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Ask Slashdot: Current State of Linux Email Clients?
mcloaked writes "We get all kinds of news about new developments, but one subject has been lacking for some time and that is email clients for Linux (or Windows for that matter). A number of reviews (mostly not all that recent) have pointed to the main clients as Thunderbird, Evolution, Claws-mail, and Kmail as possibilities. Up to about a year ago, Thunderbird seemed to be 'the' email client with the best mix of positives. However there are no recent reviews that I have seen. In the meantime Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change — and little new development. Thunderbird also won't be significantly altered in the future, if one interprets the available news information. Evolution is reported to be rather prone to bugs, and Kmail even more so. Claws-mail has limitations, as does Kmail. So where is the future of Linux email clients going, absent any real innovation? We need a well maintained and capable mail client, preferably with good calendar integration (webcal/Google calendar), properly supported HTML composing, good maildir format storage for local mail, and good security support (including the capacity to deal with both GPG and S/MIME encryption and signing). It needs a modern UI and good import/export facilities, as well as good integration with its address book, including import/export of addresses. Are we likely to see this kind of package as we move into the future, or will mail clients slowly disappear? At the moment it looks like email client support is dead — Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"
IMO mutt is still king
Yes
on xemacs, not those clicky colory things. Get off my lawn
Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_%28email_client%29
Thunderbird can sync with Google Calendar, via plugins... Here's How. There is really only so much you can do to an email client before the only updates are security. In my opinion, that is a good thing. You want a good core client that's not over-featured (buggy) and has good security support. Thunderbird fits that bill, and with a huge constellation of plugins I don't see what the fuss is about.
I really haven't used a desktop client for email in years. Where's the gain for the user?
I want my mail and calendar wherever I am. So why keep multiple copies of gigabytes of mail on multiple machines. I just don't see the gain for the average user. I think the lack of demand from users who are moving to webmail is why the Thunderbird is getting less developer attention.
What I'd really like to see is improvement in the webmail interfaces available to us. Gmail is fast, but I find the interface limiting and clunky. The best I have experienced was Zimbra, but it really prefers to be run on a standalone machine and is pretty resource intensive.
I'm sure there's also a large amount of users who would consider HTML composing, calender integration, "modern" UI, and other features you want as bloat in their lean email clients.
I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
apt-get install mutt
Most people I know go the webmail route: Gmail, Hotmail etc. Personally I prefer Thunderbird with IMAP and because I run my own mailserver I also installed Zarafa for use on the road.
title says it all
I'm using GNUS (under emacs). My wife is using Balsa. Not many mail clients appear to support Maildir anymore.
Thunderbird does a perfectly fine job of handling email for most users. It handles a decade or more of email for me, in a number of imap accounts for different addresses, totalling perhaps 6 to 7 gig of mail, without any problem at all.
What exactly is it about TB that is not capable of handling your need?
If an email client already does what you need, is complaint about slower development valid, or is it just wanting change for change sake.
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It has been over 10 years since I used more than Pine (Alpine now) regularly, I still use Alpine daily, but for good clients EXMH was outstanding. It allowed extensions via TK and TCH and used the Mail format so procmail (very very powerful) was essential. Yes it was a little clunky but you could add buttons to do whatever you needed regularly and with relative ease. The clients mentioned by the originator, front ends ... but really ... with the exception of Thunderbird , tried, tested , but just never quite as good.
Things move on, and it was never for the faint hearted in skill or experience, and of course moving into a more 'corporate' environment meant Windows etc, so never really moved back as the incentive to push to wasnt there ....
The 'cloud' as much as it is a joke term which is used to explain away cost, operational or otherwise, does have one benefit, mail anywhere by any device. The tin foil hats will come out and of course if you are doing something dubious (illegal or not) perhaps it is not for you. For the rest of the population, embrace and move on.
Improvements are happening to your webmail all the time, it's just they are for the advertisers and buyers of your personal data ;)
What features does a mail client need that the existing ones don't already have?
I'd rather have a relatively lean (read fast) client that performs it's core function very well, rather than a monstrosity that does a thousand things in a kinda half-assed way.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
pacman -S mutt
I've been using Fedora 17 since release, and I have to say that Gnome's integration with online accounts (I used gmail) is incredibly good. By entering your account details in 1 place, it enables both empathy (IM Chat) and Evolution mail, calendar, and address book. It easily handles GPG and S/Mime, though it does better automatic signing & encryption using S/Mime certificates. The new mail notifications and chat notifications are both easy to use and unobtrusive to your active application ( I don't know how it works with full screen gaming.)
If you can get over the "ZOMG GNOME 3 SUCKS, IT'S SO LAME, BLAH BLAH BLAH" crowd, it really is a great desktop experience to have everything just work together. Combined with the Deja Dup backup application, all of my new installs of Fedora are easy. Install, update packages, sign in to online accounts, and activate automatic backups (optionally, install rpmfusion and install kmod-nvidia for binary blob for GPU, and download the flash player plugin, extract it to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins and you're done.)
