Email client for Linux
from marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com to linux@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 03:56
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40443766

I have been looking for an email client on Linux after being tired of Gmail and Outlook web clients.

I had Thunderbird installed on my system and thought I’d give it a spin. I set up POP for my email accounts and it worked fantastic… For a total of 2 hours, after which I realised that searching in Thunderbird is simply not going to work for me. I need to search by attachment name and sometimes even by text inside attachment and unfortunately Thunderbird can’t do that (I think I tried an extension too but it made the UI super clunky to the point that I couldn’t even understand how to navigate it anymore).

Does Betterbird or any other email client fix this problem? I’m willing to try other options if they are FOSS.

Thanks

#linux

threaded - newest

InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world on 21 Mar 04:14 next collapse

I’ve always liked Thunderbird. Geary is also nice. Not sure if it can attachment search.

You can filter messages with attachment on Thunderbird btw

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:18 collapse

Yes but I can’t search by the name of the attachment. Unfortunately that’s a deal breaker for me. I need it to search the Content-Type field at the very least and I don’t think it can do that without an extension

ISOmorph@feddit.org on 21 Mar 06:24 next collapse

You can use the FiltaQuilla extension to add content-type as search category. It’s a pretty powerful yet straight forward extension

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 07:22 collapse

I didn’t know about this extension. I will try it. Thanks

trk@aussie.zone on 21 Mar 06:53 collapse

Yes but I can’t search by the name of the attachment.

I just searched for text thats in an attachment filename and it worked - with a caveat. I have a filename called “PMASUP236 - Operate Vehicles In The Field.pdf” on an email. There is no reference to the PMASUP236 in any other part of any email.

If I search “PMASUP236”, it returns the email as a result.
If I search “SUP236” it does not.
If I search “Operate Vehicles” it returns that email (along with a heap of others containing the word “Operate” and “Vehicles” in any order).

Admittedly this is on Windows at work, though I do run Thunderbird on Linux at home. Will have to try it there to confirm.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 07:22 next collapse

Please do. I’m on Debian and it didn’t work for me

Matriks404@lemmy.world on 21 Mar 14:53 next collapse

If you’re on Debian Stable you might have a version of Thunderbird that doesn’t have this feature, since software there is a bit “outdated”. Next stable (trixie) releases in few months though.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 15:18 collapse

That might actually be the case. I am indeed on Debian stable. Thanks

warmaster@lemmy.world on 22 Mar 00:48 collapse

Why not install the Flatpak and get it now instead of waiting 3 months?

trk@aussie.zone on 23 Mar 03:21 collapse

I just checked on Linux (Thunderbird 128.5.2esr, Opensuse Tumbleweed) and the behaviour is the same.

If I search “PMASUP236”, it returns the email as a result.
If I search “SUP236” it does not.

This is using the normal search function (top of screen in current version). Quick Filter does not look at attachments at all by the looks. The “Attachments” toggle is only a has / does not have attachment filter.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 23 Mar 04:50 collapse

I see. Is there a way I can use regular expressions to search? I.e. “*SUP236*”?

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 07:24 collapse

Is this using Quick Filter or Classic search?

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:17 next collapse

Any time I want to watch my emails I just go to the web ui for it. I doubt any 3rd party client will ever come close to what google and Microsoft offer for their own email accounts.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:21 collapse

I’d prefer not to go to their Web UIs because of how much tracking is present on those sites (adding rules and filters to ublock origin for Gmail nearly killed me). I’d prefer a FOSS option.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:24 collapse

… they already have your emails. Not only that, but just about everything else they could possibly want to know about you.

Unless you plan on moving to a more private provider I wouldn’t worry about that.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:27 next collapse

Agreed, and I do plan to move to other providers. I should add that I find a desktop client convenient, and I don’t mind the Thunderbird UI at the moment. Unfortunately, lack of a single feature breaks it for me

Xiisadaddy@lemmygrad.ml on 21 Mar 04:29 collapse

check out tutamail.

golden_zealot@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 14:59 collapse

My understanding with Tuta is that you cannot configure it to work with a third party desktop email client though, you are locked in to using theirs. You can’t configure a Tuta email address to work with mutt or something for example I believe as there is no regular imap/pop like there are for services that don’t use E2EE, or services that have some form of bridge for that like Proton did.

