Mainly a question for developers, what kind of email client do you use/prefer? I myself mainly use Gmail/Spark but wondering if there's any good alternatives out there?
Been a solid Thunderbird user for well on 15 yrs. Should I cringe that I'm a POP user? I know IMAP is the way, but I cherish my offline email archives and I don't want my email taking up space on the host I use. Am I doing it wrong?
That my friend is a good question. I get the side-stare for saying I still use POP. I sync my mailboxes between machines and it seems to work for me. Yes, working on multiple machines sharing an inbox at the same time is problematic, but so for me would be the IMAP alternative. As long as POP doesn't go away I'm good.
beginning of this year i made tabula rasa and set up my personal server up from scratch. i use postfix and dovecot for mail and made a conscious decision against imap in favour of pop3. i know it doesn't matter a lot in the end but i like to try minimize network traffic and resource consumption server side.
It is usable for me only with expression search NG (https://github.com/opto/expression-search-NG). TB is my daily driver but with every update I fear that they will destroy sth again: expression search failed to work for over a year due to their breaking changes. Switched to another extension until that one stopped working. Now back on expression search as opto has ported it.
Is this really aimed at providing an individual email client? I've used it in the past to send out bulk emails similar to Constant Contact (for example), and from their web site it appears their focus is still primarily on managing customer emails for business.
I love Proton. I use everything, Mail with 5 custom domains attached, VPN, the new Files component is turning out fantastic too, and the mobile apps are rock stable
I believe they’re on a fantastic path these days and as soon as the Drive/Files feature is out of beta and gets its own companion app they‘re going to start becoming a serious and most definitely superior competitor to Google etc
Fastmail is recommended so often on HN it's starting to feel like a bit of a meme, but if you want a solid, reliable cloud email provider with a better and faster UI than Gmail, check it out.
Edit: And as an aside, my guess would be that very few people are storing their email solely on their computer. Even people running their own mail servers are likely storing the mail on the server and syncing it to their clients with IMAP.
Agreed. Gmail is a rampant lagfest whenever I end up using it (I only go to update filters and labels anymore). The HTML site is a lot more responsive and usable IME (though the filter form's length limits need edited in a debugger to fit my queries). With the "plain" HTML frontend filter updates are fast because it's all done directly to the database. With the "fancy" frontend, it seems to be client-side driven and take minutes to "apply and update" any changes.
Same here, tried Apple, Thunderbird, Mutt and Canary. I come back to Gmail's webmail. I do not want emai lto be stored on my computer.
With firefox containers , I can have dedicated containers for different emails. With Karabiner and Hammerspoon it is easy to have good keyboard navigation. Gmail webmail itself has very good keybindings to get most of the work done.
So you are not alone :).
If not for webmail, maybe Canary mail is a good alternative.
Huh, this seems quite pleasant, just added both of my google accounts. Having touch controls to archive emails (which is most of what I do anyway) is great, and I find the noises enjoyable as well. Maybe I'll mute them eventually.
I recommend emclient and nine on Android. The former has some issues with exchange that davmail & evolution seem to get around so don't use it for the purpose anymore but it an overall good email and calendar suite.
I am really enjoying Canary mail, on macOS/iOS. It's an indie app, but feels super platform native (near Apple experiences), while boasting some nice features like email templates and actually good integrated PGP support (complete with a ProtonMail-style send-secure-emails-as-webpages-to-non-users feature).
I use evolution, as I've used it for almost decades now, and have it customized exactly how I like it.
I heavily use IMAP flags and evolution's virtual folders to nicely group/tag things, rather than IMAP folders. I also use imapfilter to automatically add IMAP flags to messages, and only add 'inbox' to important emails. This keeps my inbox small and tidy, and all my automated stuff goes to other virtual folders.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any mobile email clients (at least on iOS) that support this workflow, so I do very little email, other than some passive reading on my mobile device.
As a heavy emacs user, mu4e has intrigued me, but I haven't experimented enough with it to move my workflow. For work, I unfortunately have to deal with a lot of html email, calendar invitations, and other non-sense, that evolution handles quite well.
I use Outlook at work and Mail (Microsoft Store app) at home. I suppose the main reason is that they have basically foolproof compatibility and functioning with their respective O365 and Outlook.com (formerly/via Windows Live Custom Domains) server counterparts.
Functionally they have what I need. I turn off the Focused Inbox feature in both as I have no problem with a little tedium. The rules system in both is good, though that runs server-side technically. I turn off conversation view nowadays, but have used it extensively in the past with massive threads and found it quite good (Outlook). Outlook's list views can be customized quite extensively, and the dark theme is good. Search works fine in both clients.
I have taken Outlook to somewhere around 100GB and over 1,000,000 emails back in the year 2013 and that worked fine. IIRC the OST was always 30-40GB, and I would shuffle things off to yearly archive PSTs.