I wouldn't recommend Fedora if you're wanting stability, as it is still a testbed, but the whole system works good if you're not doing anything crazy.
It works fine for me at least, though it loads a bit slow. Has all the features you describe except calendar integration, but you can get that by using Kontact (which gives access to both Kmail, calendar and contacts in the same interface). Integrates with KDE address book, syncs with Google contacts/Google Calendar, PGP+S/MIME encryption/signing, modern UI, import/export, Sieve rules editor, modern UI (threaded message list, though no Gmail-like threading).
Claws kept losing its configuration on ubuntu so I went back to sylpheed but that integrated badly with unity so now I am using thunderbird but it is full of bugs even after however many years of development. So yeah, pretty crap.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Sylpheed:
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
It works. It is simple though highly configurable. I cannot envision anyone asking for more.
All the things the author wants, Thunderbird does. The reason TB isn't gaining new features is because it doesn't need them. E-mail hasn't evolved in ages and calendars aren't changing either. The Thunderbird developers have done exactly what they should, implement all the features we need and then switch to maintaining the code. If I wanted a huge, buggy client that was always changing I'd switch to Outlook.
I think Geary will be good once released.
In the meantime, nothing beats Thunderbird for me. The plugins are the new developments and features. Evolution works great out of the box, but it's still too slow and unreliable. I get tons of emails with Thunderbird at work and have never had a problem. The calendar plugin works mostly and even LDAP for the address book; it just takes a little bit of time to configure. For any advanced calendar functions, I just use my android phone. In fact, my coworker who is on Windows and uses Outlook has to rely on his phone because Outlook crashes once a day for him.
The G
Zimbra desktop, Even if you don't have a zimbra on the other side it's pretty cool for gmail and the like. full calendar integration....
Covers all the request features. However since the move to akonadi it does have a terrible reputation for bugginess, unrelalibility and resource hogging, unfortunately a not undeserved one.
However it has been improving steadly, even drastically since kde 4.7. I've been using it as my primary even despite the problems because when its working :) it is just so good. Fantastic integration with KDE, really good handling of multiple accounts and identities. PGP & SMIME, integration with Google calendar and contact, as well as other 3rd parties. An open plugin system for extending it. And it looks *really* good, the perfect blend of functionality and sexiness - when its working :)
I just upgraded to KDE 4.10 Beta 1 (via Kubuntu raring). There seems to be another qualitive improvement in reliabilty. Akonadi hogging the CPU seems to be fixed. Message searches are working - full text content and attributes.
There's still progress to be made, but its made huge steps and I finally feel confident in saying Kontact is back and will make it. The developers have the feature sets done and are just focusing on bug fixing now.
I have yet to find a Linux email client that supports it, although my Android phone does it just fine. I tried Evolution once. Initial setup was most interesting. It wanted me to fill out fields with single character labels (???). Googling yielded little more than instructions that were years old and outdated for the newest version. I still don't know what it wanted and it crashed as I was guessing. It was immediately deemed worthless and uninstalled. When I'm using Linux, I'm using Thunderbird, but I can't access my school's email server because Thunderbird can't do Exchange.
About two years ago, I had been stalwarthily been using Eudora, and could not imagine ever changing from a desktop-based client.
But then Eudora started to show its age (specifically, problesm with SSL certificates), and I started to look around for other alternatives, and found none what so ever.
I dug into a webclient, Roundcube, and have never looked back since, and so have a lot of my friends, so yes, i'm definately thinking that the desktop-based client is dying.
... client, [...] properly supported HTML composing"
Troll?
If not: Shiny does not correlate positively with capable or efficient.
I've been using it since KDE 1.1, after all. But I don't know what gives with it any more.
It used to be the compatibility champ -- all of its message stores were open format. Now it's all stashed in a binary database.
It used to be blinding quick. Now it takes minutes to switch between one local folder and another.
It used to update flawlessly, but the last couple of upgrades have hosed the previous mail repositories and anything that wasn't backed up offline was gone.
KMail has some very nice features (including excellent spam filters) but the usability factor is heading for zero real fast. If there were a decent alternative that doesn't have the same problems I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Having tested many, my current vote is for Evolution. Mostly because it can do RPC over HTTPs and talk to Exchange 2003 and later email servers. Which is kind of a big deal.
I hate sigs.
Thunderbird has moved to monthly releases, which are more maintenance releases containing security fixes but little functional change â" and little new development.
You know what else hasn't had much functional change in a while but I still use regularly? Wow, that really sounds like the beginning to a "your mom" joke. But I digress. I'm talking about furniture. Tables, wooden chairs, desks. Bookshelves too. To bring it back around to written communication, my postal mailbox hasn't upgraded in the past T-bird release cycle. When something's not broken, don't fix it.
I'll tell you what, though, kill that entire thread about the company holiday party from one E-Mail in the middle of the thread and you'll realize just how nice good threading features really are. And just how primitive all current mail clients are, comparatively...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.
Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.
Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.
thunderbird has the same problem as firefox, the UI is horribly slow its almost unusable.
I use Thunderbird because its the only real email client in Linux with decent calendar integration that isn't Evolution (which itself has both eaten email and crashed several times to the point where it won't start again without having to clear out all my settings and start fresh).
Thunderbird with IMAP and the lightning extension installed routinely (like 20x per day) locks up for 5-10 seconds and shows wrong messages (or no message) when quickly switching between new emails. If they actually used multiple threads/processes for the UI so it respond to user interaction while doing other things it would be much better.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Email contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks... The only thing I wish for is an easy way to sync with my Android or iPhone WITHOUT a Google/Gmail account in the mix. If you're willing to accept GMail then that synching is no problem.
Otherwise, Evolution is the Outlook of the Linux desktop. It is also compatible with Exchange and GroupWise, if that's what you have.
mutt
Works fine for me. But yes, everyone is moving to cloud. I have even considered doing this, and i store my mail locally. Why drag a fat client around with me everywhere?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't be an idiot, KISS. Use mutt.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
So what new, shiny features do you expect an e-mail client to provide? Don't fix it, if it's not broken. Thunderbird, Evolution, claws are all fine. The only differences are the way they will archive, sort or filter mail - and more or fewer things not strictly email-related.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I'm still using mutt here, and vim as my editor plus offlineimap + notmuch (for indexing/searching).
Once you learn the hotkeys it's much more efficient than any GUI MUA, and the notmuch indexing
functionality is worth it's weight in gold to me. I tend to get several hundred emails a day, the bulk of
which are neatly filed into IMAP folders inside offlineimap and nicely indexed by notmuch.
mutt itself is endlessly configurable, for people who are intent on sending HTML email
there are numerous ways to dump it back to TXT (which all email should be in). Say NO to HTML email, people.
http://notmuchmail.org/
http://offlineimap.org/
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
What "limitations" does Claws-mail have? If you can't find anything negative to say about it, that's your own limitation.
I and my 150 users use Claws-mail at work (for years). Before that, we used Sylpheed (for even more years). Before moving from Sylpheed to Claws, we researched all available options carefully. Just from memory- Thunderbird was hard to customize and clumsy. Evolution was even harder to centrally control, was bloated, and performed horribly. Kmail was too complex and tied too much to KDE (which we were/are not using). Thunderbird was our second choice, but Claws seemed like the best option.
Claws is extremely fast, reliable, feature-packed (especially with the plugins), mature, flexible, and performs well on thin clients. On the original poster's list, the only thing it does NOT do is compose HTML Email (at least not that I am aware of) and I consider that inability a feature :) It can, however, display it fine using a plugin. And it will nicely convert them to plain text for normal use. It has a calendar plugin, but we use a web-based calendar instead.
It is not perfect, but nothing I have ever seen or used is. For us, it is the best, overall.
At home, I have used Kmail for many years. At about KDE 4.8 I had lots of issues with them pulling out the communications stuff and setting it up as other "services". It was complex and unreliable. Layered with a bit too much eye candy and frustration and I finally switched home over to Claws too.
T-Bird, MUTT, Kmail, Evolution... interesting choices.
I too made the jump from Pegasus - remember Pegasus! - to Gmail years ago, and have been more or less happy, aside from some oddball missing features like the ability to resend a message in the "Sent" mailbox. But I digress...
I probably access e-mail more from my Android phone than from my desktop machine, but still want to have the same experience on both platforms. That really does seem to limit you to a web-based platform from a mega-corporation. Which means I'm stuck with whatever interface they choose to give me.
I've considered moving back to a desktop client, for all of the usual reasons - security, privacy, local backup of messages - but the last time I looked at Thunderbird it just looked like too much work to try and set up what I already have in Gmail, plus I have to assume that getting archived mail out of Google and into a new client would be a nightmare.
There really is a strong argument for taking e-mail back from the Googles and Microsofts, but in practical terms I just don't know if I'm up to the size of that task, or the restraints it might place on me. (Part of the problem being that the last time I made a radical shift in e-mail I had a back history of a hundred megs. Now Google tells me it's up to 1.5 gigs.)
Is it really practical to develop a standalone e-mail client that works happily in the dual mobile/desktop environemnt?
Three Squirrels
"At the moment it looks like email client support is dead" - Evolution is still actively maintained, there are at least two full-time developers on it that I know of. That's why it has bugs, funnily enough - because it's still getting major updates...
Evo has been pretty heavily touched in the last few release cycles, though most of the changes are 'under the hood' and right now the UI is still rather like a copy of Outlook from a decade ago (which actually suits me fine, but might not be what most people want). But stuff like the calendar backends have had heavy work and the entire IMAP backend was written over the last few versions.
I've always liked Evo, though there certainly was a Thunderbird-trend for a while. I use it with a personal server on a local network, so I wonder if those who have more trouble with it are using remote servers.