Maybe I am misinformed though.

wuphysics87@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 06:29 collapse

Do they know everything about you minute to minute? Email to email? I can imagine that is data they might want to have. The data you are presently creating. You always have a footprint, but you can always make your feet smaller while you walk. Or some better allusion. Leave me alone.

singletona@lemmy.world on 21 Mar 04:18 next collapse

I’ve been having a grand time with sylpheed.

Mostly because thunderbird changed its presentation layout and i took it personally. Plus sylpheed is lighter weight.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 04:21 next collapse

Never heard of it, will take a look thanks

ISOmorph@feddit.org on 21 Mar 05:40 collapse

Last stable version is over 7 years old. Ouch…

Dirk@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 07:31 next collapse

This is why no-one in the right mind uses Sylpheed, but the actively maintained fork Claws Mail (which just recently had a new version released).

swelter_spark@reddthat.com on 22 Mar 21:38 collapse

Sylpheed handles large amounts of email much better. It’s fast even at 50k plus emails. Last time I tried Claws Mail, it choked on that.

Dirk@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 23:16 collapse

Edge cases are not the norm, though.

swelter_spark@reddthat.com on 23 Mar 17:25 collapse

I’m not so sure that it is an edge case. I’m just an average person. I’m sure there are many people who have reason to receive and/or save much larger volumes of email than I do. Regardless, it’s always better to have software that works well under a wide range of circumstances.

Dirk@lemmy.ml on 24 Mar 07:42 collapse

On my company mail account I have collected circa 10000 mails during the past 10 years, which is circa 80 mails a month - and that is a lot.

If you’re not following multiple high-volume mailing lists since a decade and archive every single e-mail I don’t think its normal to have 50000 mails in a mailbox.

swelter_spark@reddthat.com on 22 Mar 21:43 collapse

Sylpheed has all the features I would expect an email client to have, and they all work. No reason to change anything, unless email as a technology changes, or it stops building.

Mwa@lemm.ee on 21 Mar 07:25 next collapse

Betterbird? Unsure if it can search Attachments am sure it shows attachments on top it’s a fork of thunderbird

a14o@feddit.org on 21 Mar 07:38 next collapse

Where indexing and searching mails is concerned, notmuch is the best I’ve seen. Do note that this is not an e-mail client, it only indexes, tags and searches (following the “UNIX philosophy” of doing one job well).

I personally use it with neomutt as a mail user agent, which is almost certainly not what you want. Notmuch supports other clients but they’re all pretty arcane.

So this is not a recommendation, just a glimpse into advanced e-mail setups I guess.

cerement@slrpnk.net on 21 Mar 18:39 collapse

this is one of the things that struck me about email clients on Linux – CLI and GUI clients have followed two very different evolutionary paths – the CLI clients went for the “doing one job well” path (where you end up assembling a whole system of apps for sending and receiving email) and the GUI clients went for the “everything and the kitchen sink” path (where you end up trying to hide half the options so they don’t get in your way)

bund@sh.itjust.works on 21 Mar 10:33 next collapse

maybe evolution is what you’re searching for

bubbalouie@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 11:44 next collapse

sudo apt install claws-mail

Fast, reliable, insanely functional - weird formats. Yes it has a calendar, works great.

christian@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 21:09 collapse

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.

wwwgem@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 12:25 next collapse

You may find what you need here or there.

Like @a14o@feddit.org I would personaly recommend the power of neomutt and notmuch, but it’s not a GUI option if that’s what you’re looking for.

bluefishcanteen@sh.itjust.works on 21 Mar 12:45 next collapse

I have had the exact same issue as you. Thunderbird is great, but their attachment search is not. I spent a lot of time looking for a way to make it work and what I settled on is using a third party program to serve this function: Recoll (www.recoll.org/index.html).

It should be available in your distro’s package repository.

You’ll need to download your messages to your computer, but it will work in the way that you expect search to work (I.e. search by filename, search by text within attachments, search by text within emails). Setup is straightforward. You just need to point it to the Thunderbird profile directory where your emails are saved. As a bonus, you get good desktop search for all the other files on your computer too.

