What’s everyone’s preferred email client these days?
Evolution currently. Previously Thunderbird. I wouldn’t mind a newer client but I am only interested in native apps talking to my email server over open standards.
Proton mail
They were asking about client app. Like Geary, KMail, Emacs, etc.
Gnus in Emacs, configured to use autocrypt.
How is autocrypt supported nowadays?
Sorry for the delay, but the answer was long enough that I turned it into a blog post instead. Feel free to try it out.
I use Thunderbird. I’m sure there might be other ones that are better, but it does the job.
I’m boring and just use Thunderbird nowadays, but sometimes I yearn for those simpler days when I daily drove aerc.
Evolution
I have everything aggregated into Gmail, so I just use web and the mobile app. I’m looking at Proton but it doesn’t have the “send as” feature for external SMTP services the Gmail does.
What do you mean? I use a custom domain in proton so that my server sends emails from info@mydomain instead of my proton email. I have about 10 addresses with three different domains in the essentials plan and I can send emails from different containers as different emails
That’s only for a personal domain that you own and can set the DNS records for. But if you wanted to forward your gmail (or yahoo, or outlook, or whatever other provider that offers a public SMTP server) addresses to your proton mailbox, and be able send emails as those gmail addresses from within your proton mailbox, that’s not supported. See here for what the feature looks like in GMail.
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to move away from :/
I’m honestly a bit surprised that Proton doesn’t seem to have the send as feature. I was able to find at least 15 posts across their uservoice.com site and their Reddit forum, spanning at least 6 years, with one of the uservoice posts having over 300 votes. I just gathered up all the links and sent it into Proton Mail support. Hopefully having all that thrown at them in one big bundle will prompt their project managers to consider it.
i’ve always used thunderbird and never had any reason to try anything else.
I tried Betterbird, but had no end of certificate errors and trouble. Went back to tbird and all good again.
I had the opposite for some reason! Thunderbird started giving lots of weird errors, especially with Gmail, but Betterbird worked fine so I just ended up switching over.
Does Thunderbird have unified inbox? And how well does it deal with Exchange? Just do imap mode?
EAS is not implemented so imap and pop3 only. But i heard they currently work on EAS and should be arriving in the near future.
For EAS there is also a paid plugin Owl i think.
Yes to unified inbox, not sure about exchange but works well with IMAP
Whats the best email service? I use Thunderbird for just about everything, but gmail has been getting on my nerves lately. I would love to selfhost, but my internet service provider blocks port 25…
I personally like both Posteo and mailbox.org, but they are paid email services.
You can use them for your email, contacts, calendars, and tasks. On Android, you can use Davx5 to sync them.
Great question. Gmail is still OK, but if love to degoogle more.
Yeah I would love to get off google. Good to know others are thinking the same.
Whats the best email service?
Really depends on how you define “best”, but maybe Fastmail if your priority is features and usability or Protonmail if you value privacy a lot.
I would love to selfhost, but my internet service provider blocks port 25…
Selfhosting email is generally not worth it in my opinion and doing it from a residential connection is pretty much doomed to fail right from the start.
I’ve been using Protonmail and it does the job (although not for free). To use it with Thunderbird I need to use a “bridge” background app to decrypt it though.
Same here. That works well for desktop, they also have an electron app that wraps their web ui into a desktop app and it works well enough. Bridge works very well for any other desktop app you’d want to use.
The only trouble is that on mobile your option is their app or the web interface, no ability to use alternative apps. The mobile app is good, but not great.
Overall its a good service and I’m happy bit you need to know these limitations going in or it could be frustrating.
I’ve just moved to Thunderbird. I was never keen on the old design and found it rather clunky but the new UI I find much better.
I was using Mailspring but it has recently just refused to work on my device and I never even got a response on the community forums so I’ve just given up on it.
Thunderbird is the best IMO. Mailspring is also pretty good.
Great, a subscription based mail program. Because that’s clearly what people want and need, paying rent for the software on their machines.
Nothing about the program itself is subscription based. All of the normal features of an email client (that you would also find in Thunderbird) are available for free. You only need to pay if you want to use their services like Send later, read receipts or link tracking, because these requires backend servers and actually costs the money.
kmail…
it integrates well with, you know…
kde…I tried KMail and Organizer for a few weeks, but they kept losing connection with Gmail. My calendar would get out of sync, and they only way to fix it was to reset the connection and redo all the appointments.
I’m sure it was user error, since I couldn’t figure it out after spending a couple hours on it, so I just dropped back to webmail and not leaving the mail tab open all day.
I tried using KOrganize which had KMail and some other stuff integrated together and ended up feeling like it was a gigantic, archaic codebase just hanging on by a thread. It struggled a lot with Gmail and several times I deleted my whole mail profile to try to fix some strange bug.
If I recall, what did me in was that it would stop sending emails after running for a while. The fix had something to do with restarting Akonadi. It was really disappointing, because I love a good UI/Plasma integration.
I use Thunderbird now and … eh. It’s ok.
FairEmail
Thunderbird