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26 Responses

  1. Imi says:

    Can you tell about MS-exchange support?

  2. tsb says:

    I think you forgot one – Mailody (http://www.mailody.net/)..

  3. You seem to have forgotten the Zimbra desktop, an email client from one of Canonical’s partners.

    Ampers (Journalist)

  4. sepp says:

    i just want to say that opera has a built in pop3 and imap client.

  5. rossdub says:

    You have a compiled a very nice, comprehensive, well-researched list. However, I will ask you a question that I posted on Ubuntu Brainstorm a while back while venting frustration about not being able to remove Evolution from my default Ubuntu install: Why is anyone still using desktop email clients? I’m asking a serious, sincere, question, without an ounce of sarcasm or irony: what are the advantages of desktop email clients, over say, Gmail? I can’t think of any. In fact, there are numerous disadvantages with trying to sync your email across multiple accounts, machines, etc., even with IMAP. Unless you are forced to use Exchange for your work, which I’m not sure is fully functional from within Evolution or Thunderbird anyway, why are you still using desktop clients? Even if you do need Exchange support, you can very easily get push email on your iPhone or Blackberry, or better yet, use the web based outlook client that nearly all large companies offer. Even better still, you can leave your work email at WORK. Seriously, can someone please answer this question for me?

  6. Carl Snyder says:

    A reason I use an e-mail client is to not leave confidential information on an on-line mail client’s storage, after opening.

    Another reason is habit: I have been using e-mail since the amount of on-line storage used to be about enough for 10 text based messages or one message with attachment. If you didn’t get your mail, you had no place to get new messages!

  7. admin says:

    @Imi

    You can use thunderbird,Evolution

  8. rusik says:

    ou, but i dont’t use any clients because I like gMail (in the web…on there site:))

  9. mrchilly0 says:

    I’ve tried most of those…and they all fill their little niche…to answer Rusik: I have 2 personal accounts with web based mail, and my everyday email that I have on my server. For those that have their own server, or have various accounts spread throughout the net (I’m sure I’m not the only one..) having a client makes life simple.

  10. gg says:

    using mail software over gmail has several advantages:

    more convinient, and interface fits into desktop
    can access mails when offline.
    has much more functionality (built in encryption, compression)
    syncronisation is no big deal, with imap
    well, the international google conspiracy cannot index my mails to send the NSA after me for writing down the world bomb.

    kmail rocks. simply is more intelligent than any other mail client in th elist. i have tried balsa and claws. they are buggy. pine is useable over slow lines. mutt is pain, UI in not convinient for me.

    mbox and MH mail storage are erro prone btw, and kmailuses maildir backend for locally stored mail.

    generelly: mail cleints and local client software are more convinient, usually (as browsers are just raped to provide this functionality, but were not designed for this originally, and that can be felt), and is much more secure.

  11. gg says:

    oh and about work email: well, you need mail software to do work email. a company telling its employees to use webmail, well…

  12. gg says:

    and one annother world: as many people don’t have ipod or blackberry, as many countries are not completely plagued by the idea of the mindless oversomsumption. Some people are very appy if they get their first used computer. And i’m sure this is true for the vast majority of humanity.

  13. Techdog says:

    Here are some of the reasons I use an e-mail client:

    1. Not tied to Internet connectivity. Since I can have my e-mail setup to sync to local storage, I can work with e-mail offline if I choose. With many web mail services, this isn’t an option. I can leave my work e-mail at work as you stated or I can sync it to my e-mail client. If I had to use POP instead of IMAP, that would be different, because that is where you run into the sync problems, but with IMAP, I just sit down at any of my 4 laptops or 3 desktop machines and have access to all of my mail on any of them.

    2. I sometimes receive personal information in e-mail and I don’t trust it being online at Google or Yahoo or any other online e-mail provider. (I run my own mail server.)

    3. In my opinion, webmail interfaces universally suck. None of the webmail interfaces I have used, whether it is Gmail, Yahoo mail, Squirrelmail, the web interface to Exchange, or Oracle’s Collabsuite compare to my preferred e-mail client, Evolution. I know this is totally subjective, but that is my opinion. And the Exchange connector for Evolution works great. I used it extensively at my former company and it worked better for me than Outlook.

    4. I have yet to find a decent web based e-mail interface that isn’t horribly slow when compared to my regular e-mail client. On top of that, my browser hogs enough system resources without having to keep it open all day to read e-mail.

    5. I have multiple e-mail accounts, used for different purposes and my e-mail client of choice allows me to read them all in a common interface.

