29
votes
What email client do you use?
I've seen a lot of posts about email providers, but what about email clients?
What email client have you been using? What makes it work better for you than the default client? Does it have any notable features that you didn't know you needed?
Gmail’s web client. Does enough, handles gmail nested labels, and doesn’t need installation.
Outlook at work, Thunderbird for my custom domains, and the default web client for any big email provider. I would consolidate everything into Thunderbird if I could, but Google and Microsoft constantly seem to break imap functionality.
Same here. I use Outlook for work (and some old personal emails) and then Thunderbird for accounts for my website. On devices where I don't need to check those email accounts, I use Thunderbird exclusively for RSS feeds.
Thunderbird is a great piece of software (MS shenanigans not withstanding). It's come a long way and really is solid and does everything I need it to. I feel a lot more comfortable recommending it to people who want a stable, daily-driving email client.
How often do the imap issues come up? My Thunderbird rules seem to sort mail into the correct folders and the result is mirrored in the browser versions of Outlook and Gmail as well as Apple Mail on my iPhone.
On a similar note, Thunderbird for mobile would be great.
Mozilla bought K-9 Mail a couple of years back, with the intention of renaming it Thunderbird after reaching feature parity.
I've actually been using K-9 since before the purchase, because I was frustrated with the default email client on Android and wanted something more minimalistic. Highly recommended, unless you actually need all those fancy bells and whistles.
Apple Mail.app on macOS/iOS/etc. Unlike Outlook, it doesn’t really favor its maker’s mail service and is generally a solid no-frills IMAP client that’s proven mostly resilient against fads and trends.
There’s other Apple platform clients that are viable candidates to switch to should I feel the need, including MailMate, Mimestream, and Spark.
I haven’t really found anything I like on other platforms, which is a real problem if I ever stop daily driving Apple stuff. Thunderbird, even with recent modernizations feels clunky and weird, “real” Outlook is overkill, and “new” Outlook is an Electron monstrosity. Geary on Linux is probably closest to what I’m looking for, but it’s somewhat feature-barren, doesn’t get a lot of development, and is Linux only.
This is what I love about Mail on MacOS and iOS: simplicity. I use a couple of mail providers with imap and don’t want to use any swanky features. Just give me folders and decent way to search, that’s all I ask for.
I think it says something that if you fire up the version of Mail.app in OS X 10.4, which was released almost 20 years ago, the bulk of the differences you’ll find in comparison to the modern version are aesthetic in nature. Mail client design has been a solved problem for a long time.
I’m curious why you think Thunderbird is clunky. I haven’t used it in a while but I really loved it for being fairly straightforward and easy to use while still having power users in mind, especially with extensions. The only real negative I could think of is that the interface looks fairly dated.
The dated look is part of it (though dated isn’t necessarily bad, see my example of Apple Mail that’s barely changed in 20 years), but at least on macOS it’s also kinda janky in the same way that Firefox used to be. A slight bit of latency on interactions, occasional panes flashing when redrawing, whitespace and typography that aren’t quite right, somewhat awkward bits of UI design, etc. Basically it could use a lot of polish work.
Apple Mail works great on my laptops, both work and personal. Fast search, solid native interface, easy on battery, dark mode works well.
Recently switched over to Android, and I've been liking FairEmail over the last few months. It's on F-Droid, supports damn near every option I could want, and looks pretty darn good after a bit of customisation.
I use Interlink by Binary Outcast. It's a fork of the old Thunderbird. I started using it because I was also using a UXP-based browser at the time, so I thought it was neat that both my browser and mail client were running on the same engine. (Yes, that's a very lame reason, I know.)
It fetches my mail and syncs any changes back using IMAP on Dovecot. The replies are then sent over SMTP running on Postfix. I also use the Lightning extension which adds a calendar tab, which is kept in sync using the Inverse SOGo Connector to a Radicale instance over CalDAV.
This all works just fine, and I like the way the interface looks and works, so I haven't found a reason to switch to anything else. It doesn't get updated much, but since e-mail isn't really a moving target, I don't see it ceasing to work any time soon either.
Edit: Also, on mobile, I use K-9 Mail, because I think the Holo interface is pretty.
Surprised no one mentioned mailspring which is what I use. I used to use thunderbird but it's a bit feature bloated for my taste, I wanted something simple. I use it with 3 emails (2 Gmail accounts and one custom domain email) and it's never given me trouble.
I use Mailspring as well. I wonder why it is not very popular.
For one, I didn’t know about it.
Strangely enough, I haven’t thought about Thunderbird alternatives until I saw this question. Good timing because I sent an email today with an inline image and the image disappeared after sending.
I’ll check out Mailspring tomorrow!
