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by castell 3663 days ago
It's awesome that they implement an email client. (hopefully open source)

Opera Mail and Thunderbird were good free email clients, but now discontinued.

What options are there (PC)? Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, Windows Live Mail/Outlook Express, Thunderbird, IBM Notes, OSX Mail.

Ideally, I would like an email client that is as powerful as Outlook, has the UI of Google mail (especially the conversation view), has superb IMAP support, runs on my PC and stores all emails on disk. What's disappointing is that many email clients still have no conversation view (or a broken one like Outlook), just a "sent" and "inbox" folder, and this in 2016.

10 comments

Thunderbird had a stable release 3 days ago and a preview 14 days ago. Development on it is still very much alive.
There are a few:

* Canary: http://canarymail.io (in beta)

* Airmail: http://airmailapp.com

* Polymail: https://polymail.io (in beta and currently Google-only, ironically, given its name)

* CloudMagic: https://cloudmagic.com

* Postbox: https://www.postbox-inc.com

I like Postbox, which is a commercial fork of Thunderbird. Seems to hit most of your needs (not sure about the conversation view as I always turn off threads) and has some of the keyboard shortcuts of GMail. Definitely lets you store emails on disk / offline. Alas version 4 has been less stable than version 3 was.

(Not free, but $20 is pretty cheap.)

Postbox looks like a fully-featured fork and I'd be glad to support their awesome work with dollars, but sadly there's no Linux build: https://www.postbox-inc.com/download
Genuine question but what does something like Postbox has (for regular users) over the vanilla Thunderbird + addons to justify $20 ?
It's been so long since I used Thunderbird that I'm not sure. I don't know if Thunderbird has things like the Focus Pane, where I can live-filter my Inbox down to just certain topics or certain senders. It feels a bit like OmniFocus or a GTD / Getting Things Done workflow:

http://www.softwarecrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/postb...

The killer app for me is the Postbox 4 feature to file a message in a folder just by pressing the V keyboard shortcut. Postbox then shows an Alfred/Spotlight-like "quick bar" with autocomplete - so just by typing "V GER" I can file an email in my "German Lessons" subfolder without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. They have a similar feature for automatically entering responses with a couple of keystrokes:

https://www.postbox-inc.com/blog/entry/postbox-4-quick-bar

(I also like that Postbox prompts if it detects the word "attached" and you forget to add the attachment, but I assume most email clients have that now.)

This can be done with addons in TB :

- Expression search addon to filter/search the inbox.

- Nostalgy addon for moving mail (and navigating the mailbox only with the keyboard). This addon is basically required for serious usage. Just press b and a popup shows up and allows you tochoose folder with autocomplete. It looks like this http://i.imgur.com/qYheafo.png

I took a look, and it does seem many of Postbox's features are renditions of Thunderbird addons, just with a slicker UI. Nostalgy has clearly been a big influence, and possibly Expression (though both are inspired by Gmail). I haven't found an addon for the focus sidebar, but I bet that's out there too.

My only issue is that during the years I used Thunderbird (pre Postbox) & exploring the addons, I never even knew about Nostalgy or Expression. For me, it's worth $20 for someone to design a pre-loaded Thunderbird with the best addons & make it part of the default UI & support docs. I would have easily taken $20+ of billable time just to discover & decide between the TB QuickMove and Quick Folder Move addons.

[But I'm really glad Thunderbird can do this, now I can recommend Nostalgy & TB to folks who don't want to pay for an email program.]

I currently use Postbox but heard that the company behind it was experiencing financial difficulties and a low user base (not sure how much of this is true).

Given that, I was going to wait until PB4 is no longer officially supported and make a full switch over to Thunderbird.

How about Mutt? It's undeniably very powerful, and with its support for threading it's probably not that different from Gmail's "conversation view", with the added bonus that it won't read your emails and serve you adverts based on them!
It is not free but eM Client[0] offers a "light" version of Outlook's UI and it has the best CalDAV/CardDAV support on Windows compared to Thunderbird + Lightning or 3rd party Outlook plugins.

Currently Version 7 is still in Beta but it is stable enough to be my daily driver and it offers some important features like a message thread view, which is still missing on their current, stable 6.0 release.

[0] http://www.emclient.com/?lang=en

Claws did me well on Mint. Lightweight. Worked well except with Gmail's tags. There was workaround but I just skipped it since web interface is fast on Gmail. Did you not know about Claws or have a specific reason for not mentioning it?
Why would Vivaldi's email client be open source when the browser isn't even?
eMClient. Convo mode comes in future version now in beta though, but it can do ActiveSync and *DAV.
there is a lot of mail client, tbh, you just not know them. Mailbird is a popular example you've skipped.

for my desires - all of them sucks anyway, not providing basic features that are needed and bloating the client with thing almost-nobody-need

Another is The Bat!. I've personally been using this email client for PC for 10 years now. https://www.ritlabs.com/en/

It has extremely powerful filtering, multiple inboxes for all my accounts (I prefer to deal with them separately rather than the unified inbox trend), IMAP and recently redone outlook.com/Exchange pipeline, can encrypt local store, and it's very customizable (can have it do threading/conversation for example). Reminds me of the old Opera in this regard.

The UI is a bit dated imo as it has stayed true to it's same look the whole time I've used it and skipping the modern trend of Outlook-like email client looks, but this to me is part of it's appeal. Once you get used to it.

That's pretty much the tagline of mutt[0].

> All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.

I've become really fond of notmuch[1]. It's basically a mail database and library with really fast search, tags, and native support for threads. Numerous front-ends exists[2]; I use the bundled emacs client, but have wanted to try out nevermore[3] (it did not work well with Evil last I checked).

0: http://www.mutt.org/

1: https://notmuchmail.org/

2: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

3: https://github.com/tjim/nevermore

Nylas N1. Open source and runs on any platform.
Given that you use/run a sync node.