You are so lucky you can choose. For me - there is only one option, Thunderbird, for it is the only client that supports bidi/rtl (Right to Left text). This is so sad in the linux world, many apps don't support rtl properly 😢
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Even though some terminal emulators such as Konsole surprisingly do support right to left text, it's almost never been relevant in my experience as all CLI tools are often in English, and most interactions with RTL Text / Languages occur when using GUI apps anyways.
I saw a comment on another video on this channel about Office Suites for Linux saying that Libre Office is effectively the only option for Arabic text. It's a real shame that right-to-left text doesn't have wide support in the Linux community. As a student of Arabic I really hope this changes in the future!
@@alicealysia Who's stopping you from writing a coding language in any other language? Also, it's not even true. Coding is like mathematics - the symbols could be anything - they are pretty much irrelevant. Yes it's more intuitive for an English speaker to read "for x in y do z" but anyone who is smart enough to learn coding will jump through that hump and accept that "for" means [insert word in your language] very quickly. I have tons of Chinese colleagues who are rock star programmers but their English is atrocious.
@@alicealysia English is simply the global lingua franca of the 20th and 21st centuries. English may be 3rd in the number of native speakers, but it is a distant first place in the number of speakers as a second language. Many people use it when neither of them is a native speaker of English. All airtraffic control and commercial pilots around the world must speak a minimum subset of english by international treaty. Esperanto never caught on, and English happens to have both wide physical distribution in the world and high compatibility with with computer technology because of the written structure, it is also a fairly flexible language (although this makes natural spelling inconsistent). Working with non-latin text adds a huge amount of extra work, it is an issue of manipulating the encoded bits and bytes efficiently at a low level, and then creating a graphical script or composed complex glyphs for display at a high level. Not to mention English doesn't add the additional complexity of language features like diglossia.(Japan has three written systems plus a version of the latin alphabet, and they often mix them in a single block of text.) Some forms of Arabic change the shape of letters based on where they are in a word. As an aside some Korean airlines have switched to only English in the cockpit because certain formalities of Korean were interfering with best practice crew interactions and creating increased risk to the flight. This has been an issue in other countries too. English tends to be very direct, especially when spoken as a second language which reduces ambiguity. In other languages(partly cultural not just the language) especially when interacting between a junior and senior, concerns are only implied never stated directly and sometimes not at all. You want the copilot to speak directly if they see the captain making a mistake, many planes have crashed as a result of the copilot failing to clearly state a problem that they noticed. Similarly programming a computer works best with direct clear instructions.
In my opinion this is one of the most important videos of any linux desktop topic. Email is still sadly so fundamental part of computing. Great execution, thanks!
Sadly because email hosting is an old boys club. If you self host, your mails will likely be sometimes rejected for no reason. The email standard is so old that the only way to protect yourself from spam is to reject all unknown senders and that's what the big providers do. (Even spammers configure their servers properly nowadays) So you have to be a known email provider in order to become an email provider which gets the mail delivered reliably. And there are no FOSS email providers which actually primarily provide email services against money. I don't want to pay with my data. I don't want free service, because I cannot know if it is sustainable. And I don't want a service which advertises privacy as their main selling point if that means they have custom encryption algorithm which requires me to use their client. And the encryption is often useless because it only works between the users of that service. Matrix is better for this use case. Yes technically there are services which sell email as a service with open source components which do fully work with standard imap clients, but email is designed to be so that each user actually provides their own domain. Domains are cheap. And if you use some domain you don't control, then you are locked to some provider which ruins the point of having distributed system. In the end email is just basic internet packets which are formatted and processed in certain way, so the cost of a paid service should reflect that. There's no way that server and bandwith cost would exceed for example 50€/month for single email user with two accounts on my own domain. I can get a dedicated server for that price with 20TB of bandwith. And email doesn't support html5 or markdown. There's no standardized threading so mailing lists lack usability. And the security of internet accounts often relies only on email and that puts pressure on the security so getting new innovations becomes even more difficult. I hope I managed to explain why I don't really like email, but I would be so happy if some of you could prove me wrong. And currently I am hosting my own email servers, because I don't have any other options even though that is very time consuming
@@jimbo-dev that is a valid reason - but we are in the sad state where there is no alternative, because any good modern alternative will not be very profit intensive for any established player I am still thankful for email's existence
I use Geary. It's very important though to unsub from all the email lists you're potentially subbed to when using a client because it doesn't just send notifications for "Primary" emails. You basically want to ensure that almost eveery email you get is something you care about. Unless you do that, most email clients will be a pain
@@itachi2011100 I did the above and use mostly a client now. I have about 5 emails I need to keep an eye on too and the ability to get a notification, click on it and for the client to be really fast (like they usually are) is invaluable. It takes work to unsub / blacklist everything but it's worth it imo and especially if you have multiple emails.
While Thunderbird might look a bit dated compared to some of the other email clients, a couple of things I like about it - if something happens to your system (be it windows or Linux), or you decide to change distros, it's quite easy to copy config files and email messages over the top of a new install and have it back up and running in no time at all like it never happened. - lots of plug-in add-ons - a great folder structure can be created if you work or archive by years making it easy to hide older emails that you "might" need to reference.
8:28 Vertical layout (email content at the top, email list at the bottom, or vice versa) is absolutely amazing to use on a vertical monitor! You need to try it some time ^^ Thunderbird supports this kind of layout as well
„Standard“ Thunderbird user. As someone using different DEs on different devices, I am very happy about apps with an agnostic layout. So to me, this is definitely a pro. Maybe I check out one of the other mail clients that are neither kde nor gnome. And regarding the „loud“ people who prefer the dark theme, the fact that the light theme is standard makes it inherently necessary to be „louder“. Cause if there are problems with a basic theme feature, then it is about not switching to a dark theme. Also a lot of the people who use the light theme are people who do not care about the theme, and it is really not hard to be „louder“ than people who don’t care ;)
Pretty biased because of the place I'm writing this in, but this explains a lot about why Linux users get lumped together with macOS users about being vocal. They're simply not using Windows.
