What email client do you use?
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For the past decade I have used Thunderbird as my email client of choice, but it appears that this time has come to an end. They have unceremoniously broken the only addon I use. In addition, I have discovered that > characters do not count as “quotations” and will be indented by one space in the actual sent text. This breaks manually edited quotations and makes it look like the entire body of the email is one quote, even if there are inline responses. Unfortunately, this decline in quality seems like the new modus operandi at Mozilla (especially judging by the recent changes they’ve made to Firefox).
Thus, I am in the market for a new email client. So far I have looked at Evolution, which seems like it can do 90% of what Thunderbird does, and also seems to have a much nicer philosophy wrt user customization. The only problems I encountered were that it hangs on startup unless the main thread is stopped in gdb and resumed (wtf?), and that it lacks a “simple HTML” mode for viewing HTML emails without colors and whatnot. I also looked at sup with offlineimap, but I’m not very impressed by the setup. The lack of integration between the fetcher and the viewer makes for poor UX because of the difficulty of configuration and lack of flexibility. sup also crashes on startup (ugh).
What email client do you use? Does it have the option to integrate an external editor like vim? What is the threaded interface like? How does it display HTML emails? What is the filtering system like?
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I use what the Romans do, mostly (I have an Exchange mailbox, so that does make things more difficult.):
- On Windows, I use Outlook.
- Filtering is fairly powerful, and can be punted to the Exchange server when possible
- Threading is flattened AFAIK, at least by default. That is, a thread is grouped into one clump, and you can expand to pick messages in the thread.
- On Mac, I use Mail.app.
- I don’t use filtering here, no idea.
- Threading is messages are grouped together by default, right pane shows them linearly, can be expanded in mailbox view.
- On Linux, I use Evolution.
- I don’t use filtering here.
- Threading is nested, up to a certain point where it becomes flattened because the diagonal line going too far would be too much.
Fair warning: I generally use HTML email, top post, etc, because it’s what people in the real world (i.e. my clients) do, not what people who talk about email do.
I haven’t heard of a simple HTML view or use external editors, so I can’t speak for that. The crashing you’re having with mail clients is really unusual though.
In general I’m mostly satisfied with all of them, but Evolution does have infuriating bugs with synchronization message state with IMAP (i.e move a lot of messages at once to a folder, watch random messages in your current mailbox have random read/unread for a second until it updates).
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Fair warning: I generally use HTML email, top post, etc, because it’s what people in the real world (i.e. my clients) do, not what people who talk about email do.
As far as I know there aren’t really any downside to using plain text when mailing with people who use HTML, right? Or are there email clients who render this in a weird way?
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Replying to an HTML thread in plain text can make the quoting render very poorly. I’m not sure whether this is down to the MUA doing the quoting or to the ones rendering the reply, but it gets pretty hard to read. If I’m replying to a large group on a thread that’s seen more than one HTML message, I prefer to do so in HTML.
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Some plain text renderers default to proportional fonts and mangle line endings and extra blank lines. (Notably, Gmail.) If you want your recipient to see the email the same way you intended, you should take this into consideration.
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Fair warning: I generally use HTML email, top post, etc, because it’s what people in the real world (i.e. my clients) do, not what people who talk about email do.
I need to correspond with a mix of those “people in the real world” and people who talk about email.
When I’m interacting with people who top post and use HTML email, I either use webmail or fire up a Win 10 VM and use Outlook.
When I’m interacting with people who react angrily to top posting and HTML email, I use mutt. I’ve been experimenting with aerc and like it quite a bit when it’s stable. Especially for reviewing patchsets that come in over email. For reading most email, these are my preferred clients, and both can just use a maildir so it’s easy to switch back and forth on a whim.
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All the clients I use (even Outlook) can be switched to plain text; Evolution has the best implementation because it auto-reflows to wrap and tries to map HTML formatting options to plain-textified ones. Every project I work with has a forge, so it’s trivial for me to just use plain text only for lists. (I’ve received Python scripts in Excel files more than I have diff format, so…. You haven’t lived until you had to switch the Excel worksheet to view a
.bash_profile.)-
I like switching MUAs better than flipping the setting back to HTML when I need it in a reply. Mostly because I have found that if you keep your default format as plain text, then switch to HTML just when you need it in a reply, quoting gets messed up.
So the dance becomes: read a message where I want to reply with HTML -> go to settings and change how I compose email -> go back to the message and hit reply.
