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Comment by jk2323 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any other email client recommendation for Linux?

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Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked perfectly the entire time.

It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.

If you liked Pine/Alpine, you might want to consider mu4e, notmutch-emacs, or mutt-kz. All three are highly customizable text clients that use indexing to get speedy searches and virtual mailboxes in the vain of Google Mail or Fastmail. The Emacs-based clients (mu4e and notmuch-emacs) can also use shr to render HTML mails.

(I use mu4e, coming from a mixture of Apple's Mail.app, Google/Fastmail web interface, and mutt.)

I've been using Geary, but it isn't something I'd recommend. Still feels unpolished (you can't create labels for eg). I also tried out Nylas, which is now open source, but it doesn't support plain text emails.

I'm considering moving to evolution or Thunderbird

If you were a PINE user wouldn't the most natural transition be mutt? It's less of a client and more of a toolbox but I've been pretty happy with it.

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