7 ms·

The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it

The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it uses GTK it looks like the rest of your desktop (assuming your desktop is GNOME). I always end up going back to Thunderbird, for a variety of reasons. But, I try a bunch of other stuff every now and then. Sylpheed is not bad, but it's not got anything I don't get from Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is more actively maintained and has more capabilities. (I keep trying Evolution, and hating it, every single time. It's huge and thinks really hard about every single action and continues to be buggy. I don't know how something has been in really active development for decades and still has weird quirks and misbehavior without any actionable error messages.)

madez 10y ago
I also have made bad experiences with evolution. I wonder why major distributions still use it as their default client. Is there some good reason for that, or is it just neglect?
- Faaak 10y ago
  I'm forced at work to use an exchange account (so that implies using the calendar). Evolution was the only program I found that works on ubuntu and supports exchange somewhat (I didn't want at all to use the exchange web interface). So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me
  - vetinari 10y ago
    If you don't mind having jre on your system and running a daemon: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ Then you can use any client you want.
    - nekitamo 10y ago
      Have you managed to get davmail working with Office365/Outlook.com? It was unusably slow every time I tried (message fetching would take over a minute, inbox refresh would only happen once every ~30 minutes, etc...)
      - vetinari 10y ago
        No, fortunately, never had to.
- natermer 10y ago
  Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop. The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail. The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people. Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones. Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.
  - mike-cardwell 10y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers." Search is built into the IMAP protocol. [1] Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. That said, "Sieve" is really powerful, and there are many SMTP and IMAP servers which support it. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4
    - natermer 10y ago
      ok, 'search that does not suck' isn't a feature of IMAP. > Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. Right, so users are forced to set up this stuff for each and every device they have. This is a big reason why the exodus to webmail and the proprietary internal-only protocols they use. Seive is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard and is something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients. Unless you are a big email nerd that runs your own servers it's pretty much worthless.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  What do you mean major distributions use evolution as the default email client ? AFAIK almost all major distros give you the choice of the desktop environment you want if you want one. When you choose the gnome flavor of said distros, I suppose that it comes with evolution because it is the official default email client for gnome until its replacement, geary, is ready. But last time I checked in 2015 it was still in early stages of development despite having started circa 2012.
- xiaomai 10y ago
  I have tried Evolution off and on ever since Ximian released it back in the day. It always seemed buggy and bloated (even a year or two ago when I was just using it for Calendar integration I would find freak out and eat up 100% cpu randomly). I always went back to mutt or sup, or more recently I tried Geary. Recently (<6 months?) I tried evolution again and I am blown away with how reliable it is. The search is great, everything works. It's not a very exciting e-mail client, but it gets the job done better than any other (while integrating very nicely into gnome).
educar 10y ago
I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.
- hackuser 10y ago
  That was the last I heard too, but it seems to be actively updated. For example, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ Does anyone know the story?
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    There have been a couple of discussions here and elsewhere about it. My understanding is that Thunderbird is no longer a priority project for Mozilla Foundation and has no full-time developers paid by Mozilla, but it still uses Mozilla resources, and a number of volunteers continue to maintain it. So, it's kinda in the category of Sylpheed or Claws, in that it no longer has major corporate sponsors, I guess. I think Evolution has a bit more corporate sponsorship (Red Hat, which has developers working full-time on it, while SuSE stopped funding its development a while back; I don't think Canonical contributes in any significant way, either), so if having a corporate developer behind the mail client is necessary, I guess Evolution is the only choice for Linux users. Frankly, I wish Red Hat, and everybody else, would put its people on Thunderbird. It's far from perfect, but it's farther from awful than Evolution. But, I don't need Exchange integration, so I may be missing the big picture for corporate users.
    - fabrice_d 10y ago
      The Thunderbird community is quite active, as can be seen by the activity in the tb-planning mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/ https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/). They know they have to pivot to a more modern codebase, and have been discussing modernizing TB on a regular basis. Most of the traffic in April is about a "Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies". Go read it!
Yetanfou 10y ago
What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message. Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier. Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc. Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. [1] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/
- lysium 10y ago
  Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now. I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).
- derf_ 10y ago
  > Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since. The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up. I may not be a typical e-mail user.
bigbugbag 10y ago
Assuming the desktop is GNOME is a bold assumption, AFAIK there's no gnome under OSX nor windows, and personally GNOME has displayed so much bad faith and disdain for the need of its users that even if it were the best desktop available I would not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Also GTK applications usually do not look bad under KDE or LXDE or cinnamon, etc. That being said the official screenshots are horribly dated, maybe more than 10 years. They feature version 2.2 while current version is 3.5.1 better than words here a screenshot of sylpheed 3.5.1 under a plasma 5 desktop: https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png I tried a variety of email client and none have been fully satisfying, evolution was really painful to use and half-broken most of the time, it's been a while since I've used thunderbird and though it tends to work I have no plan to go back until it offers the possibility to prevent access with a password as the mozilla suite offered. Mutt was nice but I moved away for personal preferences. Right now I use kmail which I recommend you do NOT use, far from being the pain evolution was, it mostly work most of the time but when it does not you're in for a ride, the main drawback is the akonadi backend that offers nothing I want or need and gives me headache. every other day I have stop and restart akonadi so the new mails would show in my inbox, once in a while it fails silently to send email, the documentation is sparse and the bug reports are scary[1] and the fix you may finally find are not obvious[2]. I had hopes in trojita but last time I checked it was still not ready for daily use after years of development. I had even better hopes for caliopen[3] but current roadmap says late 2018. The good news is KDE has been working on replacing akonadi by Sink which is supposed to have learned from their mistakes and address the weak points of akonadi , and replacing kmail with kube which will leverage Sink and be consistent with roundcube next. Bad news is they've been at it for a couple years now and it's not done yet. Next in line for me to give a try are elementary OS' mail[4] and notmuch in emacs (also exists for vim). [1]: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&product=kmail2&query_format=advanced&resolution=--- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=cha... [2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidates-error-and-how-to-fix-it/ http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate... [3]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/ https://www.caliopen.org/en/ [4]: https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail
sigzero 10y ago
Those screenshots should really be updated.