I’ve observed that in Outlook and Thunderbird. Evolution’s S/MIME bugs prevented me from using it for so long that I got out of the habit of even trying it.
But this:
You haven’t lived until you had to switch the Excel worksheet to view a .bash_profile.)
Damn. That is special.
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- On Windows, I use Outlook.
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Well, since I’ve not seen anyone here post it yet, I’ll say it:
I use the Gmail web application for all my email sending and receiving, both for work and for my personal email, and I really like it.
I used to self-host email but through a mixture of inexperience configuring things and my domain getting flagged on spam lists due to me running an open link shortener on it, too many of my emails went to spam and I gave up and pay Google to host my email now.
Anyway, I’m very happy with it. It runs very well, is accessible from any device with no installation, and has some really nice features that aren’t really available anywhere else. Their predictive text feature while composing emails is something I’ve come to really like. Their spam filtering is as perfect as I can imagine it getting. The auto-sorting feature for Primary, Promotions, and Updates is really nice; it works quite well too considering how much variety there is in email. The site is very performant as well (although I do have high end hardware) and I never wait for things to sync or load.
When I self-hosted e-mail I used an open source web-based mail client called Roundcube (which really is incomparable to Gmail in terms of features and ease-of-use, but certainly did the job). I also used Thunderbird for a while. However I found that for me, there really is no advantage whatsoever over just using a web app, even Roundcube.
I totally understand that not everyone can use (or wants to use) Gmail for their email, and I’m not even trying to promote it. Maybe the story is different for people that make heavy use of things like git-by-email, are in huge mailing lists for discussion and questions, or stuff like that. However, I really do believe that an e-mail client is one of the use-cases where a web application can really show its advantages.
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I am using (neo)vim as daily driver and also try to minimize the need for a mouse by using qutebrowser or vimium in chromium, I really like the handling of aerc compared to any GUI mail client.
To write mails it just opens EDITOR.
The switch to aerc wasn’t that long ago, so I am still figuring stuff out and tweaking my config. I really like being able to render HTML mails with w3m, but the concept behind that mechanism doesn’t stop at HTML: You can map commands to view/open content or attachments per media type (MIME). Or if you have no direct mapping you can pipe attachments to any command.
Next thing I want to figure out is how to integrate gpg smoothly. I don’t know if there already is direct support for it, but even if not, there might be ways. And if it’s not possible yet, this is a great way to start contributing to it. (It’s written in Go)
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For me it’s mu4e in Emacs. The speed of mailutils, convenient keybindings and sane composition defaults you don’t have to fight to submit patches.
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I also use mu4e. I haven’t found another email client that offers the same speed of execution and of user input. It connects with my password manager with a single line of configuration:
(auth-source-pass-enable)which is builtin to Emacs. I also have the ability to define custom bookmarks to, with a single keystroke, show me all my inboxes, just my flagged emails, etc.The big feature for me though is contexts. For each email account I have, I define a
:match-funcfunction. I actually used a macro to create the functions to match on the account’s given Maildir. A large part of the mu4e workflow is marking messages to delete/flag/move/etc and then executing those marks (similar to dired). When I realized the contexts automatically reassign for each message you mark in “real time”, I was pleasantly surprised. This means, for example, if I there are a bunch of emails in a row from potentially different accounts, I can just spam thedkey to mark them for deletion, thenxto actually delete, and they will all go to their respective trash folders, not just the trash folder of the context you selected when you launched mu4e. -
Another vote here for mu4e. It helps me focus on getting through my inbox to have it outside of my browser and be able to use even more keyboard shortcuts than the gmail interface.
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Notmuch in emacs, along with org-msg to produce HTML emails from org markup, complete with all the usual org stuff – tables, syntax highlighting, example/quote blocks.
I’ve used it since November 2017 and by now have a fairly extensive tag file that auto-tags almost all of my incoming email. It tags stuff like track&trace emails from shipping providers, mail related to the apartment building board, tags job-related mail by customer etc.
I currently have almost 123k emails in notmuch, and full-text searching is still incredibly fast:
$ time notmuch count -- '"hello there rune"' 9 0.00user 0.02system 0:00.06elapsed 42%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 7256maxresident)k 12490inputs+0outputs (0major+590minor)pagefaults 0swapsIt takes a bit of scripting to get everything working, but I feel that is a small price to pay for the flexibility I get.
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I use Thunderbird, but then I only send plain text emails (as Nuggan intended) so I guess that’s why I don’t see the problems you’ve been having.