I used it back in 2018 for a bit, didn't know it was still being updated. I went back to Thunderbird because it feels more lightweight and mature, in recent updates it looks pretty good too.
I'm not a never-electron kind of person, but I steer away for any apps where writing/text-editing is a main use-case - electron apps can have a weird fuzziness to them.
Not to mention the vendor-chain attacks possible with such dependency hell. Give me native apps or give me death!
I tried it briefly and while it wasn’t bad, it’s lacking polish in some areas. I’m overly sensitive to that kind of thing though so I’m sure it’s perfectly fine for many.
I use mailspring as well, it's the only client I've found that's available for linux and not clunky and ugly as shit.
I currently have Gmail/Yahoo but have been told to look into proton on a few occasions so that's on my "when I get some time" list to look into.
The main features i'm looking for these days are something that works and just isn't google because I really don't like how everything ties together. Last thing I need is for the rare youtube upload I do to somehow flag a copyright strike or something and lose access to my email or anything like that.
I just switched to proton and as soon as you make the switch, you will wonder why it took you so long.
What does it do better than other email clients?
An all around combination of being simple and cloud based while protecting your privacy, offering wide platform support, and an ecosystem similar to the Google suite.
I pay a little over $8 a month for peace of mind that absolutely nobody can see my emails, they're backed up better than I'd ever be able to do locally, I get access to one of the best VPN's and encrypted file storage platforms available, get native support for true email aliases so I never have to give out my real email, and it all looks nice and works intuitively.
There's some great alternatives individually, but the value of what you get with the whole Proton suite is unmatched.
I had a few questions if you (or someone else) doesn't mind - I was browsing the Proton website but there were a few things I didn't understand. What is the benefit of "Easy Switch"? It seems like it just auto-forwards your emails to your Proton address, but wouldn't that mean your emails could still be scanned or whatever by the original email provider? And how exactly do you use the true email aliases? Do you determine the alias when you're sending each message? Is there a limit to the number of aliases? Maybe I'm overthinking it a bit. I'm curious about their VPN and their password manager but are they trustworthy? I had Mulvad as my VPN for a bit but I haven't heard anything about the reliability of Proton's products in that area.
I can't speak specifically for "Easy Switch" as I performed all the importing and forwarding manually, but the idea behind forwarding emails through from your old email is to allow you a smoother transition while maintaining one single mailbox you can check. It's unlikely you'll be able to remember every single company and person you've ever given your Gmail address too, so when the time comes to update all of your accounts and steer people towards a new email you can still continue receiving emails sent to your old address without having to monitor Gmail separately. You can also filter emails sent to your old Gmail address to go into a separate folder or have a separate label so that you are able to see exactly what account still need to have their contact info updated.
Obviously those emails being forwarded aren't subject to the same privacy protections when they're being received and forwarded by Google, but it let's you fully jump into Proton mail right away and not end up with a new mailbox that you never use because you're constantly having to log into Gmail to check for people sending to the old address. There is a minor benefit of not giving Google permissions to hold onto all of your email data for indefinite future data analysis as well if you choose to set your forwarding rule to delete the email after forwarding.
As for aliases, know that when I say "true" aliases I only mean that to differentiate them from the completely ineffective myemailaddress+alias@gmail.com type aliases. I don't believe that's a real term used. I personally still use the older separate "SimpleLogin" service that Proton acquired and bundled into the plan which offers a completely separate portal to create addresses under different domains, add notes to mark what they are used for, and see when they are receiving mail. To email people from the alias you add their email as a "contact" under the alias and you're provided a unique "reverse alias" email address that you can send to from your primary email that will direct the email to them as if it was from your alias. This is completely hands off and seamless when replying to an email sent to your alias and only takes a moment to set up for new direct contacts.
Proton has now also completely integrated Simplelogin into their password manager "Proton Pass" however with what they call "Hide-my-email aliases", which allows you to manage aliases directly within the password manager and generate aliases at the same time you're generating account passwords. I imagine sending from aliases works similarly, but I still use Bitwarden as a password manager and can't speak to whether this is better or worse than the separate SimpleLogin implementation that I use or to how good the password manager is itself.
As for Proton VPN, I'll point to the last time I was shilling it on here for details. Realistically though both it and Mullvad are great options and are both recommended by privacy guides. It really comes down to the fact that because I also use the rest of the Proton suite it doesn't make sense to pay for a separate VPN when this one is already bundled and is arguably the best at most things outside of pricing as a standalone VPN.
I'm a Proton Visionary subscriber and fully support the switch to Proton. They're working on feature parity with Google. They currently have Drive, Calendar, and Mail, and you also get a VPN and ProtonPass (password manager). They're a bit slow for some people with feature rollout, but they're doing things right, in my opinion.
