Thunderbird, by Mozilla who make Firefox, is free and open source. It can handle your requirements, but not sure about vim shortcuts and there's no AI functionality. It's been around for a long time
Ask HN: Email Client
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#12Spark Email is good. Has 1-3. Maybe 4.
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#13Thunderbird, by Mozilla who make Firefox, is free and open source. It can handle your requirements, but not sure about vim shortcuts and there's no AI functionality. It's been around for a long time
Thanks, I don't need AI functionality (unless you mean the scheduling meetings) and tbh would rather avoid anything branded as AI
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#14Spark Email is good. Has 1-3. Maybe 4.
Thanks
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's what I use and it meets all your requests except maybe the hotkeys.
Ok, I'll have a look. Mac OS lets you change the hotkeys in the menubar anyway, so not a back idea
I use default Apple Mail. It meets points 1, 2, 4. 3 can be somewhat configured like you said.
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#16Thunderbird, by Mozilla who make Firefox, is free and open source. It can handle your requirements, but not sure about vim shortcuts and there's no AI functionality. It's been around for a long time
Thanks, I don't need AI functionality (unless you mean the scheduling meetings) and tbh would rather avoid anything branded as AI
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#17Thunderbird, by Mozilla who make Firefox, is free and open source. It can handle your requirements, but not sure about vim shortcuts and there's no AI functionality. It's been around for a long time
Thanks, I don't need AI functionality (unless you mean the scheduling meetings) and tbh would rather avoid anything branded as AI
There is none
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#18Spark Email is good. Has 1-3. Maybe 4.
... and syncs all data to their servers, like the new Outlook client.
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#19Mimestream is the best one hands down!
Re: Ask HN: Email Client
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, I don't need AI functionality (unless you mean the scheduling meetings) and tbh would rather avoid anything branded as AI
There is none
Not yet; Thunderbird is going to release such a feature in the near future:
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/thundermail-and-thunder...
> Assist is an experiment, developed in partnership with Flower AI, a flexible open-source framework for scalable, privacy-preserving federated learning, that will enable users to take advantage of AI features. The hope is that processing can be done on devices that can support the models, and for devices that are not powerful enough to run the language models locally, we are making use of Flower Confidential Remote Compute in order to ensure private remote processing (very similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute).
> Given some users’ sensitivity to this, these types of features will always be optional and something that users will have to opt into. As a reminder, Thunderbird will never train AI with your data. The repo for Assist is not public yet, but it will be soon.