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I also only send plain text emails. But Thunderbird’s text wrapping is terrible. I’ve found vim’s wrapping does the right thing 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t I can always gQ.
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I use neomutt. I pretty much ignore any HTML-only email.
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I used mutt/neomutt for years, then aerc for about a year before giving up on it.
I now use bower, which is the best notmuch frontend I’ve used so far (for someone who doesn’t emacs). Vim integration is easy, and it can render HTML mails with an external app (e.g. w3m), and the gnupg integration is very good.
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Wow, an actual useful program written in Mercury. That’s very interesting!
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I use mailmate for osx. not what i’d call a beautiful app but it’s lightning fast for search and sort over many accounts which is important to me.
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What email client do you use?
I use the combination of:
- mbsync (for syncing with any mail provider using IMAP)
- notmuch (for indexing email)
- alot (for listing & filtering & searching & writing & etc email)
- msmtp (for sending email)
Does it have the option to integrate an external editor like vim?
alot easily integrates with vim, as well as any other external editor.
What is the threaded interface like?
I think it’s as good as any TUI email client can offer. I have no complaints and I’m also happy with the keyboard shortcuts. Some screenshots here
How does it display HTML emails?
By default, you get raw HTML content. But you always have the option to pipe any email content to any external command. It’s possible to write a small script to pipe the content to a browser. (That’s what I did)
An alternative would be to switch alot with astroid for smoother HTML email support. Astroid is a fine client as well.
What is the filtering system like?
Notmuch allows you to tag emails arbitrarily and has a pretty advanced filtering & searching system. I’m happy so far (it’s been a long time). Please check out its documentation for more info. Some people also use afew for easier tag handling with notmuch.
I have also tried aerc and think it’s a fine client as well, though a bit newer, with some rough edges. But it’s a single tool and admittedly much easier & quicker to setup & use! I definitely recommend command line lovers to check it out as well.
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Geary is the best GUI mail client on Linux, period.
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NeXTMail^H^H^H^HMail.app
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Moving from Mac to Windows, Apple’s mail client and OmniGraffle are about the only things that I miss. There’s a really nice .NET framework for talking IMAP / SMTP and it’s almost enough to tempt me to write a new mail client. Windows Mail doesn’t work well if you have server-side filtering into different folders: it doesn’t monitor all of your IMAP folders so you don’t get notifications for all of your mail. Outlook really wants to talk to Exchange and isn’t really happy with IMAP. Thunderbird freezes in the UI for extended periods (this is a lot better if you switch to Maildir for the local storage format, but this comes with big ‘this is not ready for prime time yet’ warnings) and periodically decides that the main window should be one pixel big and off the screen and a recent version broke the plugin that integrates with the OS-wide notification system.
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OmniGraffle
I always liked Visio on Windows, but annoyingly, MS never included it with Office. The fact it’s a separate sub from 365 is a travesty.
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I use Gnus, which is a news/mail reader in Emacs. It does threading and quoting correctly and display of HTML messages pretty well.
In the past I went through a period of Mutt usage, and found the tutorial by Steve Losh at https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ to be very helpful
If you prefer Vim I think Mutt is a very good option. It can be configured to render HTML via lynx or w3m IIRC (I think it’s mentioned in the above tutorial) ISTR Losh’s preferred mutt keys are also quite vimmish
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I rewrote acme Mail for 9front recently, so that it handles threads properly. I now use that as my primary client.
Sadly, it’s one of the more responsive clients I’ve tried, once upas/fs has loaded the mailbox.
Judging by the number of quirky
Quoth foo:lines I see on the plan 9 mailing lists, it seems like I’m not the only user :)Here’s what it looks like. https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=160455464115859&q=p3
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I still use Thunderbird, as my needs are modest. Multiple accounts, view HTML on occasion when necessary, basic filtering.
I’d like to find a good curses/terminal MUA but the one or two I’ve tried seem designed for use with only a single account, and have non-existent or horrible UX for multiple accounts.
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I use Gmail. I used pine then elm then mutt then evolution. When running my own mail infrastructure became boring and annoying I switched to Gmail for hosting and the UI was less annoying than the IMAP implementations of the various mail readers that I was fond of.
It works well enough that I have no reason to switch. The cost is extremely reasonable given that it covers having Google’s lawyers, security engineers and antispam systems keeping things moving nicely and privately.