The 3.5 builds were _very_ buggy, but most of the mess got shaken out for 3.6.0 and now 3.6.2 is pretty decent for me. It still has a weird bug where it seems to get very sluggish after it's been running for a while (not RAM exhaustion), but that doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, so probably wouldn't affect you.
It has Google calendar integration which works pretty well for me (this is one of the things that was affected by recent rewrites; for a few releases it wasn't working very well at all, but in 3.6 it seems pretty good). It does CalDAV at least in theory, though I haven't tried it out much myself. It has all the other features listed as 'desired'.
http://notmuchmail.org/
as far as kmail/kde has come, it isn't beta anymore. So there should be fewer bugs per major release. The same with Konqueror. I really like them both and have been using them for many years, but there is something wrong when release after release (similar) bugs are present some of which take down kmail, or in konqueror's case crashes the browser just by clicking on he image icon if images are turned off by default, or just by going to a web site or page, when chromium, firefox/iceweasel, iceape/mozilla don't crash going to the same site or page.
And the crash recovery feature doesn't let you "uncheck" (like firefox/iceweasel) a tab so you don't open the page that originally crashed the browser, resulting in all the tabs and windows crashing over and over as you keep trying to recover your previously open tabs/windows. I was going to file a bug, but checking the bug database shows this is a problem (crashing when going to pages/sites) for every release and never seems to get fixed (although individual causes get fixed, there doesn't seem to be any progress, the rate/frequency of crashes never seems to get under any control). This has been a problem with konqueror as long as I can remember, and appears to be the same to a lesser extent with gmail.
konqueror is great because of its swiss army knife of capabilities (ssh,sftp,ftp,scp,file browsing/manipulation,etc.) but the lack of extension capability is hurting uptake (i've gotten by with a custom hosts file and iptables instead of adblock, but i wish for other extension capability as well, as must others), but it bites when i have to have firefox and chromium and/or iceape opened in other desktops because konqueror just crashed with many windows and tabs open to sites/pages i didn't want to close, especially since my desktop uptime is measured in months not hours.
Thanks to maildir, raid and a file system that excels in handling many small files whose name i won't mention here (but also isn't being developed any more, its been killed, so to speak), even when kmail does crash, whether in a small account with a low number of emails, or in my main account with a 100+ folders and over 500,000 emails, I've never lost an email yet, no matter how many times kmail went down.
But once again, kmail & konqueror aren't beta anymore. I appreciate the software and the work hat went/is going into them, but the stability is maddening, especially with konqueror. Just enabling crash recovery with selective page opening or elimination prior to recovery instead of the current all or none/repeated crashing and subsequent inability to recover as the result would go a long way to calm the nerves. But that will be several releases down the road. I suspect we'll get btrfs stable before we see konq/kmail stable. As for calendering...that's another post.
I gave up and moved to gmail. Gmail will let you pull in mail from most pop/imap servers.
The thing about Thunderbird is, that you can extend it with as many stuff as you want. The base platform is the same as with Firefox, so there definitely is no lack in platform features.
And if there is no add-on to fulfill your need... you can make your very own add-on in about 30 minutes, with no prior experience except a bit of XML and basic scripting skills.
I will continue to use TB until something better comes along. Mainly because it does everything I need (full IMAP support, address book, (X)HTML e-mails with attachments, folders, filters and archival, search), and because adding what I need really just takes a coupe of minutes (or an evening if it’s a bit bigger).
I honestly have no complaints about the current state of email clients. Maybe I'm not using the current 0.09% of features, but I don't care about them. The current state is fine for me.
Opera has been my main browser and mail client since it had adverts. And, though it does a few thibgs i dont like recently (default splitting up emails by date, the folder system has gone downhill) its still better than the others. And never fills up and dies like Outlook used to.
2012 and still no platform independence...
Btw, anyone here who knows when iTunes comes to Linux?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Trojita is new (just nearing it's 0.6 release), but it's looking pretty good so far.
It's been mostly a one-man development effort, but it just got accepted to be part of the KDE project (but does not depend on kdelibs, just on QT libs, so it doesn't drag in all of KDE when you install it), and as a result several additional developers have started contributing.
For a while I had good hopes about Mulberry. It was a top-of-the-line mail client 5-10 years ago as a proprietary program, and it got open-sourced a couple of years ago. But the build process is so horrific that it hasn't really made the transition to being an active project. It has really good IMAP support, but it's UI is old, and depends on obsolete libraries so it's very hard to work on. There are a number of annoying bugs that have not been fixed due to the inability to really work with the code.
I want a good IMAP client. I run my own IMAP server (so I have a good one, Cyrus, massive overkill for me) and I usually use Pine because of the state of the GUI clients in terms of IMAP (most are POP3 clients that have been modified to fetch the message via IMAP, but still act as if they are POP clients and only use the server as a place to fetch messages from)
I require a client that allows me to access my mail from many places, and doesn't try to download the entire mailstore to my local machine. It must be able to handle massive folders (I have some with >380,000 messages) and be able to take advantage of the server's capabilities to search and sort messages (not download all messages or even message headers and do the searching/sorting locally)
There are a lot of lousy IMAP servers out there (Exchange being a good example),
Therefore do not 'fix' it.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
So when Firefox gets off-main-thread compositing and runs chrome and content on different threads so will Thunderbird.
