Hacker News Reader

Comment by avery17 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a good desktop email client they recommend for windows or linux or even self hosted? All the ones ive tried are pretty awful... The problem is outlook was actually good in the past.

View on HN

The only other decent mail client is thunderbird. There exists no mail client that is as full featured as outlook.

Horde/imp maybe maybe is the closest thing you get in web form. But every mail client has a limitation that outlook does not have

Unfortunately, I dislike thunderbird with a passion. In my anecdotal experience, its search is terrible - not to mention that there are two of it: a search option in the top panel that misses about 50% of relevant messages, and a very featureful search option buried within the menu bar that misses about 20% of relevant messages. Out of necessity, I've trained myself to just reboot to Windows any time I really need to find a particular email that I know I have somewhere. I also don't particularly like Thunderbird's UI, but that is something I'm able to compromise on.

Not meant to be a rant, but rather: please, someone, is this really the best we have?

Search is still as bad as it ever was, unfortunately it remains the most feature complete alternative (and free).

And of course, Microsoft makes it impossible to use their services with it. Or so difficult you just give up after it breaks for the 5th time in a month.

Yea :(

Most everyone has moved to webmail implementations, since it's good enough. I think even folks with the tech know-how to self-host a webmail client have done so. Personally, I use RoundCube.

Wait, what? I found thunderbird search to be a super power, so much more reliable (and fast) than outlook.

12 years ago I reported you can’t search for the word wedding, as it find any email that was sent on a Wednesday: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844

Did it ever get fixed? Wasn’t fixed when I tried about 2 years ago.

Interesting... you're right, this is giving me lots of wednesdays.

I'm in the same boat. I've even installed Thunderbird and synced a mail account just to be able to find a specific mail that neither webmail nor the Android app were able to find.

> There exists no mail client that is as full featured as outlook

Possibly. It may also be the most feature-bloated unintuitive UI. Using Linux myself, but always astounded when helping my non-technical mother with the latest murky weirdness thrown at her by Outlook. Some people just need simple mail facilities, not a Rube Goldberg 'ribbonware' cube. And on Windows maybe most people want easy & simple.

> Some people just need simple mail facilities, not a Rube Goldberg 'ribbonware' cube.

Fortunately for those people, mutt still exists.

2nd for Thunderbird, I like it alot

I would add though, that TB has features, that Outlook does not have, so it is not like TB only implements a subset of functionality that Outlook offers, but rather it implements different features and, at least for me, it is way better than Outlook ever was.

I have really tried to like Thunderbird. I can't. Its search is broken, it's very slow, it inserts awkward formatting in emails (Ie space below and above each line), the reply functionality is awk etc. I know it's time to go when I have to switch back to fastmail's web client to do anything "serious".

I still have it installed because I want to like it, but.. No. This post has inspired me to delete it.

Have you maybe configured it to search online or something?

I have used TB for years and still use it daily, daily getting some 30+ emails, that I tag and sort into folders and all that. My TB profile is several GB in size. Search is instant for me, on all my hardware, including older laptops and even an old X200, with some upgraded parts.

I am not sure how it could be slow, so I am guessing something like your search needs to look for things online maybe, instead of in small inboxes and local folders.

>several GB

I have all of my mail going back to 2001..

I have all my email going back to then too. Many GB. I always download all of it locally. The global search bar (which searches all of it) appears instantaneous. It must be well under under 200ms. Every time I've verified the result with grep the results are accurate. I have no idea how they get it so fast.

Searching within a folder is different. It does a linear scan. If you don't search the body it's fast enough - a few seconds I guess on a big folder. If you search the body of the email in a big file, then yes it can take a while.

The Spacing isn't that weird. It just wraps paragraphs inside of paragraph tags. If you use Shift-enter you get a new line w/out a paragraph. The only real change I've had to do there is just hit enter once, where I used to hit twice.

Evolution.

I tried most of them.

It's a little bit different but Astroid is great and my favorite GUI desktop client right now. Lightweight, flexible and renders html all right. It uses notmuch, which takes a little bit of setup but in return you get really good search which I never felt a need to tune. You should also try out if either thunderbird, evolution or kmail does it for you.

If you're up for terminal, aerc (optionally supports notmuch).

roundcube for self-hosted webmail. cypht could also be worth checking out. maybe later on mailpile when/if they get their 2.0 out.

Does Astroid feel done? Because the last commit was 7 months ago.

I wouldn't be that absolute about it, but nothing comes to mind as missing or broken from the top of my head so far. That being said, it does look like it would benefit from some more support: https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/669

https://github.com/astroidmail/astroid/issues/744

...How's your C++? (;

Claws Mail.

https://www.claws-mail.org/index.php

It's lightning fast, to the point I can keep all my emails online (>70000 posts), all accounts, all mail lists, everything, since day one about 30 years ago, and search through them at any moment.

Runs pretty much everywhere, including ARM, also there are tools to import mail and contacts from Outlook.

I use emClient. Its paid, but its a one time fee and the client works very well event with calendar integration (gmail and outlook).

I really like Mutt.

Vivaldi’s mail client isn’t bad.

I think Evolution is okay.

I fully ditched Outlook because of this crap. Been using eM Client (emclient.com) for a few months now and love it.

On Mac You can still use the old Outlook. You have to switch back everytime there is an update but it's very easy. The new one is awful because it does not have tabular list view, with sortable columns such as: datetime, from, to, cc, etc which are critical for me.

Thunderbird for desktop. If you're selfhosting your mail, the best webmail client is Roundcube. Sure it ain't pretty, but it's robust as hell.

For android, use K-9 Mail (it's on F-Droid).

Rainloop is an okay, simpler webmail client. It is lacking in a lot of features that Roundcube has, but sometimes you just want easy access to your email when you're away from your full-featured desktop client.

K-9 is good; it's going to be rebranded as Thunderbird for Android soon. FairEmail is also good. It has a different set of trade-offs from K-9, so better for some people, worse for others.

> The problem is outlook was actually good in the past.

That's not a problem, it's just a (dubious) statement.

The problem is to find a mail client that is good now. Thunderbird is the best.

Evolution seems to work fine for me.

I have tried several, and liked none of them. I'm currently on Geary, but it's lacking in functionality, and it has things like search results being a bit different upon each of my searches. Starred messages cannot be shown on top. Eyeroll.

I think Evolution and Thunderbird are the top contenders, and of the self-hosted ones, Roundcube.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

https://roundcube.net/

Thunderbird.

nPOPuk?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com