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I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years now without extensions. Works perfectly for the most part, so can’t relate to your issues. The last email app I used that wasn’t Thunderbird, is Mailspring which was forked from Nylas N1, but I can’t remember why I stopped using it.
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macOS: Mail.app – it seems to handle everything reasonably well, albeit a lot of things are weird to me (inline pictures and all that, I’m always unsure how things will look at the receiver’s end). Filtering works well enough to handle about a dozen moderate-traffic mailing lists, and a daily volume of maybe 30-40 mails outside that. It’s good enough and it comes with my computer so I got one less thing to worry about. I have friends who complain it crashes and corrupts their stuff every once in a while but it hasn’t happened to me yet.
Linux: neomutt, imapfilter, msmtp. It’s not good, but the alternatives are way worse. I tried to use Evolution for about two years once I realized Akonadi was just never going to work and left KMail behind. But after even Debian stable switched to the GTK3 version, the only way I could use it was with a neverending array of CSS hacks to make the damn thing fit on a laptop’s screen, and after a while I just couldn’t justify the time invested in that. The only logical explanation for this state of affairs is that GTK devs don’t actually read mail, they just like to look at the beautifully-designed widgets – and, specifically, at the empty space in said widgets – since there’s hardly any room left on the screen once those are drawn…
Windows: Thunderbird – the installation predates WSL2 on my one Windows 10 machine, and I don’t really need to do too much heavy email lifting there, so I’m fine with whatever works. Thunderbird was the first one I tried, it can open my mailbox and I can reply to emails. Good enough :-D.
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Thunderbird + birdtray, so it can be minimised to tray without closing.
I wrote a quick and dirty review of several options a few years back:
https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/031_browser_loss/#emailclients
Summary:
- Trojita: beautiful, but limited to one email account/server
- Claws mail: beautiful, but no HTML email composition support (I need to send inline photos/diagrams all the time and colour important parts of emails because otherwise vendors don’t read past the first sentence. Life in ASCII only suits a select group.)
- Thunderbird: no tray icon support without 3rd party tools. Weird corner cases. But it supports everything (TM) so it’s the only option I have that does what I need.
- Seamonkey: the better version of Thunderbird that I always used to use. It looks like the Seamonkey project has stayed alive, I might go back and see how things are going (hopefully bookmark syncing words?).
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At work, I generally use the o365 web client (on Linux). I’ve dabbled with outlook in my w10 vm, but it doesn’t seem worth it. And few people seem email literate anyway (probably in part because they’re stuck with awful tools, like Gmail and o365).
I made half an effort to see if I could get some sensible calendar/contact sync - perhaps via evolution - but I never got close to what I wanted (ie: online feedback on when people and rooms are available; ability to accept invitations and see other people accepting/declining). I’d be happy to hear of any success stories.
When I read more mail (a couple of lists, hundreds of support-related mails a day)- I used pine - and I’ve been ttoying with alpine more recently: https://alpine.x10host.com/
I’m in the (slow) process of building up email for my own domains again, and hoping to maybe use postgresql/dbmail for the mailbox/search - with the ambition of maybe exposing it via a graphql layer rather than IMAP.
Idea being that dbmail have LMTP sorted, as well as battle tested schema for mail storage and retrieval.
Ed: i also think that with dbmail handling inserting mail, it might be possible to extend the schema with a few pg fulltext indices, and enable search via pg fulltext search.
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Thunderbird 60.9.x, for one reason: Dorando keyconfig, a no longer supported plugin. It gives me vi keybindings for navigating up/down the list of emails.
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/dorando-keyconfig/
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I just rolled off macOS after ~12 years of it being my daily driver. I used Thunderbird at first, then Sparrow, then Airmail for the last several years. I’ve looked for a new email client ~yearly and always came back to Airmail.
“The web browser” is my new base OS, really, as I’m switching between gaming on Windows, developing on Linux in a VM on that Windows box, and doing day job work on macOS working with a lot of Docker containers and big Hadoop cluster.
So, to that end, I’m using GMail and Fastmail, both their web interfaces and Android apps. I’m on week two of it.
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Mail.app. It does everything I need. I use aerc on a server for a few accounts that need to be separate.
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I was hoping to find someone in this thread who made KMail work. I use Thunderbird in KDE 5, but not by choice. I’ve just never found another Linux email client that consistently works without serious bugs or limitations. I’d like to buy in to the whole KDE ecosystem, and get all of the nice desktop integrations from native KDE apps, but every time I’ve tried KMail, the bugs and missing features make it unusable.
