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Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

Is the best, free (not necessarily open source), email desktop client still Thunderbird?

If you don't need a calendar, PGP support or [censored list of broken features so that the trolls don't descend], then it's certainly one of the most popular ones. But how would you even quantify "best"?

I personally migrated to Evolution at a particularly frustrating moment relatively recently, and it's been less painful for a lot of things. It has built-in calendar and PGP support, which certainly help. Unfortunately searching through message bodies is unusably slow.

I don't know whether my standards are unreasonably high, but several colleagues have expressed similar views on both.

Not trying to troll but I use Thunderbird for calendar (synced with phone and family via my radical server) and PGP (for the one friend who has a public key). Are you saying these need to be built in and not provided as plugins?

I find the search in Thunderbird to be amazing. I have archives going back 20+ years and it searches them instantly.

Self-hosting email with dovecot, if that makes a difference.

Thunderbird supports email encryption.

https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

I switched to Evolution from Thunderbird recently and I must say, it is way more pleasant to use than Thunderbird.

Dealing with exchange is a pain. OWL or something charges like 10 a year to get it to work with a 30 day trial. Works flawlessly but I just can't be bothered to pay for it right now. I may hit a point though where I I just will do it.

Also a unified calendar is out of the question.

Evolutions-EWS provides good support for exchange. Not perfect, but fine for most day-to-day use e.g. mail and calendar.

I'm using davmail + thunderbird to access my O365 emails + calendar. Works flawlessly for me but does mean you have to have a separate application running to provide the gateway. I run mine on the same machine as my email client but you could easily host it on a server and connect via that.

I've been happiest with KMail, FWIW.

Yeah, I'll second this. Thunderbird was missing many features, Evolution was always slow, KMail was featureful and fast.

Claws is what I've been using for ages. Works great. Infinitely configurable and scriptable, too.

Both evolution and claws are better IMO.

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