madez 10y ago

I also have made bad experiences with evolution. I wonder why major distributions still use it as their default client. Is there some good reason for that, or is it just neglect?

Faaak 10y ago
I'm forced at work to use an exchange account (so that implies using the calendar). Evolution was the only program I found that works on ubuntu and supports exchange somewhat (I didn't want at all to use the exchange web interface). So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me
- vetinari 10y ago
  If you don't mind having jre on your system and running a daemon: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ Then you can use any client you want.
  - nekitamo 10y ago
    Have you managed to get davmail working with Office365/Outlook.com? It was unusably slow every time I tried (message fetching would take over a minute, inbox refresh would only happen once every ~30 minutes, etc...)
    - vetinari 10y ago
      No, fortunately, never had to.
natermer 10y ago
Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop. The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail. The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people. Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones. Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers." Search is built into the IMAP protocol. [1] Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. That said, "Sieve" is really powerful, and there are many SMTP and IMAP servers which support it. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4
  - natermer 10y ago
    ok, 'search that does not suck' isn't a feature of IMAP. > Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. Right, so users are forced to set up this stuff for each and every device they have. This is a big reason why the exodus to webmail and the proprietary internal-only protocols they use. Seive is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard and is something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients. Unless you are a big email nerd that runs your own servers it's pretty much worthless.
bigbugbag 10y ago
What do you mean major distributions use evolution as the default email client ? AFAIK almost all major distros give you the choice of the desktop environment you want if you want one. When you choose the gnome flavor of said distros, I suppose that it comes with evolution because it is the official default email client for gnome until its replacement, geary, is ready. But last time I checked in 2015 it was still in early stages of development despite having started circa 2012.
xiaomai 10y ago
I have tried Evolution off and on ever since Ximian released it back in the day. It always seemed buggy and bloated (even a year or two ago when I was just using it for Calendar integration I would find freak out and eat up 100% cpu randomly). I always went back to mutt or sup, or more recently I tried Geary. Recently (<6 months?) I tried evolution again and I am blown away with how reliable it is. The search is great, everything works. It's not a very exciting e-mail client, but it gets the job done better than any other (while integrating very nicely into gnome).