Same, I think that it's superior to have coherent app ecosystem built on the same toolkit, but third-party applications shouldn't be a necessity. Windows sucks, because the latest version is basically win 7+8+10+11 in terms of system apps
This was a good overview, though I think Claws Mail was worth a mention, too. Can you do a video on how to set up PGP encryption on the mail clients that support it?
That's exactly what I wanted to ask, too - since Nick only mentioned PGP with KMail Client, but it's also available and pretty well implemented in Thunderbird, too. I would be curious to know how well and easy it's implemented in the others he mentioned in this video.
In thunderbird it's pretty straighforward. Btw don't forget that both ends need to support it. And in principle you can use any client you want if u're using a third-party app for pgp. Most people that are new to pgp also forget you need to have the public key from the receiver/destinary before one can encrypt a mail. And pgp users should also mention their pubkey in the footer of the mail. (I have a link below my email adres for that file so anyone getting a mail from me can easily obtain it. I also sign all outgoing mail, non-pgp users can still read my mails, though I sometimes get asked what that small attachment is for; which is how I try to get people interested in starting to use pgp themselves too. (that attachment is a small .asc file which is my digital pgp signature.) I've also got a mime signature which comes with my id-card, but that is only signature; no encryption. I use that one for sending official mails that are lawfully the same as a signed hand-written letter/document. So TLDR: I Use pgp for secure communication and MIME for official signing mail and documents.
I really like the fact that you have a summary in the description... Exactly what you need when you don't have the time to finish the video Also I generally enjoy most of your videos! Keep it up!!
ok. I had to rewatch to read all the email to the other Nick. this is awesome! please integrate other Nick in your future videos!! he should get a raise :)
Great summary, Nick. But i have to add a voice for Claws. Simple yet powerful and configures to almost all providers including Gmail, Yahoo, outlook, etc. Thanks for another informative video.
Started using Thunderbird when I moved to W7. I’m not particularly fussed about the look/feel uniformity - as long as it doesn’t look completely s##t then it’s ok. Now my daily driver dual-boots W10 and Mint as I envisage moving fully to Mint when W10 expires. It’s really great to have my Thunderbird mail sit on the W10 file system but to be able to access it from Mint and so keep my mail up to date no matter which OS I’m working in.
@Ozhika I spent a lot of time trying to work it out and it turned out to be much easier than I thought. Put an entry in /etc/fstab to automatically mount your Windows disk when Linux boots - Google will show you how. Then open the Thunderbird Profiles Manager from the command line with $ thunderbird -ProfileManager . Click to create a new profile, then point it at the mail profile on your Windows file system.
I used to run thunderbird for almost 20 years, but switched 2 years ago to evolution, as i ran into problems getting gmail to run on thunderbird prior to the “restart”. I might have to look again at it. Thank you for making me aware of this change to the development team.
I hope they don't change the Thunderbird interface too much. The classic look is why I still use it. If it were up to me, I'd still be using Eudora but that's not possible. Current Thunderbird is the next best thing for me.
Eudora would still beat any client when it comes to showing you what it's doing from when it connects to the mail server to when it closes connection. 🙂
I've been a Thunderbird user since it was a companion to FireBird (nearly 20 years now, god I'm old). It's amazing that after all these years they STILL don't have a backup and restore tool.
that seems to be the current philosophy of most software devs imho. I think web browsers as an example should have a lot more built-in functionality that only add-on devs seem to be addressing, but that can be a security risk if the dev is nefarious w/their intention for the add-on (even if that's an unlikely scenario). Browsers seem to be constructed of a patchwork of insecure libraries/dependencies which become more bloated over time, with very to little concern, if any, of user's hardware. A pc that is hardwired or relatively fast, but may be older or new with limited specs, may experience slower internet than years past just b/c of the way software is being (inefficiently) designed in many areas. Devs may be relying too heavily on particular company(ies) creating the standards rather than thinking about it all in an open source consortium kind of consensus. Even the FLOSS community maybe too friendly and impressionable to parties offering "free" technology. I'm speaking in general as I don't want to nitpick any particular app and don't want to say every new software is terrible.
Evolution is my favourite! I love how it feels like the classic Microsoft Outlook versions did. Also, it supports Exchange which I need for university!
I've tried all of these clients. As much as I don't like the look of the interface, Evolution is the only one that really worked well with Exchange, and I'll use webmail for pretty much any other account. It would be nice if the devs would clean up the interface and make it a bit more modern.
Ni Nick, something I've had problems with for years, no matter the OS I'm running. But every third party e-mail client I get has a tendency to mess with iCloud's default folder behavior. They'll create their own folders on the IMAP server. They mess up everything, putting things in local folders, putting messages in unique folders, etc. I'm an iPhone user that uses Linux, Windows, and MacOS. But my main personal e-mail is an iCloud address. I also, like most people, have a GMail address as well. So, if it plays nicely with Gmail too, all the better. Which e-mail client do you recommend that will not screw with the default iCloud IMAP folder behavior? Bonus points if it has a unified Inbox!
while not open source, I find myself using Outlook but having it installed as a webapp / PWA. Works lovely and saves having to remember multiple different systems when at work or at home.
BTW, when you have it open, you can hit F11 to maximize it and get rid of the title bar. Super nice full-screen version of outlook. Just F11 to restore it to normal size. It's better than using the OS's native full-screen option if you're solely going through emails.
Thunderbird is very good Outlook replacement, and I started to use it even on Windows because Mail is horrible and Outlook clunky. It kinda does too much for me but it works great. Exchange support is not bulletproof (especially if your company doesn't know, how to set ports properly), Google integration is very good.
My mail provider has a very clean Webinterface but I have never been a person for those. Under Windows, Xfce and LXDE/LXQt it is always Thunderbird for me, under Plasma I love Kmail for the reasons you mentioned and back when I used GNOME2/MATE, Evolution used to be the best (yet clunky) solution to me. I just love when my mail client integrates well with the rest of my computer's OS.