I have a few requirements for an email client. My primary email is through the same company I use for webhosting (Opalstack in my case). I'd prefer if other companies didn't read my email, so I don't use gmail/outlook/similar via IMAP/POP or forwarding or anything like that.
I also only send plaintext email. This sounds like it should be easier than sending HTML, but many mobile email clients only send HTML or "rich emails". This includes the gmail! (This used to be possible in earlier versions of google's phone email apps. Maybe it was Inbox? I don't remember now. But being unable to send plaintext email from gmail on mobile is what caused me to move away from gmail).
Now I use mutt on my own computer, K9 on mobile, and if absolutely necessary Roundcube webmail. (I do not particularly like Roundcube, but I almost never actually have to use it).
Mutt is wonderful, though I found it highly nontrivial to initially use. K9 is fine. One feature of K9 I like is that it has a surprisingly capable search capability given that I use it purely over IMAP --- it dispatches a search to my mail server and parses the results.
I tried almost every email client on macOS/iOS. All if them has few or more disadvantages, like: eats more battery life, or slow or lack of support for AWS workmail, bad for multiple accounts, etc...
So, the best, for me is Apple Mail. Simple, fast, truly native, reliable and almost full featured.
My $WORKPLACE is using Outlook, so I use Thunderbird for Mail there too and always have a browser tab open with the OWA calendar [1]. Not the most elegant solution, but it's working fine for me.
[1] Tried several addons for Thunderbird with Outlook integration, decided I don't like any of them.
55 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadhttps://www.thunderbird.net
is like an Outlook that works.
Now is the best time to try protonmail.
I believe they’re on a fantastic path these days and as soon as the Drive/Files feature is out of beta and gets its own companion app they‘re going to start becoming a serious and most definitely superior competitor to Google etc
In terms of UX it's horrible, but importantly I don't want my email stored in my computer. I trust google to be safer than my computer.
Am I alone on this?
If it's helpful, I wrote a small guide on switching off of Gmail here: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/
Edit: And as an aside, my guess would be that very few people are storing their email solely on their computer. Even people running their own mail servers are likely storing the mail on the server and syncing it to their clients with IMAP.
I can in a few keystroke isolate the handful of emails that actually need my attention in the hundreds I receive every couple of days.
Org mode integration allow me to reference those that I may need in the future, or that require later action in my to-do list.
My time handling email is now reduced to 20min-2h every two days, in one sitting, my mind feels liberated. I can't recommend this setup enough.
):
I heavily use IMAP flags and evolution's virtual folders to nicely group/tag things, rather than IMAP folders. I also use imapfilter to automatically add IMAP flags to messages, and only add 'inbox' to important emails. This keeps my inbox small and tidy, and all my automated stuff goes to other virtual folders.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any mobile email clients (at least on iOS) that support this workflow, so I do very little email, other than some passive reading on my mobile device.
As a heavy emacs user, mu4e has intrigued me, but I haven't experimented enough with it to move my workflow. For work, I unfortunately have to deal with a lot of html email, calendar invitations, and other non-sense, that evolution handles quite well.
It is simple and fast, but it has all the features that I need.
https://www.claws-mail.org/
It is one of the e-mail clients which stores the e-mail messages as separate files.
I prefer this over storing the messages in some database.
Functionally they have what I need. I turn off the Focused Inbox feature in both as I have no problem with a little tedium. The rules system in both is good, though that runs server-side technically. I turn off conversation view nowadays, but have used it extensively in the past with massive threads and found it quite good (Outlook). Outlook's list views can be customized quite extensively, and the dark theme is good. Search works fine in both clients.
I have taken Outlook to somewhere around 100GB and over 1,000,000 emails back in the year 2013 and that worked fine. IIRC the OST was always 30-40GB, and I would shuffle things off to yearly archive PSTs.
I also only send plaintext email. This sounds like it should be easier than sending HTML, but many mobile email clients only send HTML or "rich emails". This includes the gmail! (This used to be possible in earlier versions of google's phone email apps. Maybe it was Inbox? I don't remember now. But being unable to send plaintext email from gmail on mobile is what caused me to move away from gmail).
Now I use mutt on my own computer, K9 on mobile, and if absolutely necessary Roundcube webmail. (I do not particularly like Roundcube, but I almost never actually have to use it).
Mutt is wonderful, though I found it highly nontrivial to initially use. K9 is fine. One feature of K9 I like is that it has a surprisingly capable search capability given that I use it purely over IMAP --- it dispatches a search to my mail server and parses the results.
So, the best, for me is Apple Mail. Simple, fast, truly native, reliable and almost full featured.
My $WORKPLACE is using Outlook, so I use Thunderbird for Mail there too and always have a browser tab open with the OWA calendar [1]. Not the most elegant solution, but it's working fine for me.
[1] Tried several addons for Thunderbird with Outlook integration, decided I don't like any of them.