Best Email Client

GUI: Thunderbird
Terminal: neomutt
Android: K-9 (soon to be Thunderbird)

66

Fairemail

30
I only use K9 on Android. Everything else, web-based.

5
Using Evolution for desktop but about to give Thunderbird another shot I think.

4
- Evolution here. I will likely never go back to Thunderbird.
  
  5

I’ve tried basically everything under the sun, and keep returning to Thunderbird. Thankfully they’ve fixed the endless amount of performance issues with it.

Everything else is either in a horrible state, abandoned, or paid spyware that used to be a free project originally

46

i've always used thunderbird and never had any reason to try anything else.

40

I tried Betterbird, but had no end of certificate errors and trouble. Went back to tbird and all good again.

4
- I had the opposite for some reason! Thunderbird started giving lots of weird errors, especially with Gmail, but Betterbird worked fine so I just ended up switching over.
  
  3
Does Thunderbird have unified inbox? And how well does it deal with Exchange? Just do imap mode?

1
- Yes to unified inbox, not sure about exchange but works well with IMAP
  
  2
- EAS is not implemented so imap and pop3 only. But i heard they currently work on EAS and should be arriving in the near future.
  
  For EAS there is also a paid plugin Owl i think.
  
  2

Thunderbird

40

I use Thunderbird. I'm sure there might be other ones that are better, but it does the job.

25

I'm boring and just use Thunderbird nowadays, but sometimes I yearn for those simpler days when I daily drove aerc.

13

Yeah every once in a while I get restless and start thinking I should learn how to use Mutt or something, but I always end up going back to Thunderbird/Betterbird lol

1

The web browser.

10

Do you have Mozilla Suite? /s

Which web client do you prefer?

2
- Firefox of course :) It's the last one that has no compromises. As an example, Brave offers similar adblock and privacy features, but at the cost of having to put up with Web3 stuff. wbu?
  
  3
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/09/why-use-a-mail-client-vs-webmail/

1

Mutt.

7

Thunderbird is the best IMO. Mailspring is also pretty good.

7

Great, a subscription based mail program. Because that’s clearly what people want and need, paying rent for the software on their machines.

2
- Nothing about the program itself is subscription based. All of the normal features of an email client (that you would also find in Thunderbird) are available for free. You only need to pay if you want to use their services like Send later, read receipts or link tracking, because these requires backend servers and actually costs the money.
  
  3

FairEmail

7

I personally use Claws Mail.

6

Whats the best email service? I use Thunderbird for just about everything, but gmail has been getting on my nerves lately. I would love to selfhost, but my internet service provider blocks port 25...

6

I personally like both Posteo and mailbox.org, but they are paid email services.

You can use them for your email, contacts, calendars, and tasks. On Android, you can use Davx5 to sync them.

8
I've been using Protonmail and it does the job (although not for free). To use it with Thunderbird I need to use a "bridge" background app to decrypt it though.

5
- Same here. That works well for desktop, they also have an electron app that wraps their web ui into a desktop app and it works well enough. Bridge works very well for any other desktop app you'd want to use.
  
  The only trouble is that on mobile your option is their app or the web interface, no ability to use alternative apps. The mobile app is good, but not great.
  
  Overall its a good service and I'm happy bit you need to know these limitations going in or it could be frustrating.
  
  5
Permanently Deleted

4
- I've done it once before with mailinabox. It worked for a while....then we moved.
  
  Just seeing what my options are. Thanks!
  
  1
Great question. Gmail is still OK, but if love to degoogle more.

3
- Yeah I would love to get off google. Good to know others are thinking the same.
  
  2

kmail...
it integrates well with, you know...
kde...

6

I tried KMail and Organizer for a few weeks, but they kept losing connection with Gmail. My calendar would get out of sync, and they only way to fix it was to reset the connection and redo all the appointments.

I'm sure it was user error, since I couldn't figure it out after spending a couple hours on it, so I just dropped back to webmail and not leaving the mail tab open all day.

2
- I tried using KOrganize which had KMail and some other stuff integrated together and ended up feeling like it was a gigantic, archaic codebase just hanging on by a thread. It struggled a lot with Gmail and several times I deleted my whole mail profile to try to fix some strange bug.
  
  If I recall, what did me in was that it would stop sending emails after running for a while. The fix had something to do with restarting Akonadi. It was really disappointing, because I love a good UI/Plasma integration.
  
  I use Thunderbird now and ... eh. It's ok.
  
  2

Still using mutt after two decades (with isync for fetching).

6

They all fucking suck

6

I prefer Claws Mail. It does what I need it to.

