Email client for Linux

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

42 comments

mutt or nothing
- 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
- I learned about mutt ~12 years ago, and it changed my email-interface forever
  all mutt, all the time

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

Tired of Gmail? Switch to Kmail!
- Oof
  You do you, but some of us don't miss 1995
  
  Looks fine to me! ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

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 (https://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.
- 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
  
  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.

Geary or Mailspring are the best options. Neither is perfect. I lean toward Geary.
- 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.
- I like mainspring but I can’t get my corporate outlook account to work with it

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.

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

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.

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.
- 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)

maybe evolution is what you’re searching for

sudo apt install claws-mail
Fast, reliable, insanely functional - weird formats. Yes it has a calendar, works great.

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.
- Last stable version is over 7 years old. Ouch...
  
  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).
- Never heard of it, will take a look thanks

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

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.
- 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.
  
  … 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.

42 comments