I just can’t find a decent email client that looks like it’s from the last 20 years. Geary and Evolution both appear to be pretty modern but something about using Gmail with a Yubikey just doesn’t work and neither of them will connect to my account. Both on Fedora and OpenSUSE. Thunderbird works but it’s so old fashioned and Betterbird doesn’t look much better. What’s everyone else using?
A combination of thunderbird and mutt.
And bluemail on android…
I just use Protonmail’s web client. Fast, sleek, similar polish to gmail imo.
For an actual desktop client, Thunderbird with Dark Reader addon and some tweaks for theming.
Honestly though, I just prefer the web client from Proton, it’s really nice.
mu4e+mbsync+msmtp
I know it’s not an answer you expect but I just use the official web client. I hate how there’s 2+ sidebars and a lot of features I don’t need in standalone clients. I just need inbox, spam, trash and probably search.
Wasn’t it supposed to become Thunderbird for android?
I think this was a different smartphone app that would get the Thunderbird branding… searching… ah, it’s K-9: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on-android-plans-k9/
You are mistaking KMail (desktop client by KDE) and K-9 Mail (Android client that is being rebranded into Thunderbird for Android).
You are thinking of K9
Oh hi Jure of KDE fame ;)
How is KMail these days? I haven’t used it in years. It always largely worked, but never really exceled at anything.
aerc with mbsync and msmtp and neovim for composing
Do you use it for work or personal? I have aerc installed and working for my personal email, but I found it harder to sort through HTML emails as quickly as something like Gmail. I gave up on it after a couple days, but really liked the keyboard-centric workflow.
I don’t work but I use a script using w3m to print HTML as text. You can find those in the aerc repo.
Old school here, I use mutt. :P on android I use FairEmail and really like it.
FairEmail is great! One of the best email clients I’ve ever used.
It started struggling a bit with a large mailbox though, so I switched to K9 Mail (which I’ve heard will eventually become Thunderbird for Android)
Thunderbird. Idk what you mean by old fashioned. It works fine, and you can style it with gtk themes.
On Android I use K-9 Mail, which looks modern to me.
I mean everyone has their preferences, but personally I don’t use email clients because I want to look at something pretty—I use them to read my emails. Thunderbird mostly matching my gtk theme is more than enough for me.
I don’t know if you were aware of this but K-9 Mail has joined up with the thunderbird developers and will at some point transition to thunderbird for mobile devices
Woah, that’s cool. Yeah I had never heard that but I’ve read the K-9 blog posts about it now. From the sounds of it, K-9 Mail is just going to continue developing along the same trajectory they were going on but are just going to change the branding to Thunderbird. Which is cool with me.
Thunderbird had a redesign not too long ago. I mean, maybe you still consider it old-fashioned, but did you check you’re on the latest version?
Switched from the default win10 mail app to thunderbird about a year ago when the mail app started forcibly updating to the outlook and broke some shit on my windows installation to use a whole lot of resources. I quite liked the old mail app of the windows, but Thunderbird is quite enough of a replacement at default settings and much more customizable after fiddling. K9 has no difference than Gmail on default settings, either.
Thunderbird is very nice and lightweight compared with outlook. Picks up email settings more quicker and is much simpler to use than outlook. Recommended to all my clients.
If exchange servers and outlook.com weren’t total dickheads about their very special and proprietary Auth methods I’d literally never use outlook as a client
After Thunderbird’s UI overhaul I jumped around a bit and landed on Claws Mail. It’s fairly old fashioned, but I personally prefer that and find it clear and logical. It’s a good client.
Claws is awesome
Thunderbird. I even use it as my RSS feed reader. The only problem it has is it does not have any tray icon to indicate new unread mails (I wrote my own program for this). They are working on a tray menu, if I’m not mistaken. I have 5 mail accounts from different providers. Backing up is easy, and on a new OS installation I just need to copy over the entire directory and its like I never left my system (same for Firefox).
I cannot believe I used xbiff in the 80s to know when I had a new email, and in 2024 the most well known and old thunderbird does not…
xbiffwas usually watching a file - your mailbox - on the mainframe, which would have been updated by the mail server daemon. Heck, it could be set to watch any file to see when it updated.Basically, you could still use
xbiffif you emulate that setup using your own local mail server as a proxy. (And you’re using a GUI that supports it. No idea if Wayland does.)
I remember that was an add-on for this.
I used an addon in the past, but experienced problems at some points. Also could not find any addon that supported what I want to do, supporting RSS feeds as well or better yet, Unified Folders feature of Thunderbird. Maybe it was a configuration issue, but I ended up writing my own fast solution, that also works on commandline and can be added as a widget to any environment. Why not link it here :D https://github.com/thingsiplay/peepbird
Fair enough.
You can use birdtray for notifications
Did you mean birdtray? It’s in the AUR and I try to install mostly (not a hard rule) from official repositories.
It should be in the Debian repos
You probably can install it with distrobox
That’s too much. Distrobox and then installing from another distribution, different package manager and repository is not something I want to do and maintain. Just checked it, its in the Flatpak/Flathub repository.
And I remember using birdtray in the past, but uninstalled it for reasons I forgot. I think it did not support what I needed. Meanwhile I have my own custom solution, so its fine for now. Thanks for the suggestion however.
Def proton mail. I was using spark for my other accounts and it was pretty good. Then i got a new phone and never downloaded it agIn and i use the stock ios app.
Vivaldi M3 on desktop, K9 on mobile.
Claws-Mail is still alive and well and works great. Lots of plugins, you can write your own post processing actions, custom powerful filters, customizable interface etc.
I’ve used claws for like ten years and I have never felt any reason to switch, but OP’s criticism of thunderbird is that it’s too old-fashioned. Claws was more old-fashioned than thunderbird way back when I was trying out different clients, and has had no significant interface changes in the time since.
But yeah, claws is awesome. I can’t speak for power users, but as someone who doesn’t need a lot of features other than being somewhat idiot-proofed, it works great for me.
My work uses office365 and claws does not work with those mailboxes on its own, it took me a while to figure out the workaround. There’s a libre program called davmail that will allow you to access office365 emails from any client, it’s in the AUR and for Debian users I believe it’s in the native repositories.
TBH I’m not sure what exactly OP wants. They like Evolution and dislike Thunderbird but they both look the same to me. All mail software on desktop has list of folders, list of messages and message view.
Yes to Claws-Mail. Absolutely wonderful…can use ProtonMail Bridge to get your ProtonMail on Claws. I use Thunderbird and Tuta, Proton apps in other contexts, but if I had to use only one, it would be Claws. The user remains in control there, stripping away HTML garbage by default.