Important for newbies: Thunderbird has the tendency of making you install the Owl for Exchange extension right off the bat if you're configuring an Exchange mailbox the easy way. Do it the hard way with help from a tutorial online, otherwise, Owl will be installed, and the issue with that is that Owl is PAID, it only works for 30 days before it asks for payment.
Bluemail routes all of your emails through their servers before delivering them like many webmail based clients in a desktop wrapper (usually electron). Best to avoid imho
I’m a long-time Thunderbird user (but more passively; have never really looked into plugins except for dictionary/language support packages). I NEED this conversations package, will install it asap!
i really dont care about the UI, just need it to stay up in background and start on startup, i have it to check on startup but i've never received a notification in my life i have to manual open and wait 10 secs for it to load it stuff then i can read emails
I actually like the old looking, but functional UI. Most of the time newer UIs are less usable.. I'm looking at you Windows 10.. There is a major overhaul planned.. I think it lands next year.
@@AcidiFy574 it literally looks like something from the 90s.... And with your argument hopefully you never complain about the police the military or anything that you don't actually make... Just because I don't design UI's (well my awsome WM is not bad ) doesn't mean I can't spot one that is long in the tooth when I see one
@@manuelrivera6778 it's a terminal based email client, but it's not for everyone. Basically if you want to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of your day, you might find it useful. There's lots of articles on how to set it up 🙂
Since I switched to linux in 2010, I tried a few mail clients, like Thunderbird, Slypheed, Geary and windows mail. Now that I'm back from windows 10 to ubuntu, I'm trying Springmail. Thunderbird was not bad after I set up a flat theme, but the layout is a bit too outdated now. Sylpheed gets the job done, but I think at that point I could as well go to mutt. Geary was rather nice under gnome 3, but I had many stability issues, until I dropped it completely. When I was in W10, the default mail client was my choice, and it was working well, being clean and going straight to the point. And when I went back to ubuntu, since W10 is slowly going toward its end of support, I wanted something similar but more stable than Geary. And that's where I try Springmail. So far, not too bad. Sure, it looks like an apple app, and I can't easily make a folder as read, but it seems to be quite close to the windows mail.
I use Thunderbird on my personal desktop, but Evolution on my work laptop. Mostly because Evolution has great support for Microsoft Exchange servers and also Office 365 pretty much out of the box and everything like appointments with different people and tasks just work great. Important for me, because I am the only Linux user in a mostly Microsoft dominated company haha
The hilarious Easter eggs in Nick's emails read like something out of a "Fallout" game! Looking at the other comments, I don't think many people have noticed them.
I actually really like Mailspring, but I am looking for a new client currently (thanks for this video!) because it constantly uses 15% CPU when idling, spiking occasionally (probably to check for mail?).
@@TheLinuxEXP I must have some kind of attention deficit because I watched again and still didn't catch the mention of it. But still thank you so much for yet another amazing video ❤️
I'm glad you made this video. I don't like using a web browser to do stuff like email, but I only knew Thunderbird and Geary, and they just didn't do it for me for some reason, so it's nice to see the other options. I'll have to try some of the other ones out (or maybe try a tui one).
A while lot years ago I used a tui mail-client. Have u ever tried Pine? It's still available afaik and it worked perfect with imap as far as I can remember. Since it's TUI expect nothing but an archaïc and some what complicated UI/UX.
Guys here help please. I can't send gmail emails from Thunderbird. It doesn't work on 2 different machines (Mint and brand new Kubuntu). Any reinstall, reconfig, fixes can't help. What to do?
Good video, and I've tried just about all of these, and have been happy with none of them, so when on my desktops/laptops, I just stick to webmail. However having said that when on my Android phone/tablets, I use Edison mail that combines all my email accounts in one place, while using less resources than the default Gmail app, just wish they had a Linux version.
@@encycl07pedia- I've tried mutt in the past, it's just not my thing as I need more advanced GUI features, and neomutt is not in the Solus repos, plus I find myself using my tablet more these days than firing up my main computers/laptops for just some simple task, and to be more mobile at work with my senior clients, and around my home chasing around my 3 year great nephew from time to time, so Edison Mail works well enough, but like I said I just wish they had a Linux version, but thanks for the suggestion nonetheless. 🙂
thanks for this Nick! I didn't know about the nextcloud integration on Thunderbird! Is there one for kmail? also, would be good to go into how to keep a copy of your email on nextcloud folders as active backup away from the Gmail or other providers.
I have used Thunderbird for a long time, ever since I moved off OS/2. It does great filtering, and is able to filter my already downloaded email, via a manual initiation, my email from certain local vendors based on date. So if their email is out of date in 3 days or a week, it can grab them and move to trash. And it can do a lot more. I want my software to work for me, and don't particularly care what it looks like. Thunderbird works for me.
Used Thunderbird until switching to Alpine Linux (in their testing repo but could never get it to work on my system). Started using Sylpheed as a result, which works perfectly for my needs.
I've moved a few people off of Outlook/< insert mail client of any Windows version> and onto Thunderbird. As long as they didn't need to use it as a PIM and just an email client they were fine though I hear that area has been expanding with better calendar support and such. They liked that it supported multiple versions of Windows with the same appearance and was available outside Windows while maintaining that consistency. I haven't been happy about the replacement of enigmail; Thunderbird's OpenPGP support is still lacking in a number of ways to where I have to export/import my key from gpg2 even for a basic renew expiration date. If I recall, didn't they still not encrypt the private key on disk? Thanks for mentioning mutt; Wonder if the original `mail` is still a thing.
I used everything and Mailspring for me is the best. I like the looks, mail signature, sending emails later option and the customisation. The second best I consider Evolution. Thunderbird is heavy and super ugly.