5

The interface is a bit bare bones and 90's but I like it that way. It's a good and reliable client.

3

I've just moved to Thunderbird. I was never keen on the old design and found it rather clunky but the new UI I find much better.

I was using Mailspring but it has recently just refused to work on my device and I never even got a response on the community forums so I've just given up on it.

5

Evolution currently. Previously Thunderbird. I wouldn't mind a newer client but I am only interested in native apps talking to my email server over open standards.

5

don’t really have a favorite – started with Thunderbird a long time ago but switched over to webmail fairly early on

now that I’ve started to build a new system, I started to look around at the various options (and maybe getting off webmail or at least having local storage “backup”) – the standard GUI clients (Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, BlueMail, Mailspring) seem to be … fine – but none of them really stand out

recently stumbled across some nice screenshots of aerc and the idea sounds really appealing, but I’ve never had any contact with terminal email programs and found out they’ve followed a completely different evolutionary path than GUI apps (even terminology has diverged between the two) – GUI apps keep trying to be an all-in-one (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, …) whereas terminal programs almost seem to to favor a “balkanization” of effort – aerc looks like it’s grabbed a middle-ground, you can run it as standalone or go all in with a fully customized setup – problem I’m running into is I can find lots of “how” guides, but very little in the “what” or “why” side of things …

4

mail(1) or nedmail(1) is all I really need.

I prefer mutt/neomutt, but Thunderbird comes by default in basically every desktop-oriented distro I regularly interact with, so I end up using that most often on *nix. K-9 if I want it on my phone.

My true love is the combination of acme(1) and faces(1), but that doesn't do encryption/PGP stuff.

4

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

4

That's a name I haven't seen in a while.

4

I like Evolution. Has email, contacts, calendar, and todos all in one. And pgp support out of the box.

4

Thunderbird

4

I use Thunderbird if I'm using Plasma and Geary if I'm using Gnome

3

Thunderbird’s not bad, but I usually use web stuff.

I have an existing iCloud e-mail that I haven’t had the time to switch off of. I then use G-Mail for school stuff - since I’ve signed away my soul to Google anyway, might as well use what they have to offer.

Maybe one day, I’ll start my own personal e-mail utopia, nut that day is not today.

3

To be honest, i still use Geary. It has a nice UI, and if you just read and write a small handful a month it still gets the job done.

2

Geary on mobile, Thunderbird on desktop.

2

I have everything aggregated into Gmail, so I just use web and the mobile app. I'm looking at Proton but it doesn't have the "send as" feature for external SMTP services the Gmail does.

2

What do you mean? I use a custom domain in proton so that my server sends emails from info@mydomain instead of my proton email. I have about 10 addresses with three different domains in the essentials plan and I can send emails from different containers as different emails

1
- That's only for a personal domain that you own and can set the DNS records for. But if you wanted to forward your gmail (or yahoo, or outlook, or whatever other provider that offers a public SMTP server) addresses to your proton mailbox, and be able send emails as those gmail addresses from within your proton mailbox, that's not supported. See here for what the feature looks like in GMail.
  
  3
This is exactly what I've been trying to move away from :/

1
- I'm honestly a bit surprised that Proton doesn't seem to have the send as feature. I was able to find at least 15 posts across their uservoice.com site and their Reddit forum, spanning at least 6 years, with one of the uservoice posts having over 300 votes. I just gathered up all the links and sent it into Proton Mail support. Hopefully having all that thrown at them in one big bundle will prompt their project managers to consider it.
  
  2

Evolution

2

Gnus, aerc, neomutt

2

I'm not a big email user, tried some of the clients multiple times and always return to web.

2

I like neomutt and kmail.

1

Gnus in Emacs, configured to use autocrypt.

1

How is autocrypt supported nowadays?

1
- Sorry for the delay, but the answer was long enough that I turned it into a blog post instead. Feel free to try it out.
  
  2

I used to have lieer's gmi (read: mbsync with gmail tag syncing) paired with notmuch. It's good when it works, but it's annoying to need a service in the background.

I used to use Gnus, but Gnus is sometimes weirds out if your tag filters are too complex for it

1

I use Mailspring. 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.

1

mu4e because it's the best email client which runs in Emacs.

1

Evolution, I wish I could use Thunderbird, but that crashes when signing mails with my Yubikey.

1

On my *nix machine I'm currently using NeoMutt & Aerc as MUA with different MTA/MRA. It suit my use case for reading lots of mailing list. Meanwhile on Android, currently using FairEmail. I was using K-9 Mail previously for over a decade.

1