There is always good old Thunderbird.
According to the official fediverse account of Thunderbird, they are not going to adopt the new Firefox EULA.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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I've used Thunderbird since forever as my go-to client, I used mutt as well for a while and that met my needs pretty well.
I use alpine when I want a text client, Thunderbird when I want graphical.
Thunderbird is the usual recommendation for an email client. So try that
I have no idea if Betterbird is actually better than regular Thunderbird, but I use that cause people said so and I read about it a bit. If it does die I guess I'll switch to Thunderbird, just a little cautious about Mozilla after the privacy policy fiasco.
Betterbird is in flathub too which is great for newbies like me.
I'd be wary of that fork. It's run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn't really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.
Operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird community.
Ah that's a relief
Try Betterbird.
Damn these guys are very passionate about how shitty thunderbird is
That is the correct answer
No one has mentioned the command line: aerc
I use it and it’s very minimal and clean.
I use aerc thru home-manager accounts on NixOS
Thunderbird
I use evolution and it's great even on kde
If your into Linux and a decent admin. Nothing is better than neomutt. Add not much.
Filtering and searching is faster than Google on gigs of mail.
It will take a long time to configure it well. But it's worth it. I rarely change the config.
I have been using Linux since 1992.
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Thunderbird
It is bot the most feature rich and the most annoying thing, but it works
Kmail, Thunderbird, Evolution. That's pretty much it.
There's always some weird niche client somewhere but it won't be a hidden gem. Although I guess you can always use Pine (or rather Alpine nowadays) if you want to appear ubergeeky.
I've been using Betterbird for a while and I like it. It's based on Thunderbird.
I second this! It seems to have more features than Thunderbird while being just a fifth of the file size.
I can‘t confirm this, but I have read elsewhere that Thunderbird is a bit bloated.
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Mailspring
Every time I look around for a new mail client I come back to thunderbird. Nothing else ticks all the boxes
I used Claws Mail at some point in the past. Now notmuch+Emacs.
Claws mail
I landed on Claws Mail myself. It does look a bit dated, but the UI is functional and the client works. I'm content with it.
At first i thought, wow, cool they're still developing that? Doing a release or two a year, i see.
I used to use it long ago, and was pretty happy with it.
But looking closer now, what is going on with security there?! Sorry to be the bearer of probably bad news, but... 😬
The only three CVEs in their changelog are from 2007, 2010, and 2014, and none are specific to claws.
Does that mean they haven't had any exploitable bugs? That seems extremely unlikely for a program written in C with the complexity that being an email client requires.
All of the recent changelog entries which sound like possibly-security-relevant bugs have seven-digit numbers prefixed with "CID", whereas the other bugs have four-digit bug numbers corresponding to entries in their bugzilla.
After a few minutes of searching, I have failed to figure out what "CID" means, or indeed to find any reference to these numbers outside of claws commit messages and release announcements. In any case, from the types of bugs which have these numbers instead of bugzilla entries, it seems to be the designation they are using for security bugs.
The effect of failing to register CVEs and issue security advisories is that downstream distributors of claws (such as the Linux distributions which the project's website recommends installing it from) do not patch these issues.
For instance, claws is included in Debian stable and three currently-supported LTS releases of Ubuntu - which are places where users could be receiving security updates if the project registered CVEs, but are not since they don't.
Even if you get claws from a rolling release distro, or build the latest release yourself, it looks like you'd still be lagging substantially on likely-security-relevant updates: there have actually been numerous commits containing CID numbers in the month since the last release.
If the claws developers happen to read this: thanks for writing free software, but: please update your FAQ to explain these CID numbers, and start issuing security advisories and/or registering CVEs when appropriate so that your distributors will ship security updates to your users!
with every reinstall, i go hunting for decent calendar- and email-apps. always go back to Evolution eventually
This recent post may be of interest to you: https://lemmy.ml/post/27474047
You may also find some ideas here or there.
I personaly use the power of neomutt and notmuch, but it's not a GUI option if that's what you're looking for.
IMHO, you should consider doing more troubleshooting on Kmail. I've never used it personally, but from my understanding, it's a stable program and shouldn't have problems doing the basics of email, like you're reporting.
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Has anyone got gmail or outlook working via SMTP in the past couple years? I was using the former with emacs gnus and then it started demanding additional auth that I couldn't provide via a simple file, then in the past 6 months the latter stopped letting me log in.
My ~/.gnus file was like this -
setq user-mail-address "my.name@hotmail.co.uk"
user-full-name "My Name")
(setq gnus-select-method
'(nnimap "outlook"
(nnimap-address "imap-mail.outlook.com")
(nnimap-server-port 993)
(nnimap-stream ssl)))
(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp-mail.outlook.com"
smtpmail-smtp-service 587
gnus-ignored-newsgroups "^to\\.\\|^[0-9. ]+\\( \\|$\\)\\|^[\"]\"[#'()]")
~/.authinfo (encrypted with gpg) -
machine imap-mail.outlook.com login my.name@hotmail.co.uk password **** port 993
machine smtp-mail.outlook.com login my.name@hotmail.co.uk password **** port 587
I think I might need to start hosting my own email server because every authentication option on these services requires some extra step or fingerprinting that gnus can't provide. Maybe I should give up and try Thunderbird to see if that would work.
I spun up a mailcow instance relatively simply through elestio (new to me devops as a service). Takes a few clicks, let's you pick your cloud provider and has pretty slick admin UI to manage firewalls and dockerfiles etc.
I've never setup an SMTP server before, but I've decided to with my "buy Canadian" initiative to eschew the tech-oligarchy at every turn I can. Not for Canadians sovereignty alone, but to help get rid the planet of billionaires by starving them of their capital.
But I digress, mailcow makes setting up DNS a breeze and elestio makes mailcow a breeze. I've actually spun up this Lemmy instance on elestio too, just so nice its a game changer. Here's info about mailcow https://elest.io/open-source/mailcow and no I'm not affiliated with elestio, just seems solid thus far (only been using it for a month, but support is on point too).
Ok going to try Thunderbird tomorrow and if it works then I'll see if I can reverse engineer whatever it does into gnus
evolution
Evolution is really great. I was able to make Kmail work, so because it integrates best into Plasma, I am using that. But setting it up was not a fun experience.
I have used Evolution in the past. It was very Outlook like and did a decent job talking to Exchange. Now days i just use the web interface.
Depends on what you want. Email client or groupware client?
90% of the time I use web interfaces, but I often have spotty connectivity while boondocking. So I need a client that can get/send gmail POP3 in narrow windows of connectivity.
I started with thunderbird but something (can't remember what) wasn't working well. Ended up with Evolution. It also syncs well to google calendar and google tasks.
Is anybody still using mailspring? I remember trying it back in '16 or '17 or so, liked it, but didn't really feel the need for a standalone client at the time.
Now I'm looking forward to creating more email addresses, and multiple tabs of webmail are getting gradually less appealing. Sure, Thunderbird works...
Seamonkey
Nothing has beat mutt so far. But that's not for everyone, naturally.
What mailing list features do you need?
If you arena opposed to GNOME, you add your online accounts and it integrates them into evolution mail, calendar and contacts. And also Gdrive becomes a mounted folder if you add Google account.
No I actually prefer GNOME, but have to use KDE because I need specific features (kiosk mode), but yes I feel like Gnome is so much better integrated with its defaults apps!
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