(It’s been long enough since I last used it, at this point, that I don’t remember what the showstopper bugs were… Lots of UI annoyances though. Something as simple as a dark color scheme breaks its UI, with unreadable black-on-dark-gray text in places.)
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Outlook on iOS might be my favorite iOS email client. I actually read my personal mail in Outlook and send my work mail to Mail.ipa when I’m using an iPhone. (And I enable Outlook notifications but not Mail.ipa notifications.)
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I use Mail.app (and have used it for 15 years). It has full HTML support, with some extra privacy additions in the upcoming version, displays threads by allowing the latest reply to be »folded« to a list, and has very good filtering support to build mailboxes based on header fields, spam status, name of recipient, groups of senders, etc, etc. Apart from moving or deleting mails, such rules may execute scripts, bounce the icon, post notifications, mark or forward mails, etc. It’s really very intricate, but easy to edit.
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I forgot to say above, but my favourite feature of Mail.app’s HTML support: It uses the WebKit2 sandboxed mode. It’s been a while since there were worms that propagated via exploits in HTML renderers used by mail clients, but it’s still a potential attack vector. Each HTML email that you receive in Mail.app is rendered in a separate sandboxed process, so you need a WebKit vulnerability and a sandbox escape to do any damage. I hope that Thunderbird will soon be able to pick up the sandboxing support from Firefox.
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Outside work: Spark. No idea if it does anything particularly advanced. My email is pretty much receive only these days. Comms from organisations and automated services. Links to click to reset passwords.
Work: Outlook in its Office 365 on the web version. It’s pretty good.
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mutt, K9mail and rainloop. I don’t do much with K9, it’s just to have something in my pocket. I do even less with rainloop, but it’s the simplest web client that runs directly against an IMAP/TLS account, so in dire situations I can access it from any machine that has a web browser I trust to type a password into.
mutt is the only MUA that can actually handle 100K+ messages in an inbox. Not that I do that, but you’d be surprised what users get up to from time to time. The mutt filter system is everything that the MH people always wanted but never managed to integrate properly. Add in searching via mairix or maildir-utils and everything necessary and pleasant is to hand.
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I used mutt exclusively for more than 15 years. Last year I migrated my mail from self-hosted over to Fastmail and I found their web interface so good it’s all I use now.
(That, and I somewhat rely on the “Report Spam” and “Report Phishing” buttons in the UI, which, although can be sort of replicated in an IMAP client with filter rules, it’s less convenient.)
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Same, 90%[1] of the time: you can use a keyboard combination to hard wrap plain text, I pipe raw messages into hg or git to get patches.
Decent standard configuration and also good settings if you go deeper. Also, it’s ridiculously fast, I’ll never use imap with a desktop client and I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like to use web apps.
[1]: The last 10% are occasional email that I send from a terminal when it’s easier to do so. I never read from there.
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Mostly Mail.app but not that infrequently alpine, because I used to use alpine all the time (after migrating from pine), until Mail.app got good enough to replace it for everyday use. alpine is good, I t’s a really nice middle ground between mutt and something fancy. It has really useful context-aware menus on screen all the time, sensible key mappings, good selection/grouping tools, good role/account management, and it’s extremely configurable. I always use it when I’m on Linux, and I’d use it a lot more if I didn’t live in Mac land so much of the time.
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I was hoping to find a native replacement for Mail.app in the comments but alas.
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For those Mail.app users, does Mail now support keyboard shortcuts for archiving and moving to the next message in the mailbox? Looking at https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/keyboard-shortcuts-mlhlb94f262b/mac I don’t see anything.
In Gmail, this is
[and]; If my old muscle memory is right, in mutt this is justspace. -
mutt mostly. Gmail web-client and iOS Mail.app at times.
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In my e-mail golden days when I was able to keyboard-warrior through half a dozen W3C mailing lists, I’ve used Opera Mail. It was fantastic.
When Opera died I defaulted to Apple Mail, and it’s been a slow death of e-mail for me. It’s sooo primitive. How can people use e-mail clients with flattened barely-working threads, and binary “read” flag that automatically disappears after two seconds and you never find the message ever again?
Now there’s a revived Vivaldi Mail, so I’m giving it a try.
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The answer depends on the OS.
- Outlook on Windows and Apple Mail for my work email
- Gmail web client on macOS and iOS Gmail client for personal email
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