    What I don’t understand is how people can trust their e-mail to online providers like Gmail. And I certainly don’t want my personal e-mail or instant messenger conversations archived on servers that I don’t control. I know from experience how nosy system administrators can be. Plus, I have seen too many online mail services fall by the wayside or suddenly convert from free services to paid services.

    If you like Gmail or Yahoo mail or some other online mail service, then fine. To each his own, but I prefer my e-mail client and would only resort to using webmail as a last resort.

  14. Donnie Pennington says:

    Re: TechDog point #4 – You mean you can close a Browser? Who knew!

  15. scheater5 says:

    I use an email client for my preference with the interface. I use multiple accounts, and I like viewing them all at once. Even using gmail, and having a blackberry, I like being able to check everything from thunderbird (including personal accounts other than gmail and a university account with a local server) when I’m at my desktop. The html handling is superior on thunderbird to blackberry, as well. And I use Sunbird for my calendar, and I like the integration with Sunbird and Thunderbird.

  16. Orgo Bumm says:

    After reviewing ALL of them I stay with my Windows The Bat Email Client – really LIGHYEARS ahead in terms of usability. Also there is still so much primitivism out there in the linux world, it is unbelievable. Show me please ONE distro with CLEAN FONTS on a default install. Ridicolous, but this is the truth!

  17. George says:

    What about the venerable elm?

    comand-line email from the good ol’ days!

  18. Hello. Great job. This is a great story. Thanks!

  19. John says:

    Put simply if you have a lot of data a good e-mail client can’t be beat. Even a bad one is better than webmail. The ability to sort and organize contacts, e-mail, and calendar is crucial to many users. For my home e-mail webmail clients work fine but my work e-mail has so many contacts and e-mails that without being able to organize it to my liking it is almost useless. So far I have found nothing for Ubuntu that will do what I want. Evolution comes the closest but still falls short.

  20. Billy says:

    I think the first and foremost reason I use a desktop based email is so that I don’t have to wonder if the email is being blocked/nuked/sent to spam due to being from hotmail/yahoo/gmail – home of the spammers.

  21. Bill says:

    Some of us have never seen an iPhone or Blackberry, and will never in a million years be able to afford one. Ever.
    Also, our computers are too old and too slow to access web email due to the scripting problems and flashing ads.
    Mozilla Thunderbird works great for me under these circumstances.
    Yes, I’m posting to an old thread – but, perhaps it will help someone in the future who is searching for desktop email clients.

  22. jon mathew says:

    Hi. Thanks. i read your post on email clients. which is the best one among these?

    i have tried thunderbird before. i will try few others

  23. Gwyllym says:

    To the person who wrote that they can’t afford an iphone etc.
    IT is a very difficult for people to admit this in the real world as most people are all about image.
    so for you i offer you a few suggestions. 1 download Lynx from the debian or ubunt website, it is a text based www browser and it works well without the huge amount of data and crap that comes with web pages these days.
    2. go and seek out what ever you can to improve your machine from where ever you can, off the street, rubbish etc.
    3. contact a person who might be a bit computer savy and start improving without spending any $$$
    4. Be cool, hard times hit us all and one day it will get easier.
    With the Ubuntu community there can be a lot of elitist snobs with huge horsepower in their PC’s that can be real geeky pricks, stay away from them, instead talk to people that are
    genuine and can help

  24. Harish says:

    I have tried so many email clients but none came close to my expectation in terms of functionality and ease. This list includes Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird and Zimbra. Apart of these Zimbra came on the top of the list in terms of features and ease of use but it has non-native linux feel as it runs on JVM.

    Just few days back tried Opera Mail ( comes bundled with opera browser ) for ubuntu. It comes as native deb package and installation and setup was quite quick. I was delighted by the whole experiences. So if anyone is not happy with email clients then give a try to opera.

    http://www.opera.com/mail/

  25. Fredrik says:

    I think for me the main reason would be privacy. If i run my own mail server at home with a mail client that only i have access to then there’s no possibility of anyone have access to my mail at the back-end, such as is the case with Gmail and so forth. To some people privacy is of the utmost importance and the current global trends of cloud is not necessarily supporting privacy. Of course they say they guarantee privacy but the fact of the matter is someone else DOES have access to you mail. There are enough free mail clients do download and further customize and build on where you can include IM and video that is equally as good as offering from companies such as Google, for me it’s about ultimate privacy and protecting that.

  26. Roberto says:

    Some email providers add ads to the mails send with the browser.

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