I hope that GNOME will not drop Evolution for being too powerful as it is my go-to email client. I don't care much about how outdated it may look as long is it is as efficient and stable as it has been for me. Just powerful stuff that integrates well. And I love the option to give color to emails, therefore everything is nice and well-organized. :)
I agree with you. It is functional and integration is good with Linux desktops especially genome. I also use thunderbird and mailspring. Mailspring quite slow to relase their calendar supports. Thunderbird is good but they needs to tune their interface look definitely.
Honestly, what I want is a mail client that has labels/tags instead of folders. Bonus points if it automatically filters incoming mail. I mean, we already have Bayesian spam filters, just apply the same concept to folders/labels/tags to sort incoming mail. Bonus points if it's labels/tags and mails can have more than one label. I know that there is Mailpile which does exactly that. But unfortunately it's old and outdated and still requires Python 2, development has stalled - someone started a re-write in Python 3 but who knows when that's going to be ready, so right now I can't recommend it, but it is something to keep an eye on.
I have simple needs, the two that I've used was Thunderbird and Geary. As an almost exclusive Gnome user, Geary is what I use and I don't have any needs and simple.
Agree about Thunderbird, used it for a bit, but it was too feature-rich for what I needed and not very legible, so I went for something simpler. Maybe if they change their GUI I'll give it another try.
I moved to kmail after finding out that thunderbird didn't have a tray icon that worked on plasma, and birdtray doesn't work on wayland (last I knew). Was nervous about moving back to kmail after many years ago it kinda went south. Happy to say kmail is awesome these days just like plasma Great overview. I didn't disagree with anything you said this time :)
If I'm right, you have to use a plugin for your DE like KDocker. There is also a plugin for Thunderbird that minimizes on closing. This is kind of hacky though..
Looking for an email client that support email filter rules, tag/label, and can sync between machines. If necessary, I don't mind having config files (e.g. email filter) on file cloud service (e.g. Dropbox) to keep the configuration the same between computers (e.g. workstation and laptop). I use email filter rules and label/tag heavily in Gmail so having these features are important to me when choosing my email client.
I don't know why I never tried KMail, but now I finally did and on first impression it is great. Definitely looks better and is way more customizable than TB.
It requires some entry effort, but nothing is as simple, customizable, well-integrated, and rewarding as managing your emails and agenda with Emacs+mu4e+org-mode+iSync!
I've had spotty luck with Kontact as a Flatpak. I wanted to use it on my Pop!_OS or Fedora GNOME install, but it was super slow and didn't seem to have all the bundled libraries.
How do the clients look from security and privacy standpoint? Thunderbird has some options to block stuff, which I guess is also capable of blocking requests to external hosts (when attempting to load an image or something).
Thuderbird awesome, but for MS Exchange plugin I must pay. For me, best choice - Bluemail - best free integration with MS Exchange. I use my Linux laptop for work in Microsoft Environment and Services and have no problem.
Download Safing's Portmaster, or subscribe to the SPN, and take control of your network traffic: safing.io/portmaster
Why use mutt?? PINE is much better, and the Pico editor is so nice!!
You are so lucky you can choose. For me - there is only one option, Thunderbird, for it is the only client that supports bidi/rtl (Right to Left text). This is so sad in the linux world, many apps don't support rtl properly 😢
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Even though some terminal emulators such as Konsole surprisingly do support right to left text, it's almost never been relevant in my experience as all CLI tools are often in English, and most interactions with RTL Text / Languages occur when using GUI apps anyways.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 there's a depressing saying among the coding community,
"Anyone can code, as long as they speak english"
I saw a comment on another video on this channel about Office Suites for Linux saying that Libre Office is effectively the only option for Arabic text. It's a real shame that right-to-left text doesn't have wide support in the Linux community. As a student of Arabic I really hope this changes in the future!
@@alicealysia Who's stopping you from writing a coding language in any other language? Also, it's not even true. Coding is like mathematics - the symbols could be anything - they are pretty much irrelevant. Yes it's more intuitive for an English speaker to read "for x in y do z" but anyone who is smart enough to learn coding will jump through that hump and accept that "for" means [insert word in your language] very quickly. I have tons of Chinese colleagues who are rock star programmers but their English is atrocious.
@@alicealysia English is simply the global lingua franca of the 20th and 21st centuries. English may be 3rd in the number of native speakers, but it is a distant first place in the number of speakers as a second language. Many people use it when neither of them is a native speaker of English. All airtraffic control and commercial pilots around the world must speak a minimum subset of english by international treaty.
Esperanto never caught on, and English happens to have both wide physical distribution in the world and high compatibility with with computer technology because of the written structure, it is also a fairly flexible language (although this makes natural spelling inconsistent).
Working with non-latin text adds a huge amount of extra work, it is an issue of manipulating the encoded bits and bytes efficiently at a low level, and then creating a graphical script or composed complex glyphs for display at a high level. Not to mention English doesn't add the additional complexity of language features like diglossia.(Japan has three written systems plus a version of the latin alphabet, and they often mix them in a single block of text.) Some forms of Arabic change the shape of letters based on where they are in a word.
As an aside some Korean airlines have switched to only English in the cockpit because certain formalities of Korean were interfering with best practice crew interactions and creating increased risk to the flight. This has been an issue in other countries too. English tends to be very direct, especially when spoken as a second language which reduces ambiguity. In other languages(partly cultural not just the language) especially when interacting between a junior and senior, concerns are only implied never stated directly and sometimes not at all. You want the copilot to speak directly if they see the captain making a mistake, many planes have crashed as a result of the copilot failing to clearly state a problem that they noticed. Similarly programming a computer works best with direct clear instructions.
In my opinion this is one of the most important videos of any linux desktop topic. Email is still sadly so fundamental part of computing. Great execution, thanks!
why "sadly"?
@@obvious_humor aye the most standardised system which no monolithic system controls - isn't it cause to celebrate?
@@obvious_humor Yeah that sadly also kinda bugged me, all the replacement "options" are much more disruptive, and mostly all walled gardens.