Sadly (don’t throw anything at me), the only desktop email program that I have found that does search properly is Outlook desktop. On Linux, that is obviously a non-starter.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Mar 15:17 collapse

Honestly I might try this. Or maybe I can use grep lol. We’ll see how it fits in my workflow, I’m comfortable in the CLI but haven’t really entertained the idea a CLI email client before. Thanks

bluefishcanteen@sh.itjust.works on 21 Mar 16:54 collapse

Recoll (thankfully) has a GUI. It isn’t the prettiest app, but it was easy to set up and I’ve otherwise quite happy with it.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Mar 01:29 collapse

Just coming back to say that I’m loving recoll. I’ve set up Thunderbird to download everything with POP and I’ve pointed recoll at the profile directory. Since Recoll also seems to be able to read PDFs, it is giving me amazing results at blazing speeds. Honestly if there was a decent application to just pull down email with POP I probably wouldn’t even open thunderbird other than to reply to stuff

CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml on 21 Mar 14:25 next collapse

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

mintberrycrunch@lemmy.world on 21 Mar 14:46 next collapse

Geary or Mailspring are the best options. Neither is perfect. I lean toward Geary.

WolfLink@sh.itjust.works on 21 Mar 15:06 next collapse

I like mainspring but I can’t get my corporate outlook account to work with it

nucleative@lemmy.world on 22 Mar 06:25 collapse

I used mailspring for about 6 months because I love the idea and it looks beautiful. But when you check the forums you see people are complaining about major bugs that seemed to remain unfixed for eternity, developer never comments.

wuphysics87@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 03:58 next collapse

Tired of Gmail? Switch to Kmail!

easily3667@lemmus.org on 22 Mar 04:23 next collapse

Oof

You do you, but some of us don’t miss 1995

lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Mar 04:59 collapse

Looks fine to me! ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

dukatos@lemm.ee on 22 Mar 19:07 collapse

Buggy as hell 😐

AnnaFrankfurter@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 04:08 next collapse

mutt or nothing

lemminator@lemmy.today on 22 Mar 04:21 next collapse

I learned about mutt ~12 years ago, and it changed my email-interface forever

all mutt, all the time

mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world on 22 Mar 20:01 collapse

hows the search fuction in mutt? For eg, if i want to search an email thread from like 3 months ago, does it function well or do I need to open my broswer…

lemminator@lemmy.today on 23 Mar 18:14 collapse

It works great. I never open a browser to search for mail: mutt.postle.net/searching/

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Mar 06:31 collapse

How has your experience been with Mutt? I’ve heard about neomutt from a lot of people but I’m honestly a bit intimidated to move to a completely CLI-based email client especially because it’s another configuration file which I’ll need to be mindful of

Earflap@reddthat.com on 23 Mar 03:16 collapse

I really liked the client but HTML emails are a real pain in the ass.

tiny@midwest.social on 22 Mar 05:28 next collapse

I use evolution and it works well for everything besides my work Gmail but that has more to do with security policies than evolution

jcarax@beehaw.org on 23 Mar 02:23 collapse

I was pleasantly surprised with Evolution the last time I tried to use Gnome, it used to be a buggy, bloated mess. But alas, I can’t manage to use Gnome for more than a release or two. Now I’m looking for a decent Wayland native alternative to Thunderbird, but it just doesn’t exist without DE bloat at this point. Maybe someone will build a modern replacement for Sylpheed/Claws.

databender@lemmy.world on 22 Mar 14:46 next collapse

nmh is the way

unknown_user@lemmy.ml on 22 Mar 15:44 next collapse

Claws Mail www.claws-mail.org

kittenroar@beehaw.org on 22 Mar 21:50 next collapse

Claws searches reasonably quickly and unlike thunderbird it isn’t a total resource hog. OTOH it suffers from not being multi threaded, which means when you first install it, expect it to take literally hours before it finishes syncing all your emails.

Mutt is not multi threaded either. Only thunderbird and kmail are, and kmail is a buggy mess, while thunderbird eats your ram like it’s a plate of cheese danishes.

marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Mar 21:58 collapse

I’ve settled for using Thunderbird for POP + Recoll for search. I can’t believe how good Recoll is; in my opinion this is even better than Gmail’s search in their Web GUI. I will be using Recoll for a lot more things now, but my immediate need for search has been fixed for now. Though running Thunderbird just for downloading emails does seem a bit overkill. We’ll see

kittenroar@beehaw.org on 22 Mar 22:18 collapse

If it works, it works – glad you found a way

ndupont@feddit.uk on 23 Mar 07:35 collapse

Why not Roundcube ?