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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
Keep using Thunderbird, It works. Try add ons if you want more features.
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
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
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable, though it does sometimes screw up (since email was never designed to actually have this in the first place).
Do other clients have this yet? At my last job I had to use Outlook Web Access, and the job before that I had to use regular Outlook (can't remember the version), and neither one had this, and as a result, it was a complete PITA to manage work email, with all the email chains going on between other coworkers, customers, etc. I ended up having pages and pages of emails that I'd never look at, and missed a lot of emails unless someone told me about them; the volume was so large I pretty much gave up even trying to read them all, and only looked at ones that had subject lines that looked important to what I was doing. As useful as I find Gmail's conversation-grouping for my own personal email, it would have been 10x more useful for my work email, with all the CCing going on in email chains there.
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 access all my email just fine from both mt Linux box and my Android phone without ever using a browser. Thunderbird is the client I use on my laptop, and it supports gmail just fine, as well as accessing my corporate mail and personal website mail. I get notices on my phone when I receive email to any of those accounts in real time. We based email is for the average Joe, who finds it too "complicated" to use a real client.
Thunderbird isn't adding new features because it is friggin' email. At some point, all the features you need have been implemented and security and bug fixes are what is of primary importance. Thunderbird is at that point, which is why that is what they are doing.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Threading, meaningful subject lines, and proper message references in replies is a lost art. They all require an attention-span long enough to grasp contextual communication.
Today's email user cannot even remember their correspondents' email address nor figure out how to use a contact list, so they just reply willy-nilly to any other message they find from that person in their inbox, or grieve their lost friend if no such message exists. The lure of social networking is that they don't even have to think about whom they are addressing anymore. The future is full of psychotic people wandering about, issuing forth monologues and an intelligent messaging system beaming these selectively into the heads of other psychotics wandering half way around the world.
on thunderbird:
edit > account settings > [account in question] > copies & folders > tick "place replies in the folder of the message being replied to"
admittedly a few more steps than "click on 'conversation view'" .. but it is there .. and i love it so much
suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
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)