I switched from Evolution to Thunderbird about two years ago. I liked Evolution, but it was buggy and performed horribly with large folders. Not to mention it was tied in with Gnome, which made configuration painful for a non-Gnome user. Thunderbird is vastly better. It almost never crashes, is much faster, and after finding a few key plugins has every feature I wanted, and a few that I didn't know that I wanted.
The above is based on a fetchmail/IMAP setup with no mail stored locally, using the same setup to read my mail on at least two different systems.
I use thunderbird at home, but to be honest, roundcube does everything I need very well, and actually runs faster than thunderbird.
Since I can't use imap directly from work, I installed roundcube on my home servers. It's very nice. I would assume that you could also just install a local lighty with php and run that as a local web-based solution if you don't have your own web server.
http://roundcube.net/
I've used it for years, but for some inexplicable reason it only supports one outbound mail server, and that's just shockingly stupid. Got a gmail account AND a work account, AND an account for a side-business? Thunderbird only wants all your outbound mail to go through ONE of those servers. Really just DUMB.
Each email account has its own settings for inbound mail server settings but all the accounts want to send through the one configurable outbound server. This is not just dumb from a basic design standpoint, I cannot even think of what the precedent might be that they would have copied it (the dumb idea) from. Now, in case somebody wants to chime-in and scream that either the latest release fixes it or there is some hidden way to fix it, let me say that (a) I have not updated any of my installs in the past several months and (b) open-source coders need to learn that an undocumented/hidden/obscure feature is a feature that does not exist... if it's not worth taking the time to document it, then it's not worth somebody taking the time to hunt for it.
In EVERY other way, I like Thunderbird best and I recommend it to anybody who has only one email account
The Addressbook is being replaced (both back end & front).
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/
The old archaic design & limitations are being tossed for a more flexible & pluggable design.
Guys we are on Linux, we have emacs
I use Thunderbird on Linux with IMAP. Search works fine, if a bit slow.
I recently started using mutt + offlineimap (to have a sync'ed local copy of mail) + davmail (exchange connector) + notmuchmail (indexing and searching)
It runs under a screen/tmux session (I am using tmux panes inside screen) and way much easier to access all mail accounts (and nicer interface than gmail and outlook web exchange). I am usually a couple of keystrokes away to mail windows (and I am using a large monitor for a full screen shell window)
It helps that most of my work is text based (documentation is markdown/wiki type), though I jump into a web browser once in a while
If more people would use mutt, we'd be much further along the road to everyone using encryption by default, because mutt folds gnupg in so transparently and makes it so easy to use. Web browsers & GUI MUAs have wasted more than a decade NOT coming up with equivalent functionality.
We used to joke about GUI Usenet clients which never managed to implement killfile functionality. Same old, same old, ...
mutt rocks and is so damned easy to use, it's ridiculous. It's software that's designed to be trained to do what you want it to do the way you want to do it, and it's not difficult to configure even for mere mortals.
Kaplah!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Mutt isn't easy to use though. It takes a while to learn how to use it compared to (Al)Pine.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I personally use claws for several years (+- 10) and i think its great. the only thing that people might miss is the lack of edit html messages (it can write text only emails), but it can read html emails without any problem. it support calendar and meeting requests, attach remover and various gpg and smime via plugins, so it covers what people need. Its fast and light enough and many keyboard shortcuts when you dont want to use the mouse.
if you have imap, you may want to try the mulberry mail , it have the best imap support i ever used. its now open source, could use a facelift, but is very good.
Higuita
If you're running your own mail server, dovecot is very stable for IMAP/S (probably for POP too, but I don't use that). Works with all kinds of clients, from Linux based to OS X based to smartphone based. The latest versions never crash or lose mail and support encrypted/authenticated access. Set it and forget it. All servers should be so solid.
Mutt isn't easy to use though. It takes a while to learn how to use it compared to (Al)Pine.
BS, not true. For simple things, it's drop dead easy. For things not often done regularly, it demands a bit of thought or research. For stuff that happens all the time (handling attachments transparently or using encryption), tell it how once and it'll do it again automatically until the end of time.
There is no better MUA than mutt. It's brilliant software. I wish everything was designed and implemented as well as mutt.
[I tried to include my ~/mutt/mailcap here, but /. objected. Fine. Be that way.]
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '
In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll probably have a short text and a PDF attachment, and just have some script grind it out slowly, sending to 1 email address at a time. I don't care if it takes 48 hours to send them all --I've had enough with snags about how I can't send to all 2000 recipients at a time, and how I have to break it up into 30-50 recipients at a time, keep track of who has been sent what, etc. Not to mention: in the past, Kmail has refused to compose HTML messages, Thunderbird had some funny incompatibility with my email provider (which was also my shell host and web host, but I just didn't have time to go figure out the problem), and installing Evolution completely steamrolled my Kubuntu installation with some GNOME crap (KDE wouldn't unmount devices properly because GNOME thought it would be fun to just automount every single thing I plugged into USB).
