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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
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 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.
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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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.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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.
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.
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
grnbrg.
Improvements are happening to your webmail all the time, it's just they are for the advertisers and buyers of your personal data ;)
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen. This is obviously going to get worse and worse. Like Youtube, where ad infestation is nearly intolerable already and rapidly deteriorating. And it is just downright creepy when Google snoops my mail and runs the same pushy, stupid ad in Youtube over and over. Moral: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second Moral: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Third Moral: the writing is on the wall, the way of Google is the way of pain for the average netizen. Something needs to be done. Not sure what. Google is rapidly becoming what Microsoft always wanted to be: proprietor of the internet. We're probably saved from a worse fate if Microsoft or horrors, Apple managed to secure that position, but it's still bad. This kind of infrastructure needs to be a kind of commons like the highways, power grid, sewage system and so on. A life under the gaze of Google, dancing on Google's string, is just not a life I can accept, and by now it is abundantly clear, that is just where this is all heading, veneer of benevolence notwithstanding.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Don't be an idiot, KISS. Use mutt.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
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).
KMail developers and maintainers seem hellbent on breaking existing functionality every few versions. And by break, I mean stuff like "delete all your old mail" and "make your mail go away after version upgrade, maybe forever, maybe just a few weeks". If you've avoided these issues in your upgrades, you've been lucky -- so far. Akonadi and Nepomuk, whatever the hell those are, really aren't ready for prime time. As such, KMail has gotten too "alpha quality" to use in such mundane, critical, production work as -- well -- email.
I am not a crackpot.
I just don't like the idea of my mail hosted on somebody else's server. The privacy implications are just not acceptable to me. Not to mention the amount of hacking that this attracts.
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen.
That's the price you pay for having a free service where they house gigabytes of your email for you and give you instant access to it from any device, with 5-9s reliability.
The catch is, whenever you access it with a web browser using the standard web interface, there's nothing stopping you from blocking the ads with AdBlock Plus. So no, it's not going to get "worse and worse", as long as they have a web interface. They'd have to disable the web interface and force everyone to switch to a closed-source proprietary client application, and that's never going to happen.
Complaining about ads on Gmail makes about as much sense as complaining about pop-up ads. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those, thanks to pop-up blockers.
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.
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[GPG key in journal]
Actually, after getting out in (very rough shape) in 4.7, KMail got a new maintainer, and he's been fixing bugs and improving things like crazy (look at the commits by "montel").
Also other people have been working on other parts of the infrastructure and there are more fixes on the way.
Lastly, you're putting together two things unrelated to each other: Akonadi is a local cache for PIM data (contacts, mails, calendars...), while Nepomuk is a framework used to organize data semantically (and used a lot in other bits of the KDE platform), which is used in Akonadi to store mail and contact data for searching.
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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)
IBM has been selling and supporting Lotus Notes on Linux since before 2006. Also, Eudora 7.1 reportedly runs pretty well under Wine.
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).
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