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 !
yeah, I use Thunderbird, but it bothers me how slow it feels and the frequent little UI bugs with unread flags not updating and the delay of messages to show up in the unified inbox.
It’s nice that Betterbird has a system tray (I can’t believe how a standalone desktop app for emails neglects this, like TB does), but it still inherits a lot of the problems TB has.
I do remember Thunderbird being kinda slow when I tried it on my potato grade laptop… I assume Betterbird isn’t any faster ?
I have tried kmail, Geary, mailspring before I landed on betterbird. I’m not sure what you mean with slow, but it works without issues on my pc. It does a lot of stuff, but it’s a fork of Thunderbird, which you want to exclude based on the initial thread. There are not a lot of linux clients even worth trying. Good luck finding your jam.
I meant not too slow to load on a potato-grade laptop… Thunderbird takes a while 😅 I hadn’t heard of mailspring before, I’ll check it out thanks !
Which version do you use with which OS? As a GNOME user I don’t need it, but I’m pretty sure Thunderbird has a system tray.
v137 on KDE, there’s no minimize or close to tray option in the settings, like some screenshots suggest.
Thunderbird extensions for that don’t work on recent versions, and KDocker - which I used for a couple of years - doesn’t seem to work on Wayland. So the only option on some DEs seems to migrate to Betterbird.
Ouch that must sucks 🫤