Sadly because email hosting is an old boys club. If you self host, your mails will likely be sometimes rejected for no reason. The email standard is so old that the only way to protect yourself from spam is to reject all unknown senders and that's what the big providers do. (Even spammers configure their servers properly nowadays) So you have to be a known email provider in order to become an email provider which gets the mail delivered reliably.
And there are no FOSS email providers which actually primarily provide email services against money. I don't want to pay with my data. I don't want free service, because I cannot know if it is sustainable. And I don't want a service which advertises privacy as their main selling point if that means they have custom encryption algorithm which requires me to use their client. And the encryption is often useless because it only works between the users of that service. Matrix is better for this use case.
Yes technically there are services which sell email as a service with open source components which do fully work with standard imap clients, but email is designed to be so that each user actually provides their own domain. Domains are cheap. And if you use some domain you don't control, then you are locked to some provider which ruins the point of having distributed system.
In the end email is just basic internet packets which are formatted and processed in certain way, so the cost of a paid service should reflect that. There's no way that server and bandwith cost would exceed for example 50€/month for single email user with two accounts on my own domain. I can get a dedicated server for that price with 20TB of bandwith.
And email doesn't support html5 or markdown. There's no standardized threading so mailing lists lack usability. And the security of internet accounts often relies only on email and that puts pressure on the security so getting new innovations becomes even more difficult.
I hope I managed to explain why I don't really like email, but I would be so happy if some of you could prove me wrong. And currently I am hosting my own email servers, because I don't have any other options even though that is very time consuming
@@jimbo-dev that is a valid reason - but we are in the sad state where there is no alternative, because any good modern alternative will not be very profit intensive for any established player
I am still thankful for email's existence
Hvala!
I use Geary. It's very important though to unsub from all the email lists you're potentially subbed to when using a client because it doesn't just send notifications for "Primary" emails. You basically want to ensure that almost eveery email you get is something you care about. Unless you do that, most email clients will be a pain
That's the reason I stopped using it.
@@itachi2011100 I did the above and use mostly a client now. I have about 5 emails I need to keep an eye on too and the ability to get a notification, click on it and for the client to be really fast (like they usually are) is invaluable. It takes work to unsub / blacklist everything but it's worth it imo and especially if you have multiple emails.
your videos really helped a lot in my "linux" journey
same!!
The "You're HIRED!" email contents was quite funny. I'm surprised you took the time to write that, but the attention to detail is appreciated!
While Thunderbird might look a bit dated compared to some of the other email clients, a couple of things I like about it
- if something happens to your system (be it windows or Linux), or you decide to change distros, it's quite easy to copy config files and email messages over the top of a new install and have it back up and running in no time at all like it never happened.
- lots of plug-in add-ons
- a great folder structure can be created if you work or archive by years making it easy to hide older emails that you "might" need to reference.
The "dated" look is why I like it so much. Reminds me of using Eudora in 1996.
Except it's terrible and it doesn't sync well with double authorization like work inboxes tend to be. The calendar doesn't work at all.
@@mithrandirthegrey7644 Never had an issue with it. And I don't need a calendar in an email client.
8:28 Vertical layout (email content at the top, email list at the bottom, or vice versa) is absolutely amazing to use on a vertical monitor! You need to try it some time ^^
Thunderbird supports this kind of layout as well
Thank you so much for this one, I haven't been able to decide on a Linux email client yet so here's hoping this video helps 🤞
Good content, as always. Not so detailed that the video was too long, but a concise overview of each client. Nice.
„Standard“ Thunderbird user. As someone using different DEs on different devices, I am very happy about apps with an agnostic layout. So to me, this is definitely a pro. Maybe I check out one of the other mail clients that are neither kde nor gnome.
And regarding the „loud“ people who prefer the dark theme, the fact that the light theme is standard makes it inherently necessary to be „louder“. Cause if there are problems with a basic theme feature, then it is about not switching to a dark theme. Also a lot of the people who use the light theme are people who do not care about the theme, and it is really not hard to be „louder“ than people who don’t care ;)
Pretty biased because of the place I'm writing this in, but this explains a lot about why Linux users get lumped together with macOS users about being vocal. They're simply not using Windows.
Same, I think that it's superior to have coherent app ecosystem built on the same toolkit, but third-party applications shouldn't be a necessity. Windows sucks, because the latest version is basically win 7+8+10+11 in terms of system apps
Thanks for the Geary recommendation. I recently switched to Gnome and it works quite well for me.
This was a good overview, though I think Claws Mail was worth a mention, too. Can you do a video on how to set up PGP encryption on the mail clients that support it?
That's exactly what I wanted to ask, too - since Nick only mentioned PGP with KMail Client, but it's also available and pretty well implemented in Thunderbird, too.
I would be curious to know how well and easy it's implemented in the others he mentioned in this video.
In thunderbird it's pretty straighforward.
Btw don't forget that both ends need to support it. And in principle you can use any client you want if u're using a third-party app for pgp.
Most people that are new to pgp also forget you need to have the public key from the receiver/destinary before one can encrypt a mail. And pgp users should also mention their pubkey in the footer of the mail.
(I have a link below my email adres for that file so anyone getting a mail from me can easily obtain it. I also sign all outgoing mail, non-pgp users can still read my mails, though I sometimes get asked what that small attachment is for; which is how I try to get people interested in starting to use pgp themselves too. (that attachment is a small .asc file which is my digital pgp signature.)
I've also got a mime signature which comes with my id-card, but that is only signature; no encryption. I use that one for sending official mails that are lawfully the same as a signed hand-written letter/document.
So TLDR: I Use pgp for secure communication and MIME for official signing mail and documents.
I really like the fact that you have a summary in the description... Exactly what you need when you don't have the time to finish the video
Also I generally enjoy most of your videos! Keep it up!!
Thanks :)
2:25 as an unnemployed graduate, im not sure if me applying for a job in your channel would be a great move... love your easter eggs bits btw
ok. I had to rewatch to read all the email to the other Nick. this is awesome! please integrate other Nick in your future videos!! he should get a raise :)
Hahah he should definitely be paid, but then again, maybe it's now Other Nick talking!
