Back in 2017-2018, I tried about 8–10 Linux email clients, for use on openSUSE.
Thunderbird is by far the best. It’s the most complete, the most flexible, and the most capable, and it integrates well with various email hosting services as well as shared calendars and address book services.
I tried Evolution (it's very tied to GNOME and the GNOME way of doing things; it's noticeably MS Outlook-like, quite complex, and I couldn’t get calendaring and other things working.)
I also tried Balsa, Geary, Nylas/Mailspring, Sylpheed, Claws, GNUstep Mail, KMail, and others.
Sylpheed is nice and simple but misses vital functionality for me.
Claws is a bigger, slower, over-complicated version of Sylpheed, and rather than missing vital stuff, it’s festooned with every little option someone somewhere wanted. And _still_ misses important stuff. I stayed with it for a month or two, but its lack of threading was a nuisance. As soon as it starts to check for mail, you must wait: you can't read, let alone compose or edit or anything else, until it's done.
The others are, to me, basically toys. :-( They may look nice or have some unique UI feature, but in terms of filtering, spam detection and handling, multi-account support (because who has just 1 email address in the 21st century?) or some other significant important feature, they are lacking.
I would not hate an email client that enforced incoming mail to plain text, or minimal markup: bold, /italic/, _underline_ [note that HN will screw this up], and nothing else.
But it breaks some emails. That rules out some clients for me.
However, I actively want my client to enforce plain text replies. Always, no exceptions, strip everything else out.
Since that experiment, I have been back on Thunderbird, which after some 20 years, still has not been beaten for me. I have been using it since it was the mail component in Netscape Navigator, before Firefox existed. It’s mature and it works. It’s a bit clunky and a bit big, but it needs to be to do all the stuff it does.
I’ve also tried a number of proprietary clients, from MS Internet Mail and News (later “Outlook Express” but unrelated to Outlook), Outlook itself, Apple Mail and others. MS IM&N was pretty good. Outlook is a horror. Apple Mail is OK but does not work the way I like.
All the others are specific to one OS, usually Windows (e.g. The Bat), or ancient (Pegasus), or unmaintained (Eudora).
Back in 2017-2018, I tried about 8–10 Linux email clients, for use on openSUSE.
Thunderbird is by far the best. It’s the most complete, the most flexible, and the most capable, and it integrates well with various email hosting services as well as shared calendars and address book services.
I tried Evolution (it's very tied to GNOME and the GNOME way of doing things; it's noticeably MS Outlook-like, quite complex, and I couldn’t get calendaring and other things working.)
I also tried Balsa, Geary, Nylas/Mailspring, Sylpheed, Claws, GNUstep Mail, KMail, and others.
Sylpheed is nice and simple but misses vital functionality for me.
Claws is a bigger, slower, over-complicated version of Sylpheed, and rather than missing vital stuff, it’s festooned with every little option someone somewhere wanted. And _still_ misses important stuff. I stayed with it for a month or two, but its lack of threading was a nuisance. As soon as it starts to check for mail, you must wait: you can't read, let alone compose or edit or anything else, until it's done.
The others are, to me, basically toys. :-( They may look nice or have some unique UI feature, but in terms of filtering, spam detection and handling, multi-account support (because who has just 1 email address in the 21st century?) or some other significant important feature, they are lacking.
I dislike formatted mail. https://useplaintext.email/ is absolutely right. Read it, and learn something.
I would not hate an email client that enforced incoming mail to plain text, or minimal markup: bold, /italic/, _underline_ [note that HN will screw this up], and nothing else.
But it breaks some emails. That rules out some clients for me.
However, I actively want my client to enforce plain text replies. Always, no exceptions, strip everything else out.
Since that experiment, I have been back on Thunderbird, which after some 20 years, still has not been beaten for me. I have been using it since it was the mail component in Netscape Navigator, before Firefox existed. It’s mature and it works. It’s a bit clunky and a bit big, but it needs to be to do all the stuff it does.
I’ve also tried a number of proprietary clients, from MS Internet Mail and News (later “Outlook Express” but unrelated to Outlook), Outlook itself, Apple Mail and others. MS IM&N was pretty good. Outlook is a horror. Apple Mail is OK but does not work the way I like.
All the others are specific to one OS, usually Windows (e.g. The Bat), or ancient (Pegasus), or unmaintained (Eudora).
Thunderbird remains the best there is.