@ackables, they've recently released a beta mail client for Windows and Mac (edit: oh, and apparently Linux), too, if you're looking for an application rather than using webmail. They also have a great iOS app (and, I assume, an Android app).
Thanks for sharing the site - always nice to see it being mentioned on here :)
Nobody can see your emails on Protonmail's servers. But your emails are not stored exclusively on Protonmail's servers. The protection and encryption they offer only works if your contacts use the same level of protection.
True, but honestly the biggest risk is the aggregation of all my personal data in one place, not the less stringent security and privacy standards of every single sender and recipient that might have bits and pieces of personal info.
The end to end encryption of mail flow itself only works if you're emailing other people using Proton or PGP yes, but the E2EE at rest alongside strictly audited data retention policies for mail processing still ensures that even Proton doesn't have access to the full contents of your mailbox where the greatest vulnerability to data analysis and theft lies. I also like that using it contributes towards expanding the network effect of encrypted email overall similarly to using Signal for messaging.
All that to say that their protection offered does absolutely "work" and still has a major positive impact on a security or privacy threat model even for general usage with non-encrypted senders and recipients.
For work it’s all-in-one with Zoho. Their webmail is basically on par with Gmail in terms of features
For my personal email, I just use Apple’s default mail apps. I don’t need anything more. My one complaint is that it can be difficult to tell when an email was sent to one of my aliases.
I use the default apple mail apps right now, but my big issue is that the junk filter isn't very good. I don't know if that is outlook's fault or the apple mail app's fault, but it just doesn't seem to learn what is junk mail for me. It lets every obvious scam email that only has "Hey there <my name>" in the body, but will throw a legitimate package notification email into junk.
That is entirely on your email provider (which may be Apple, but since you mention outlook I would assume it is outlook web mail). Email clients can implement spam filtering, but most of the time it’s handled by the server. Your problem won’t really change unless you get a different email provider, and you may be able to keep using Apple mail as a client.
My personal recommendation is Fastmail, but the others mentioned here can also be good.
I can vouch for Fastmail. I use it for my personal email, while I use Outlook at work.
I still have my Gmail account, but it usually just gets junk mail these days. I changed to Fastmail two years ago, and I think I have received one or two junk mails there, while I receive the same amount every day in the Gmail account.
Ah, perhaps I should mention that I have spam filtering handled server-side. I’m not much of a believer in client-side filtering.
I went back to Google Workspace from Zoho Mail, it had too many silly bugs and quirks. Now I use Shortwave on top of that for it's AI features that were cheaper than Google Gemini. (Don't know if it still is)
Mail services is simply cPanel on a server. Mail client is Edison Email, now simply Email in Google Play Store.
On the PC I use Gnomes Evolution, even though my DE is KDE.
I've been using mu4e. It's great having all of your e-mail locally with super fast search, but the main reason I use mu4e is that it's in emacs... Which is really nice because now I can make todos and stuff in org-mode that reference e-mails, and I can easily jump to the e-mail referenced in a todo for additional information.
I use obsidian for notes and tasks, but emacs seems appealing for how much more you can do in it. Do you use it for any software development?
Yeah, I use emacs for everything. It's great :).
I’ve been using Superhuman for a long time and have felt that its cost is justified. It would be hard for me to go back to a different client.
Microsoft 365: Hosting my domain e-mail under a business account. I have 3 x licenses for the family, so we all have access to Office/Teams/Sharepoint and other tools. Kids are in college, so they are using most aspects of it.
Client: Linux - Thunderbird, Windows - Outlook, OSX - Outlook.
Work: Linux Laptop
Personal: Linux Laptop, new M1 Macbook Air, I'm playing around with.
Occasional: Windows via VM as needed or when troubleshooting my kid's gaming laptop.
Up until two weeks ago, we were a Linux house on everything, with the only Windows machines being my kid's gaming laptop and a VM I keep around on my proxmox server for the rare Windows-only software. However, I recently acquired a MacBook Air 13 M1 due to the reasonable price at Walmart. I want to play around with iOS development, so I'm using Outlook.
I know I could use Thunderbird everywhere and probably simplify my life. However, I started my career in IT 22 ago on the helpdesk, and even though I have been a DevOps/Developer for the last decade, there is something nostalgic about using Office/Outlook and keeping up with the latest Microsoft OS releases just for awareness. I usually set it up just enough for me to be able at least do administrative tasks on it (email, finances, browses, etc) but dont do any an anything from them and then only in dire remote emergency situations via wireguard. Automation handles powering it up and applying updates on a schedule.
