31–40 of 85 posts
Does anyone know of a good Linux email client that isn’t crippled by show-stopping bugs of this sort? I used Mailspring for a while, which has a nice modern interface, but quit after discovering that my drafts were only saved locally, not on the server. This has been an open bug for at least two years. In the end I’ve always fallen back to Thunderbird as the least bad option.
> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…
Maybe they have an exchange mailbox? If you want exchange support on linux with full syncing of mail, calendar and tasks there are two options I know of: evolution and hiri. And hiri is paid abandonware. I’ve set up both, both are not good. Lately I’ve been using outlook web access, which is still bad, just not as bad. Really I guess I miss outlook for windows. There I’ve said it. Judge me if you will. Its search fea…
> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…
Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact. Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware…
The three good options are KMail, Thunderbird, and Evolution. Everything else is CLI or lacks features like DAV.
KMail and Evolution both bring in the entire KDE/Gnome PIM suite with daemons and other programs, making them not great unless you are using Gnome or KDE - as another HN commenter said about Java web applications, you wanted a banana and instead got the entire jungle and an angry gorilla. But they do integrate very well. Thunderbird is standalone.
I tried Evolution for a week, about a month ago, and have used KMail and Thunderbird a lot.
KMail is fully-featured, with native support for CalDAV/CardDAV and 'send later.' But it's incredibly complex and easy to misconfigure. When upgrading to a new computer recently, I tried doing an export => import to transfer data, but it apparently permanently borked the KMail installation on the new computer. Tried uninstalling/reinstalling and deleting all KDEPIM-related files in ~, and it still would not work... Even on my old computer I still kept Thunderbird installed along with KMail sometimes didn't work properly.
Thunderbird is very straightforward to use and is quite stable. I use the TbSync add-on (Thunderbird has an official add-on repository like Chrome/Firefox). You'll also need the 'Provider for CalDAV & CardDAV', which adds that functionality to TbSync but is distributed as a separate add on.
Set up cal/carddav account, then go to calendar, right click the toolbar => Customize, and drag the 'Synchronize' button onto the toolbar so you can force a synchronization if needed (in addition to the timer-based background sync).
There's also a 'send later' add-on available. Aside from that, I only have a few minor issues with Thunderbird:
To switch between HTML and plain-text emails, you need to shift-click the 'compose new email' button. Can't switch in the middle of composing; you'll need to make a new email and copy-paste over. Changing the default from HTML to plain text requires going into about:config. And you can't enable/disable text wrapping on the fly for plain text emails; it's an about:config pref.
With Gmail accounts, it incorrectly lists the inbox/sent/etc. folders in a subfolder of the account (functions properly, but ugly). You have to right click the account, go to Settings => Server Settings => Advanced and set the IMAP Server Directory to '[Gmail]'.
Finally, TB has its own Spam filtering mechanism. You can't fully disable it. Even if you go to account settings and disable junk filtering for that account, it still shows a button to mark as junk and overrides the J key for that. Annoying if you are used to vim controls and press J often. Also J has the homing nub on the keycap so I like pressing it a lot...
KMail has all of this stuff built in / fixed, but is just way too complex and brittle.
Actually, after seeing your article's screenshot of Evolution with KDE titlebars, and a person replying suggesting that Evolution is good for this purpose, I'm trying it out on KDE. Never thought that would happen! I don't use signatures so hopefully this bug doesn't affect me... I did have to separately install the gnome-keyring package to get it to remember the IMAP/SMTP password but aside from that it appears to work fine.
I misread this as: "I recovered a lost email from my client’s memory". It made me think of the Black Mirror episode 'Crocodile', and I was quite amazed. Then I saw 'email' client... haha
Author here. That was actually the working title up until two minutes before publishing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact. Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware…
Thunderbird feels wrong for some reason, and webmail doesn't let me have ten accounts in one place... I love being about to readily move an entire email folder to a different imap amount entirely with drag and drop.
I think it mostly just reminds me the most of Eudora so I just like it for being familiar.
(I've never encountered this bug, I guess I just don't have changing my signature in the workflow.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact. Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware…
As others have mentioned, Thunderbird is the least worst option (in our opinions :). I use it with CalDAV/CardDAV synced to my Nextcloud instance. The three good options are KMail, Thunderbird, and Evolution. Everything else is CLI or lacks features like DAV. KMail and Evolution both bring in the entire KDE/Gnome PIM suite with daemons and other programs, making them not great unless you are using Gnome or KDE - as a…
nano ftw. Modern web email clients have this since a long time and Gmail never crashed internally for me ;)
Some google services seem to be crashing the tab in my Firefox (but me only, since this bug has been there for many months now and I reported the crash with URL a bunch of times), I remember street view for sure but recently there was another, don't remember the name. (I don't use google services that frequently aside from pulling youtube content.)
Anyway, point is, browsers aren't infallible either and google is known to make their software work only in google-branded browsers. I'm not sure that a really stupid bug in $someSoftware is a good argument for why we should move everything into the browser, or a Google product in particular (why not bring up roundcube or runbox or something?).