Great summary, Nick. But i have to add a voice for Claws. Simple yet powerful and configures to almost all providers including Gmail, Yahoo, outlook, etc. Thanks for another informative video.
Thanks for the email client reviews. You have saved me the trouble of installing and testing all the various clients. Gonna go with Thunderbird.
Good to see Thunderbird is not abandoned, I used it for years before ditching it in favour of accessing my email from my browser.
Started using Thunderbird when I moved to W7. I’m not particularly fussed about the look/feel uniformity - as long as it doesn’t look completely s##t then it’s ok. Now my daily driver dual-boots W10 and Mint as I envisage moving fully to Mint when W10 expires. It’s really great to have my Thunderbird mail sit on the W10 file system but to be able to access it from Mint and so keep my mail up to date no matter which OS I’m working in.
@Ozhika I spent a lot of time trying to work it out and it turned out to be much easier than I thought. Put an entry in /etc/fstab to automatically mount your Windows disk when Linux boots - Google will show you how. Then open the Thunderbird Profiles Manager from the command line with $ thunderbird -ProfileManager . Click to create a new profile, then point it at the mail profile on your Windows file system.
I used to run thunderbird for almost 20 years, but switched 2 years ago to evolution, as i ran into problems getting gmail to run on thunderbird prior to the “restart”. I might have to look again at it. Thank you for making me aware of this change to the development team.
Sir, your email conversations with "Other Nick" are freaking hilarious!
Thank you for the dash of humor in this video ;)
I already wrote angry message about not having Mutt section. At least it got a mention...
I hope they don't change the Thunderbird interface too much. The classic look is why I still use it. If it were up to me, I'd still be using Eudora but that's not possible. Current Thunderbird is the next best thing for me.
Eudora would still beat any client when it comes to showing you what it's doing from when it connects to the mail server to when it closes connection. 🙂
I hope Other Nick gets those vacation days
I've been a Thunderbird user since it was a companion to FireBird (nearly 20 years now, god I'm old). It's amazing that after all these years they STILL don't have a backup and restore tool.
that seems to be the current philosophy of most software devs imho. I think web browsers as an example should have a lot more built-in functionality that only add-on devs seem to be addressing, but that can be a security risk if the dev is nefarious w/their intention for the add-on (even if that's an unlikely scenario). Browsers seem to be constructed of a patchwork of insecure libraries/dependencies which become more bloated over time, with very to little concern, if any, of user's hardware. A pc that is hardwired or relatively fast, but may be older or new with limited specs, may experience slower internet than years past just b/c of the way software is being (inefficiently) designed in many areas. Devs may be relying too heavily on particular company(ies) creating the standards rather than thinking about it all in an open source consortium kind of consensus. Even the FLOSS community maybe too friendly and impressionable to parties offering "free" technology. I'm speaking in general as I don't want to nitpick any particular app and don't want to say every new software is terrible.
I didn't know I needed that Bluemail feature for categorising your email for when you want to handle them until I saw this video. Very interesting
Love the application from Nick. He seems like a nice Guy ;)
Evolution is my favourite! I love how it feels like the classic Microsoft Outlook versions did. Also, it supports Exchange which I need for university!
Evolution is by far the best I used ews for work and its work so good
I've tried all of these clients. As much as I don't like the look of the interface, Evolution is the only one that really worked well with Exchange, and I'll use webmail for pretty much any other account. It would be nice if the devs would clean up the interface and make it a bit more modern.
Ni Nick, something I've had problems with for years, no matter the OS I'm running. But every third party e-mail client I get has a tendency to mess with iCloud's default folder behavior. They'll create their own folders on the IMAP server. They mess up everything, putting things in local folders, putting messages in unique folders, etc. I'm an iPhone user that uses Linux, Windows, and MacOS. But my main personal e-mail is an iCloud address. I also, like most people, have a GMail address as well. So, if it plays nicely with Gmail too, all the better.
Which e-mail client do you recommend that will not screw with the default iCloud IMAP folder behavior? Bonus points if it has a unified Inbox!
"Isn't it my macOS replicating friends"
Damn that felt like I was personally attacked
while not open source, I find myself using Outlook but having it installed as a webapp / PWA. Works lovely and saves having to remember multiple different systems when at work or at home.
100% agreed. This is the best solution IMHO, and I feel like it's even faster than the native desktop app.
BTW, when you have it open, you can hit F11 to maximize it and get rid of the title bar. Super nice full-screen version of outlook. Just F11 to restore it to normal size. It's better than using the OS's native full-screen option if you're solely going through emails.
Thunderbird is very good Outlook replacement, and I started to use it even on Windows because Mail is horrible and Outlook clunky. It kinda does too much for me but it works great. Exchange support is not bulletproof (especially if your company doesn't know, how to set ports properly), Google integration is very good.
My mail provider has a very clean Webinterface but I have never been a person for those.
Under Windows, Xfce and LXDE/LXQt it is always Thunderbird for me, under Plasma I love Kmail for the reasons you mentioned and back when I used GNOME2/MATE, Evolution used to be the best (yet clunky) solution to me.
I just love when my mail client integrates well with the rest of my computer's OS.
10:08 I like that MailSpring window titlebar name ;)
You should read all the emails he show then. He made one for each client he showed. It's the TLEU ! "The Linux Experiment Universe" :D
Important for newbies: Thunderbird has the tendency of making you install the Owl for Exchange extension right off the bat if you're configuring an Exchange mailbox the easy way. Do it the hard way with help from a tutorial online, otherwise, Owl will be installed, and the issue with that is that Owl is PAID, it only works for 30 days before it asks for payment.
I literally searched for this exact this an hour ago on the internet. And here comes Nick to the rescue 😂
Bluemail routes all of your emails through their servers before delivering them like many webmail based clients in a desktop wrapper (usually electron). Best to avoid imho
I’m a long-time Thunderbird user (but more passively; have never really looked into plugins except for dictionary/language support packages). I NEED this conversations package, will install it asap!
hey you forgot to say that Thunderbird supports MIME encoding and PGP encoding by default, with also a fantastic keymanager
Super cool music in the outtro 🥳
Hopefully Thunderbird gets a nice make over for the UI...the 90's called they want their ui back
They updated the UI over the last year, it still looks like trash
what's wrong with the UI??