Also, I want something command-line for my N900. Enough with interfaces -- I'll let bash talk to my email client. I'll compose my text in Vim and let some script take care of sending. If Mutt is it, then I'll install Mutt.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I have tried ditching Windows at my various huge companies but it was always email/calendar/contacts where Linux failed. Evolution was too buggy and couldn't handle the calendar scheduling. IMO, Outlook is the key remaining app keeping most enterprises from considering Linux desktops.
That's available through an extension on Thunderbird called "Thunderbird conversations". See here: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/wiki
MH ... really nmh ... sucks even less.
Seriously? With cell phones becoming so ubiquitous, that I keep hearing how they're going to kill all other gaming consoles, how on earth do you expect to justify to Joe Average user the need for a dedicated E-mail client? IMAP is cool and all but it's not as fast as gmail especially if you go to a not yours computer. As in for instance when you go to give a presentation in class that's stored in your email (saw it 2 weeks ago, such a rare show of technological competence I nearly cried) I have a hard enough time getting people to send me emails instead of facebook messages. The only reason my sister uses Mail.app is because she has a hotmail account, hates the interface, sucks at change, and therefore hates gmail's interface too (it's different it sucks). Nevermind that it solves nearly every issue she has with email she just hates it and she probably read one of those "Google is secretly tracking every email FUD articles" so she got paranoid of google on top of that. I'm half sure the only reason she got on Mail.app in the first place was accidentally clicking it and then filling in the wizard prompts to get rid of the screen. Without a chunk of the average user population, of course email clients are going stale. Unfortunately I don't see any way to get that chunk back. Unless facebook wants to convert their messaging to email boxes and not provide a web (or app) interface. Yeah and maybe Zuckerberg wants to literally piss away a few million bucks.
Just another second banana
That's an easy one... Just like everything else with linux, a joke.
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is
The "killer" feature on gmail for many of us is the privacy suicide.
We have several email accounts, all consolidated onto our home mail server. It's secure enough but far from "private", as the emails all pass through multiple domains en route, but at least we've probably reduced the butt-hurt of being profiled for ads based on our email content. Anyway, a lot of our email is in Finnish, so good luck to non-Finns on trying to ascertain useful details from that (do we like product X or hate it - Google translate even gets this wrong often enough). Actually, Google translate on Finnish-English sucks, and I mean sucks really badly - it's little more than a garbage generator.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Hello,
You say " Evolution is reported to be rather prone to bugs". But have you give it a try recently? There is bugs sometimes. But overall, it is a very good mail client. I used it for some years at work. The search engine is really good and fast, even with a hudge mailbox, and the advanced search is really good either.
The most of the problems were in the calendar. I had som synchronisations bugs but maybe is it resolved now?
Regards,
Nicolas
I drink the energy-saving drink Sleeping Cow while coding.
Thunderbird will survive as icedove of gnu debian where as if no. of users for Evolution and Claws-mail increses, its development will boost.
I think the unflattering image in that Wikipedia article entirely fits the program's slogan.
Claws-mail is the successor of the old Sylpheed-claws. It really is a nice and simple mailclient, which in the meantime does almost everything. Imaps, RSS, filtering, whatever. And with good usability, the buttons are all at the right place.
I even use the Windows version at work.
There are some thing Thunderbird is particularly bad at in my opinion. Like sorting threaded mails. I know there are extensions, but they suck.
I also don't like the autodetection of mailserver settings. You cannot save something in a non-working state, while sometimes I just want to do that.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
The protocol is old, and not used in the way it was intended. Instead of trying to patch it, why not transition away, to a system that supports the things needed in modern communication (encryption by default(with your own key, not Gmail's), good conversation views, intuitive interface to 2-person/multiple-person conversations (i.e. No "Whoops"-reply-all-problem).
And instead of trying to change the world, can't we fix this for ourselfs? Where is the FOSS-project for software that acts as a mailserver (or imap-client) and translates everything into a resonable protocol?
Two words: Geary (by Yorba foundation) & Trojitá (now even an official part of the KDE project).
*** Everyone not satisfied by any reason with years-proven POP3/IMAP solutions Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird, Claws/Sylpheed is either using CLI based ones (be it mutt, pine, alpine or even customized emacs) or just web-mail interface e.g. Squirrel Mail, Roundcube and proprietary offerings from IT corps.
Whatever became of Eudora? When Qualcomm bailed out of it there was talk of integrating it into one of Mozilla's products -- Thunderbird, I guess -- but I haven't heard much about what came of that. So I'm still Macgyvering Eudora to work on XP.
IBM has been selling and supporting Lotus Notes on Linux since before 2006. Also, Eudora 7.1 reportedly runs pretty well under Wine.
