have it running headless in the background checking for emails. Birdtray is kind of a janky solution that I don’t recommend either.
Mailspring I’ve found has most of the features I’d need from a mail client. It also does have a real background process that can check for mail and notify you when you receive some.
The application with the best integration to your (GNOME) desktop is going to be GNOME Geary. It looks like a native GNOME app (because it is) and it fits in perfectly with your system. But it’s very light on features. If you only need a client to read and write simple messages, Geary will work wonderfully.
@NateNate60 I would recommend Thunderbird (longtime user), but as you say it lacks integration into the system. Relatively recently wrote my own extremely simple new mails checker extension for Qtile. And the mail client double works as my RSS reader as well, since I discovered that ability.
mbsync/isync + maildir utils/mu4e + emacs