educar 10y ago

I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.

hackuser 10y ago
That was the last I heard too, but it seems to be actively updated. For example, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ Does anyone know the story?
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  There have been a couple of discussions here and elsewhere about it. My understanding is that Thunderbird is no longer a priority project for Mozilla Foundation and has no full-time developers paid by Mozilla, but it still uses Mozilla resources, and a number of volunteers continue to maintain it. So, it's kinda in the category of Sylpheed or Claws, in that it no longer has major corporate sponsors, I guess. I think Evolution has a bit more corporate sponsorship (Red Hat, which has developers working full-time on it, while SuSE stopped funding its development a while back; I don't think Canonical contributes in any significant way, either), so if having a corporate developer behind the mail client is necessary, I guess Evolution is the only choice for Linux users. Frankly, I wish Red Hat, and everybody else, would put its people on Thunderbird. It's far from perfect, but it's farther from awful than Evolution. But, I don't need Exchange integration, so I may be missing the big picture for corporate users.
  - fabrice_d 10y ago
    The Thunderbird community is quite active, as can be seen by the activity in the tb-planning mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/ https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/). They know they have to pivot to a more modern codebase, and have been discussing modernizing TB on a regular basis. Most of the traffic in April is about a "Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies". Go read it!

Yetanfou 10y ago

What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message. Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier. Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc. Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. [1] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/

lysium 10y ago
Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now. I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).
derf_ 10y ago
> Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since. The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up. I may not be a typical e-mail user.

bigbugbag 10y ago

Assuming the desktop is GNOME is a bold assumption, AFAIK there's no gnome under OSX nor windows, and personally GNOME has displayed so much bad faith and disdain for the need of its users that even if it were the best desktop available I would not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Also GTK applications usually do not look bad under KDE or LXDE or cinnamon, etc. That being said the official screenshots are horribly dated, maybe more than 10 years. They feature version 2.2 while current version is 3.5.1 better than words here a screenshot of sylpheed 3.5.1 under a plasma 5 desktop: https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png I tried a variety of email client and none have been fully satisfying, evolution was really painful to use and half-broken most of the time, it's been a while since I've used thunderbird and though it tends to work I have no plan to go back until it offers the possibility to prevent access with a password as the mozilla suite offered. Mutt was nice but I moved away for personal preferences. Right now I use kmail which I recommend you do NOT use, far from being the pain evolution was, it mostly work most of the time but when it does not you're in for a ride, the main drawback is the akonadi backend that offers nothing I want or need and gives me headache. every other day I have stop and restart akonadi so the new mails would show in my inbox, once in a while it fails silently to send email, the documentation is sparse and the bug reports are scary[1] and the fix you may finally find are not obvious[2]. I had hopes in trojita but last time I checked it was still not ready for daily use after years of development. I had even better hopes for caliopen[3] but current roadmap says late 2018. The good news is KDE has been working on replacing akonadi by Sink which is supposed to have learned from their mistakes and address the weak points of akonadi , and replacing kmail with kube which will leverage Sink and be consistent with roundcube next. Bad news is they've been at it for a couple years now and it's not done yet. Next in line for me to give a try are elementary OS' mail[4] and notmuch in emacs (also exists for vim). [1]: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&product=kmail2&query_format=advanced&resolution=--- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=cha... [2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidates-error-and-how-to-fix-it/ http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate... [3]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/ https://www.caliopen.org/en/ [4]: https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail

sigzero 10y ago

Those screenshots should really be updated.