I would like 2 C Ur UI-Design??
i really dont care about the UI, just need it to stay up in background and start on startup, i have it to check on startup but i've never received a notification in my life
i have to manual open and wait 10 secs for it to load it stuff then i can read emails
I actually like the old looking, but functional UI. Most of the time newer UIs are less usable.. I'm looking at you Windows 10..
There is a major overhaul planned.. I think it lands next year.
@@AcidiFy574 it literally looks like something from the 90s....
And with your argument hopefully you never complain about the police the military or anything that you don't actually make...
Just because I don't design UI's (well my awsome WM is not bad ) doesn't mean I can't spot one that is long in the tooth when I see one
Why does RUclips not want me to share my opinion in that using Mutt combined with Thunderbird is actually pretty useful?
Wow, my comment didn't get autodeleted this time 😂
Mutt???? Do tell what is that and how is it useful? I might try it and maybe adopt it into my workflow!
@@manuelrivera6778 it's a terminal based email client, but it's not for everyone. Basically if you want to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of your day, you might find it useful. There's lots of articles on how to set it up 🙂
@@RainbowVision interesting 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 Thank you!
@@RainbowVision I know that feeling very well
Since I switched to linux in 2010, I tried a few mail clients, like Thunderbird, Slypheed, Geary and windows mail. Now that I'm back from windows 10 to ubuntu, I'm trying Springmail. Thunderbird was not bad after I set up a flat theme, but the layout is a bit too outdated now. Sylpheed gets the job done, but I think at that point I could as well go to mutt. Geary was rather nice under gnome 3, but I had many stability issues, until I dropped it completely. When I was in W10, the default mail client was my choice, and it was working well, being clean and going straight to the point. And when I went back to ubuntu, since W10 is slowly going toward its end of support, I wanted something similar but more stable than Geary. And that's where I try Springmail. So far, not too bad. Sure, it looks like an apple app, and I can't easily make a folder as read, but it seems to be quite close to the windows mail.
I love the email to 'other Nick' at min 7:28. Very funny!
Thunderbird and others need to add exchange support natively!!!!!!!!!
This is a must have feature for corporate users.
I use Thunderbird on my personal desktop, but Evolution on my work laptop. Mostly because Evolution has great support for Microsoft Exchange servers and also Office 365 pretty much out of the box and everything like appointments with different people and tasks just work great. Important for me, because I am the only Linux user in a mostly Microsoft dominated company haha
If just Thunderbrid was look like Geary or Mail of elementary OS it was the best e-mail app ever!!!
Okay, I need to read that entire email exchange between Nick and The Other Nick
The hilarious Easter eggs in Nick's emails read like something out of a "Fallout" game! Looking at the other comments, I don't think many people have noticed them.
The co-CEO email was an awesome easter egg😂😂😂
I actually really like Mailspring, but I am looking for a new client currently (thanks for this video!) because it constantly uses 15% CPU when idling, spiking occasionally (probably to check for mail?).
I missed any comments on the three-four mail clients in Emacs. It can run in both graphic environment and in text terminal.
Geary
I love mutt :-) it deserves a mention here ❤️
It's in there right at the end!
@@TheLinuxEXP I must have some kind of attention deficit because I watched again and still didn't catch the mention of it. But still thank you so much for yet another amazing video ❤️
I use Evolution, since it supports all functions I need; like email; contacts; calendar (birthdays); task lists
I am really happy about this video because to compare distros all the time is stressfull! Programs are important, not spend too many time in O.S.
I'm glad you made this video. I don't like using a web browser to do stuff like email, but I only knew Thunderbird and Geary, and they just didn't do it for me for some reason, so it's nice to see the other options. I'll have to try some of the other ones out (or maybe try a tui one).
A while lot years ago I used a tui mail-client. Have u ever tried Pine? It's still available afaik and it worked perfect with imap as far as I can remember. Since it's TUI expect nothing but an archaïc and some what complicated UI/UX.
Guys here help please.
I can't send gmail emails from Thunderbird. It doesn't work on 2 different machines (Mint and brand new Kubuntu). Any reinstall, reconfig, fixes can't help. What to do?
Good video, and I've tried just about all of these, and have been happy with none of them, so when on my desktops/laptops, I just stick to webmail. However having said that when on my Android phone/tablets, I use Edison mail that combines all my email accounts in one place, while using less resources than the default Gmail app, just wish they had a Linux version.
Try mutt or neomutt. You can have multiple accounts. Mail forwarding also might be useful, but you can't respond as any email address you like.
@@encycl07pedia- I've tried mutt in the past, it's just not my thing as I need more advanced GUI features, and neomutt is not in the Solus repos, plus I find myself using my tablet more these days than firing up my main computers/laptops for just some simple task, and to be more mobile at work with my senior clients, and around my home chasing around my 3 year great nephew from time to time, so Edison Mail works well enough, but like I said I just wish they had a Linux version, but thanks for the suggestion nonetheless. 🙂
I appreciate your demented sample emails.
thanks for this Nick! I didn't know about the nextcloud integration on Thunderbird! Is there one for kmail? also, would be good to go into how to keep a copy of your email on nextcloud folders as active backup away from the Gmail or other providers.
I haven't seen one for Kmail, but maybe it exists!
I have used Thunderbird for a long time, ever since I moved off OS/2.
It does great filtering, and is able to filter my already downloaded email, via a manual initiation, my email from certain local vendors based on date. So if their email is out of date in 3 days or a week, it can grab them and move to trash. And it can do a lot more.
I want my software to work for me, and don't particularly care what it looks like.
Thunderbird works for me.