" At the moment it looks like email client support is dead — Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"
That may be the most loaded and opinionated question i've read in a while. What makes webmail so abhorrent and useless, is what this question implies. It reads like a survey from Faux news
A friend of mine said recently he is looking for a new email client because it seems that Mozilla Foundation doesn't want to improve Thunderbird. I agree with him.
Mozilla Foundation gets something like $100 million per year. Quoting: "Mozilla's consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2010 was $123 million..."
Do you see $100 million of development every year? Where does the money go? Where is the 2011 report?
We often distribute short but complicated business reports to clients by email. The emails must be formatted in HTML or they would be difficult to read.
Things we need in Thunderbird:
A "Get All Mail" button. Getting all email should not require a menu choice.
Better handling of images and other attachments. Sending an image with slightly different text to 10 people should have the option of not requiring storage of 10 copies of that image.
Automatic storage of important emails in both the email database and as separate files. If something corrupts the database, we cannot afford to lose important emails.
nobody has mentioned seamonkey yet...
What exactly does Thunderbird or Mutt not do that makes Exchange always come up? When I'm communicating via Email, I use POP or IMAP to recieve, and SMTP to send. The only concrete thing I heard was that Exchange has a calender (Disclaimer: I've never touched Exchange, so I have no idea what functionality it has), but why does your Email client need a calender? Additionally, doesn't Exchange have the option somewhere, to export the contents of it's address book into a text document (Preferably without CR/LF line endings, but I'm sure Thunderbird could figue it out)? Then just import into Thunderbird.
Confusion aside, can somebody please explain what the Outlook Calender does that a piece of paper, an entry in notepad, or any other calender application won't do? Failing that, can somebody explain why you would put it in an Email client?
My mutt talks utf-8 (and better than the Outlook abominations my colleagues use, btw.). Need some help configuring yours?
Ah, and while my colleagues twirl their thumbs in tune to the spinning wheel of their outlook I've answered the first mail.
I am most assuredly, as a former and now mostly reformed NT and IIS network administrator, a "power user". HOWEVER, my 82 year-old mother, who has deleted the Apple Address Book application twice now in a year, is NOT, and THAT is who a utilitarian (non-corporate IT department supported) email client SHOULD be designed for. Arrogance is the primary failing of those of us whom proudly claim status as knerd or geek.
For reference:
1) Reflections on Complexity Robert W. Lucky IEEE Spectrum 1997 March
2) Digital Obesity by Nicholas Negroponte - WIRED July 1997
No, mutt is an interactive client that runs in a text terminal (most of us probably run it in terminal emulators like xterm or gnome terminal). I often run it remotely as part of an interactive ssh session.
You might want to look at 'grepmail' which can do all kinds of pattern matching on message header or body content. It takes a mailbox (mbox format) as input to search and generates a new mailbox stream as output with just matching messages in it. You can then read that stream with a normal mail client.
But if you are just searching for messages in an ad-hoc manner, you can run mutt inside an interactive ssh connection, and perform searches using mutt. It has features to search forward/back through the mailbox or to "limit" the view to just messages matching a pattern. I often combine the two: do a course pattern match to limit the view, then either just browse the threads if there aren't too many, search using another more specific pattern, or do other things like sort the visible messages by sender, time, etc.
mutt rocks and is so damned easy to use, it's ridiculous
I like to click on links in my e-mails. Let's see how to do that in mutt ( after writing a bunch of config and installing some helper apps ):
When you read an email on the pager, hitting ctrl+b will list all the urls from the email. Navigate up or down with arrow keys and hit enter on the desired url. Your browser will start and go to the selected site.
Uh... what?
So let's move on. How do I view two e-mails at the same time? No suggestions offered. I suppose I'll be told that this is a "window manager task" and it just needs a dozen lines in my .muttrc.
No, none of that is easy to use.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/dr_agon-365450/which-mua-for-linux-35190/
mike c
"Sort by --> Threaded" -- Thunderbird has this feature, and it works correctly if you send yourself a copy of all outgoing email.
I have been using Fedora for the past 7 years and although it comes with Evolution I have always used Thunderbird. I think it is the best of the bunch.
The Import/Export feature are good (still need some work tho). The contacts are good as well and can also import/export to different files. I also use Lightning as the Calendar, which syncs with Google without any problems. Thunderbird also has regular update to security and bug fixes.
So in my opinion Thunderbird Rocks...
I use it all the time. Works great. When there's a problem, it seems it's a doozey though. Once you get past it, you're golden again. Not as bad as dealing with a POS like outlook.
"preferably with good calendar integration"
No, why would we want "calendar integration" in a mail client?
Calendars are useful, but they have NO connection to mail that I can see. I know that microsoft tries to mix calendar and mail - but why do anyone think that is useful?
A mail client should handle mail well - period. A calendar program can handle calendar stuff . . .
