Hi, I tried using an email client over a year ago, and after trying almost all of them in the span of a week I gave up in frustration. Would anyone have a recommendation ? For an email client :
- That is actively maintained
- That is not controlled by a company that could pull a Mozilla on it (Thunderbird)
- That isn’t proprietary
- That doesn’t need 77 dependencies and 450 GB (WTF KMail 😭 )
- That is reasonably fast and light and not too bloated (I just want to read emails, I don’t need a full app suite…)
- That supports POP
- That supports writing HTML messages (sorry Claws, I really liked you but occasionally I kinda need to write formatted messages to preserve other people’s sanity 😅 )
- That supports reading HTML messages without showing the HTML version as attachments so that every single email has the paperclip icon and I can’t tell which messages have real attachments (Sylpheed I think ?)
- That supports MailDir format for portability (why isn’t it the default everywhere already instead of weird non-portable formats ? 😭 )
- If possible, that doesn’t have an interface that’s so awful it’s a pain to find anything (Thunderbird)
I also tested Geary and another one but I don’t remember much about it… I can’t find out whether Geary does support POP and maildir, its documentation page is… well it’s a list 8 lines long, but on a page called “Documentation” so it’s technically counts as documentation I guess ? 😅 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary/Documentation
Any recommendation would be greatly appreciated !
tell me you are heavily neurodivergent without telling me
I went through this same process and research and I landed on hosting Roundcube as a docker container on a server in my home built from the guts of my old laptop but you can run it locally too.
Lmao that’s what ChatGPT recommended after I ranted about all the email clients I had tried 😂
fetchmail/getmail6 to fetch the mails via POP3 in maildir format + a local roundcube server + CLI tool to still be able to read mails outside home but I thought I might be a bit overkill 😅
lol I am as dumb as artificial intelligence. fwiw I have it hooked to my reverse proxy and can just use the roundcube website on my phone externally, it scales nicely for phone screens.
Hey it’s not a dumb idea just because AI suggested it, ChatGPT probably just pulled that setup from somewhere on reddit I wasn’t saying it was stupid but the reverse : it probably would be too technical for me to set up and a bit overkill, but it’s tempting to try anyway. If you managed to do it it’s awesome !
Evolution.
I have used Thunderbird a lot, but finally decided to go back to Evolution 2 years ago.
Just a note: its more of a Personal information manager(it includes calender,contacts,to do,etc) rather then just a email client
Well I year ago I would have said “no way I want an email client that does email and nothing else” but after trying so many of them I’m fine ignoring the stuff I don’t use as long as it doesn’t get in the way so I’ll look it up thanks !
I basically use it only for mail, although I have set up my calender there, too. The evolution-data-server makes it possible to access the calender entries using gnome-calender which has a modern gui.
You can still accept email invites in evolution and see them in gnome-calendar. It works very well with my radical server.
And second bonus, it integrates your dates with gnome-shell. Just disable notifications in evolution to don’t get them twice. (:
So close on mutt! :)
I have it set up so that it autoconverts all HTML messages to plain text as best as it can. If it’s not good enough, I have a macro set up to launch the HTML version in Firefox so it’s usable. (None of the images come through, which is potentially a feature.)
I did look into writing HTML mail with mutt, and it’s even uglier than reading. The gist of it is to basically have a wrapper script that launches some kind of HTML editor, then builds the multipart message (maybe autoconverting HTML to text so you can have both) and headers, then launches mutt -H email.txt to prepare to send it. If it looks good, send it from Mutt as normal. I don’t know how well this would work with attached inline images, but it sounds potentially quite painful.
But I don’t regularly send HTML messages, so I haven’t bothered with that route. I’d just bring up TB if I had to.
(I can say, for me, since I went back to mutt, I’m happier with email than I’ve been for decades. And my RAM is happier, too. But I probably spent 20 hours configuring it. And everyone probably hates my preformatted text. They get back at me by sending 30 MB HTML-only mails. 🤣)
20 hours spent on config is only a waste if you can’t do it in a config file that you get to proudly display in a public repo as a gift to Humanity… dotfiles will be our immortal legacy 😁
Vivaldi has integrated mail client.
