Ask HN: What email client do you prefer?
Mainly a question for developers, what kind of email client do you use/prefer? I myself mainly use Gmail/Spark but wondering if there's any good alternatives out there?
I can in a few keystroke isolate the handful of emails that actually need my attention in the hundreds I receive every couple of days.
Org mode integration allow me to reference those that I may need in the future, or that require later action in my to-do list.
My time handling email is now reduced to 20min-2h every two days, in one sitting, my mind feels liberated. I can't recommend this setup enough.
So, the best, for me is Apple Mail. Simple, fast, truly native, reliable and almost full featured.
In terms of UX it's horrible, but importantly I don't want my email stored in my computer. I trust google to be safer than my computer.
Am I alone on this?
If it's helpful, I wrote a small guide on switching off of Gmail here: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/
Edit: And as an aside, my guess would be that very few people are storing their email solely on their computer. Even people running their own mail servers are likely storing the mail on the server and syncing it to their clients with IMAP.
To have an offline archive, I also have Apple Mail connected to my Exchange accounts. I never use the app itself but frequently use Spotlight to search for and preview e-mails. However, if I'm already working in OWA, I use the search function in there. In my experience, it works well and doesn't feel significantly slower than searching locally in my offline archive.
[Sidenote: I find it annoying to have to use Spotlight for local e-mail search instead of Alfred.app (which has been my universal search app for many years). Alas, Apple only allows access to the e-mail folder on MacOS for their own apps for some annoying reason these days.]
Outside of work, I have the same setup with Apple Mail and Spotlight for archival and search. As clients, I use K-9 on Android and Apple Mail or runbox7 on the desktop. The latter is the webmail app of Runbox, my e-mail provider of choice (I think the app is pretty good - and open source on https://github.com/runbox/runbox7 ).
Now is the best time to try protonmail.
I believe they’re on a fantastic path these days and as soon as the Drive/Files feature is out of beta and gets its own companion app they‘re going to start becoming a serious and most definitely superior competitor to Google etc
is like an Outlook that works.
I also only send plaintext email. This sounds like it should be easier than sending HTML, but many mobile email clients only send HTML or "rich emails". This includes the gmail! (This used to be possible in earlier versions of google's phone email apps. Maybe it was Inbox? I don't remember now. But being unable to send plaintext email from gmail on mobile is what caused me to move away from gmail).
Now I use mutt on my own computer, K9 on mobile, and if absolutely necessary Roundcube webmail. (I do not particularly like Roundcube, but I almost never actually have to use it).
Mutt is wonderful, though I found it highly nontrivial to initially use. K9 is fine. One feature of K9 I like is that it has a surprisingly capable search capability given that I use it purely over IMAP --- it dispatches a search to my mail server and parses the results.
Functionally they have what I need. I turn off the Focused Inbox feature in both as I have no problem with a little tedium. The rules system in both is good, though that runs server-side technically. I turn off conversation view nowadays, but have used it extensively in the past with massive threads and found it quite good (Outlook). Outlook's list views can be customized quite extensively, and the dark theme is good. Search works fine in both clients.
I have taken Outlook to somewhere around 100GB and over 1,000,000 emails back in the year 2013 and that worked fine. IIRC the OST was always 30-40GB, and I would shuffle things off to yearly archive PSTs.
My $WORKPLACE is using Outlook, so I use Thunderbird for Mail there too and always have a browser tab open with the OWA calendar [1]. Not the most elegant solution, but it's working fine for me.
[1] Tried several addons for Thunderbird with Outlook integration, decided I don't like any of them.
I heavily use IMAP flags and evolution's virtual folders to nicely group/tag things, rather than IMAP folders. I also use imapfilter to automatically add IMAP flags to messages, and only add 'inbox' to important emails. This keeps my inbox small and tidy, and all my automated stuff goes to other virtual folders.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any mobile email clients (at least on iOS) that support this workflow, so I do very little email, other than some passive reading on my mobile device.
As a heavy emacs user, mu4e has intrigued me, but I haven't experimented enough with it to move my workflow. For work, I unfortunately have to deal with a lot of html email, calendar invitations, and other non-sense, that evolution handles quite well.
On macOS, unfortunately, I haven’t found anything better than Apple Mail, considering the integration with OS. There are downsides, though. Offline format is incompatible with everything else, it’s hard to do rsync backups of ~/Library/Mail, and I don’t think all mail is accessible offline. It is slow, and it mangled non-latin attachment names for Gmail letters. On positive side, there is a great support for drag&drop, Spotlight integration, multiple account handling.
Have always been surprised it doesn't get more attention on this forum. It's a paid app, and it shows in the quality. Very smart and dedicated single developer (this is feasible for an email client since the protocol is stable and doesn't change very much), an active mailing list and user community. Clean with few bugs in my use. Definitely aimed at developers and people who want to peer into the internals of email.
and it allows me to create many different folders of which rules can relocate toward its designated folder(s).
Works perfectly with IMAP4 protocol.
Minimal chance of corruption and maximum portability to other mail clients.
https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/difference-between-maild...
My favorite feature is that the app tries to remove tracking pixels. The ability to override the user in the from address is super nice too.
You can download the releases right from GitHub, too.
On top of all of that, the dev (Marcel) goes above and beyond to help solve issues you run into. Even if you haven't bought a license!
It is simple and fast, but it has all the features that I need.
It is one of the e-mail clients which stores the e-mail messages as separate files.
I prefer this over storing the messages in some database.
I wouldn't use an offline email client unless emails are really essential to the job (kinda had to use proper outlook when I was a consultant).
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