I've run Linux only on all my boxes for over a decade at this point, and I started using Linux exclusively since Ubuntu
Lucid/Precise, with brief tours to Fedora, Arch, and beyond, I finally settled on Debian Sid a few years ago. Before that, I usually dual-booted Windows XP with FreeBSD and stayed in FreeBSD more and more until I barely booted into Windows. IIRC, the only reason I switched to Linux is the company I worked for hardened some security measures for remote access. The port on FreeBSD didn't support the measures, and compiling the latest version didn't work then. I needed to be able to do my job, so I switched. Overall I've been dual booting since the FreeBSD 4, Redhat 3/4 (pre-RHEL/Fedora).
I use Tuta, also known as Tutanota. They guarantee privacy by not treating users as the product and provides end-to-end encryption for both emails and calendars. Additionally, they introduced quantum encryption, addressing potential threats from new AI technologies that malicious entities might use to decrypt passwords. They offer a free account to try their service but I pay around $5 per month. I also like that they listen to their customers. They are open source and you can view upcoming sprints and I’ve been able to add new functionality by posting the suggestion to their subreddit.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tuta-mail-adds-new-quantum-resistant-encryption-to-protect-email/
I'm also in the Tuta camp. I wanted a service specifically in the EU because of Five-Eyes and the like. Privacy is of tremendous value for me, not because 'I have anything to hide', but because it's a slippery slope if you don't.
Works like a charm, simple and effective. Plus I like that I don't have a long username, nice and short email address.
To answer OP's question, their app is in the same vein simple and effective. It just works.
Privacy Guides (full disclosure: I'm a team member) has a list of recommended email clients. It isn't perfect - there are very few email clients on iOS that support PGP E2EE - but it should cover most people's needs.
Very helpful website! Thanks for sharing
For work, Outlook on my laptop and Nine on my mobile. The Outlook app for Android sucked last time I tried it, so I bought Nine and have just used it since. For personal, just the Gmail web client in browser and their app on mobile.
Thunderbird since I'm lazy, but I'd like to swap over to a lighter client on my (very old and feeble) work laptop like Sylpheed. I used to use Claws Mail for a time, but the Windows port was finicky to set up exactly how I had it on Linux so I opted for the simpler solution. I'm pretty basic when it comes to email (the most complex setup I have in terms of client-side configuration is having multiple aliases available) so my main motivation is to have a nice, clean and orderly wrapper for my mail. When it comes to mobile, I use FairEmail (I used to use K-9 but kept having sync issues) and the default Gmail app as an emergency backup if there's something not working right.
For a provider, it's all Gmail but I do use custom domains so if Google ever really makes me flip it wouldn't be terribly painful to swap to any other provider.
Outlook and 365 at work and Proton for personal. Once I clued into the fact that free email meant that my messages were being used as training fodder, I noped out pretty quickly.
Outlook (Web) at work, Proton Mail for important personal mail, Gmail for usual daily stuff (subscriptions, newsletters) and Yahoo for spam and shady websites.
I don't use any 3rd party clients, although I think I could benefit from one. I just don't have the patience to set it up.
I'm using Fairmail for personal mail. My employer has blocked all mail clients expect Outlook so I've it to use it for official work. On desktop I use the websites.
mutt: http://www.mutt.org/
Coincidentally I have a mail account on a hobby server that I regularly access using pine.
Shortwave.app because I could never get over the loss of Google Inbox and the ability to archive an entire labels worth of email all at once.
On my phone I'm using K-9 Mail. I rarely access email on my computer, so I use a simple terminal-based client for that (aerc).
On my Linux desktops I use aerc, a terminal-based client. I use its maildir backend, so everything feels snappy. Syncing between my hard drives and the IMAP server is handled by a cronjob running mbsync. Prior to aerc I used mutt (specifically neomutt).
On my iPhone I use plain old mail.app. It’s fine, and I do most of email work on desktop anyway. The major third-party mail apps on iOS all seem to have something fundamentally unacceptable to me, such as mail provider lock-in, non-native UI, annoying AI integrations, and other privacy nightmares like fetching your mail onto their own servers. So stock mail.app it is for me.
Deltachat for direct chats,
Thunderbird and K9Mail for traditional emails.
And web client for my other address.
Outlook (web) for work. It gets the job done most of the time, but sometimes I need to open up the desktop app to fix formatting issues or view shared calendars.
I require PGP capable clients on my personal devices.
Thunderbird for personal Linux desktop. I don’t really like any other GUI app that I’ve tried on Linux. They feel even more half baked than Thunderbird.
Canary Mail on iOS and MacOS devices.
FairEmail on Android devices.
Currently using mailbox.org and a vanity domain for personal emails.
On Android I use Google's mail client. On desktop I use web frontends of the provider (Gmail's and one local provider's). I still didn't set up my own email on server with my domain sigh