Used Thunderbird until switching to Alpine Linux (in their testing repo but could never get it to work on my system). Started using Sylpheed as a result, which works perfectly for my needs.
Who made this video? Nick or Other Nick from the mirror dimension? Wait a minute...Are WE in the mirror dimension?
exactly.
I'll never tell.
We need more of the Nick and Other Nick lore!
I've moved a few people off of Outlook/< insert mail client of any Windows version> and onto Thunderbird. As long as they didn't need to use it as a PIM and just an email client they were fine though I hear that area has been expanding with better calendar support and such. They liked that it supported multiple versions of Windows with the same appearance and was available outside Windows while maintaining that consistency.
I haven't been happy about the replacement of enigmail; Thunderbird's OpenPGP support is still lacking in a number of ways to where I have to export/import my key from gpg2 even for a basic renew expiration date. If I recall, didn't they still not encrypt the private key on disk?
Thanks for mentioning mutt; Wonder if the original `mail` is still a thing.
Ah good ole tight shirt Nick giving us the good open source Linowledge and Linformation.
What are your views on the future of elementary os?
I used everything and Mailspring for me is the best. I like the looks, mail signature, sending emails later option and the customisation. The second best I consider Evolution. Thunderbird is heavy and super ugly.
exactly same here :)
never tried anything other than thunderbird and had no idea thunderbird will be releasing major update in the future, so will stick with thunderbird
I hope that GNOME will not drop Evolution for being too powerful as it is my go-to email client. I don't care much about how outdated it may look as long is it is as efficient and stable as it has been for me. Just powerful stuff that integrates well. And I love the option to give color to emails, therefore everything is nice and well-organized. :)
I agree with you. It is functional and integration is good with Linux desktops especially genome. I also use thunderbird and mailspring. Mailspring quite slow to relase their calendar supports. Thunderbird is good but they needs to tune their interface look definitely.
Honestly, what I want is a mail client that has labels/tags instead of folders. Bonus points if it automatically filters incoming mail. I mean, we already have Bayesian spam filters, just apply the same concept to folders/labels/tags to sort incoming mail. Bonus points if it's labels/tags and mails can have more than one label.
I know that there is Mailpile which does exactly that. But unfortunately it's old and outdated and still requires Python 2, development has stalled - someone started a re-write in Python 3 but who knows when that's going to be ready, so right now I can't recommend it, but it is something to keep an eye on.
procmail, mutt (or forks like neomutt)
I have simple needs, the two that I've used was Thunderbird and Geary. As an almost exclusive Gnome user, Geary is what I use and I don't have any needs and simple.
Perfect timing!
Thank you. Does anyone know which client can import .PST files from an old outlook account?
Agree about Thunderbird, used it for a bit, but it was too feature-rich for what I needed and not very legible, so I went for something simpler. Maybe if they change their GUI I'll give it another try.
I'm also looking for a simple email client.
Which "simpler" email client did you choose by the way?
@@Bob-1802 Kmail crashed for me, couldn't get it to work again, so am on Geary now and am just as happy.
I use mailspring, but I'm going to check out kmail again; I use separate Morgan for calendar.
KMail looks very much up my alley... also, those e-mails look like an excellent Halloween special lol
the only desktop client i ever liked was eM Client. sadly, it's only available for windows and mac. for linux, i only stick to webmail.
I personally use mutt and would never use any of the email programs mentioned in the video. Thunderbird always felt like bloatware to me.
yea mutt's nice. i might swtich back to it eventually. and, agreed, thunderbird is horribly bloated. i prefer minimal interfaces.
I moved to kmail after finding out that thunderbird didn't have a tray icon that worked on plasma, and birdtray doesn't work on wayland (last I knew). Was nervous about moving back to kmail after many years ago it kinda went south. Happy to say kmail is awesome these days just like plasma
Great overview. I didn't disagree with anything you said this time :)
Oh, I may have to check out kmail again then. It was a hot mess last I used it. But I remember it being pretty powerful when it actually worked
How about the integration of spell- and grammar checks?
Oh man I love Thunderbird but is there a way to put Thunderbird in a system tray icon when closing it ? Like Discord, Signal or Viber for example
If I'm right, you have to use a plugin for your DE like KDocker. There is also a plugin for Thunderbird that minimizes on closing. This is kind of hacky though..
Thanks for the tiny mention of mutt :D
Looking for an email client that support email filter rules, tag/label, and can sync between machines. If necessary, I don't mind having config files (e.g. email filter) on file cloud service (e.g. Dropbox) to keep the configuration the same between computers (e.g. workstation and laptop). I use email filter rules and label/tag heavily in Gmail so having these features are important to me when choosing my email client.
wow, Safing have pretty good services
I don't know why I never tried KMail, but now I finally did and on first impression it is great. Definitely looks better and is way more customizable than TB.
Great job on that ear vfx!
Other Nick is really good
Been using bluemail for years on my Android. Now I know it's available for Linux too!
It requires some entry effort, but nothing is as simple, customizable, well-integrated, and rewarding as managing your emails and agenda with Emacs+mu4e+org-mode+iSync!
Wait. Wasn't BlueMail (at least on Android) the ones that send your login credentials for your E-Mail(s) to their servers (unencrypted at that)?
We really need a mailclient with native EWS support, as it is the defacto industry standard.
I've had spotty luck with Kontact as a Flatpak. I wanted to use it on my Pop!_OS or Fedora GNOME install, but it was super slow and didn't seem to have all the bundled libraries.
How do the clients look from security and privacy standpoint? Thunderbird has some options to block stuff, which I guess is also capable of blocking requests to external hosts (when attempting to load an image or something).
other nick really did some good post effects on your ear, wouldn't have spotted it if I didn't know!
Thunderbird doesn't play well with outlook account I was facing issues with it and then switched to geary
Thuderbird awesome, but for MS Exchange plugin I must pay. For me, best choice - Bluemail - best free integration with MS Exchange. I use my Linux laptop for work in Microsoft Environment and Services and have no problem.
How about protonmail? I believe they now have a desktop client. :)