___________________ I want to be free()!
I thought I was done with email clients. GMail is just that convenient. Then Google gratitiously changed the interface, horribly, to Google Groups. It was so bad I went back to Thunerbird for Usenet and discovered how refreshingly simple Thunderbird is. I hope it stays that way.
The problem is, mutt doesn't display our reply in thread. We have to open outbox to see our reply.
The problem is, mutt doesn't display our reply in thread. We have to open outbox to see our reply.
"s" to save it to another folder (this encourages you to file things where they can be found again), then "c" to change to that folder. Find that email and now reply. Define "save_hook" entries to tell mutt where you want it to save different stuff. After some text file configuring, mutt'll know what to do, and it'll do it consistently, even if you've now forgotten what you told it to do. The "s" command will be pre-populated with the value you told it to use for that sender so you just hit Enter and it does it.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Since almost all mail lives in the cloud, why even bother with an email client? I'll grant that some people like to use command-line clients simply because they can - more power to them. But there's really no reason to eschew the GUI, and a browser is all the email client you need. Has been for years.
I loved Kmail until KDE 4 was introduced and I decided I didn't want that bloatware anymore and learned the hard way that:
1) You can't have any KDE app without the whole huge crapload of KDE, so it's a major liability
2) Migrating from Kmail to another email client is not a walk in the park.
My advice: even if you use KDE and love it, get a less compromising email client. If you want to leave one day, you won't have to worry about migrating your email.
I used thunderbird for a while, installed a few addons such as google mail sync. As time went by it just become slower and slower to the point that I couldn't use it anymore. I switched to OPERA MAIL and haven't looked back since.
Use whatever is best for the job. And who has only one email address these days anyway?
I can fully appreciate and understand the privacy concerns about $webmail_provider putting in advertising and all that stuff, but I still use it anyway -- for non-critical mail (that is to say, mostly newsletters, email digests and whatnot, some of which contain some form of advertising anyway). Why should *I* store the latest copy of an email from CNET or Light Reading or Slashdot or whatever myself when I can let the Google store it? It's non-important and being public information, I couldn't give a toss if Google wants to scan it for advertising.
Gmail's interface is also rather extensible, all things considered (like Thunderbird... how about that?) and I've got all sorts of little helpers installed on mine to make it less clunky and/or a bit more desktop-client-like.
As for *important* (business, mostly) email, the business has it's own server. We run Dovecot for IMAP. POP3 is not allowed. Every client we have (Desktop, Symbian, Android, iOs) all seem to connect to it fine with SSL.
For those in the business who *need* webmail, we have Roundcube with an OWA-like theme, IIRC. Otherwise, the default install is Thunderbird for a few simple reasons:
1. Multiple Identities - we couldn't get this working nicely on Outlook (for those using Windows)... and by nicely, I mean at all... without paying... and why should I pay for something that both Gmail and Thunderbird offer for free (and work on any platform, not just Windows)?
2. Portability - I can move from Windows to Linux to Mac and vice versa and/or upgrade my machine and all I need to do is copy the profile directory from the old machine to the new and voila, I don't have to set anything up - all my accounts, filters, add-ons and everything else are just there, waiting for me. It also makes deploying stuff easier when we get new users because then all we need to change are the mailbox credentials and they're up and running with the same things as everyone else (Same with Firefox, even though most of us use Chrome which Google syncs most of anyway, Firefox portability isn't easy to match from what I can ascertain).
3. I appreciate people who want to use mutt/pine as their email client, but really... it's not the most user-friendly interface unless you're already familiar with a CLI and have SSH access. For joe-blow office drone, mutt and whatnot just isn't practical. If, hypothetically, someone in the organization specifically wanted to use mutt, we wouldn't stop them, but they would have to make a case for wanting SSH access... and someone who wants SSH but who isn't employed as a technical person might have a hard time doing that.
4. It's been a long time since I tried any of the other clients (Kmail, Pegasus, Eudora) but... there's probably a good reason for it. Evolution just didn't do it for me, and that it's the default in many Linux distros annoys me and that getting rid of it basically is impossible without $package_manager wanting to remove Gnome in it's entirety as well (which some of us use).
5. We write our emails in plain-text by default. We have a little html in our signatures but it's just a couple of links.
6. Familiarity. Thunderbird is relatively familiar to even new recruits - it looks a bit like Outlook used to, which may or may not be a good thing, but, in either case, getting new people up to speed doesn't take too much time.
Those are all I can think of at the moment, but basically the moral of the story is, if you separate out your mail sufficiently there's no reason you can't take advantage of webmail providers for newsletters and non-critical stuff, and keep the private mail, well, private, using your client of choice. We like Thunderbird, you might not. It's a matter of taste. But we have managed to keep our systems open (as in with mostly FOSS), relatively secure, relatively extensible and relatively easy to deploy, all without sacrifice (as far as we know, anyway - correct me if I'm wrong).
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
The very best Linux email program is still KMail. No, not the buggy, still not finished KMail from KDE 4.x, but KMAIL from KDE 3.5.10. It still runs just fine, is pretty fully developed, and is far more functional than the later version.