Ask HN: What email client do you use? I've been wondering what's the best application for email productivity. Browser v Desktop Clients v Mutt |
Ask HN: What email client do you use? I've been wondering what's the best application for email productivity. Browser v Desktop Clients v Mutt |
CLI: mutt
Mobile (Android): K9
Claws because it starts in less than a second and does all I want, mutt because of the same reasons, K9 because it it does most of what I want and is free software like all other software on my mobile devices.
At work we're a Google G-Suite shop, so Gmail web interface.
Only problems I had with it were when searching for mails and when I had a bug in dovecot.
There are some other up and coming open source solutions (FairEmail/SimpleEmail), bjt I don't like the interface
iOS: Gmail.app
I don't love either one, but for Google's Advanced Protection program, I don't have much of a choice. They're fine.
1. The new "dark mode" periodically sends emails with white background and white text. (Check out their support forum/Reddit and lots of people experience the issue. Users are asked to send it in and… nothing changes.) I've just disabled dark mode because of this.
2. There has been a bug which causes the app to erroneously display "Inbox Zero" despite being badged with new messages. This error has been in the app for 3-4 years.
3. Searching a large inbox throttles up CPUs. On my i9 MacBook Pro CPU usage goes to >250%.
4. It struggles with quotes/signatures. I send long emails which regularly get folded in bizarre places in the preview panel.
5. Periodically hitting forward/reply on an email will not include any of the text in the chain, when the original email is archived.
6. Saw this at the weekend but not today yet: the main window disappears sometimes and can only be brought back by quitting the app and reloading. Right clicking the dock icon and hitting "Show main window" does not work.
Honestly if any other email app was simply designed and had either mappable keys or by default mapped backspace to archive, I'd be using it.
But mostly from within Gmail itself.
I used to read a huge amount of mail, in particular most of linux-kernel and gcc-devel, and other things like that. Eventually it got burdensome to keep up, about 1000 mails/day incoming, and taking about 1 hour every day of fairly intense skipping through.
For a while I started to find mail traumatic. It was because of one, then another, person being abusive and pushy to the point that handling their mail was taking too much time and stressing me, on top of difficult personal experiences (partner illness, bereavement etc). As a result, I stopped reading mail regularly for a while. Naturally this had some unfortunate effects, and it put me off doing tasks that needed doing.
This was transformed when I started using Notmuch to filter mails, with the default filter being "everything in the last 1 hour", and two secondary filters: "all work mails in the last 7 days" and "all non-list mails addressed to me in the last 24/48 hours".
Even while the trauma issues continued, this one change transformed how I deal with mail, and it meant even when I felt tired I could approach little tasks that involved immediate emails quickly, instead of putting them off; and improved keeping on top of work and related things.
That won't apply to everyone, but it transformed my productivity with mail when I wasn't coping, and I suspect a similar time-based filtering can transform productivity for someone who is coping ok, but finding the quantity of mail, or their "ever expanding todo list stored in email", to be putting them off dealing with it.
Notmuch indexing and searching has also transformed how I file mail. I used to store mail from different people or organisations in separate folders. That by itself turned out to be quite a bit of grind every day (don't dare take a holiday!). Now I tend not to file mail, so much as add new search filters, which I add to auto-tagging scripts. When I add a new search filter, it isn't just used for new mails (as Procmail is). Updating filters re-tags older mails as well.
One of these days I will link my search-tagged mail to an app (of my own) on my phone so that I get notifications for "important stuff", but nothing else. For the moment, I avoid mail notifications, and take a look when I feel like it, every few hours, or when I'm expecting something. If something's important and time-sensitive (like a server alert - I look after a number of critical services), it's linked to SMS as well as mail, so I won't miss an alert. And people know to call me if something is time-sensitive.
Android: AquaMail
Webmail: Roundcube
Nothing better!
I wrote an alternative; https://lumail.org/
There's also Sylpheed (https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/) and Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/).
If I were just using email with developers I would not care about sending/receiving only text emails, but unfortunately the real world is a bit more complicated than that...
The tagline "for busy professionals, like you." immediately made exit the page without thinking.
It could be the best product in the world but I'm not going to use a product that treats me with such a patronizing attitude.
And whatever genius decided to hide the pricing behind another page doesn't understand their market. The price is the first and only thing I care about if we're talking about paid desktop clients. Everything else is secondary. And they might as well put the big honking "$40 per license" pricing right there at the top instead of further down the fishing rod. Anyone who considers that a worthwhile deal is going to pay it anyway. It's not a bad deal for a lifetime license.
However many customers would probably like something more than a 30-day free trial without a lifetime commitment. Offering a $3/mo subscription would probably majorly boost sales.
I've some hope in getting a nice setup with notmuch, mu4e or some other power-user oriented MUA at some point (being able to type my emails in Emacs is a real selling point for me), but so far I've been hesitant to lose the ability to read non-plain text emails right in my MUA.
I prefer desktop clients because I have 6 email accounts and managing all of them in tabs is just a headache.
I want to shift to a CLI based email client. But my previous attempts in making that shift have been unsuccessful. I had spent a couple of hours in shifting to Gnus Emacs but because of my inability to configure it properly I had to move away from it.
Some common issues I faced while configuring it were -- 1. Would always start downloading the mail metadata everytime I did =M-x gnus=. I am pretty sure there is some way to pull that into local filesystem once and just download the incremental metadata. 2. With the basic vanilla config, there was no support for notifications which is an essential factor in my workflow i.e. interrupt based working rather than polling.
I have heard there are other CLI based clients like Mutt, m4uemacs in Emacs which are a bit more practical for a beginner than a Gnus but I am yet to get those a shot.
eM Client on on Windows, because is it comparable with Thunderbird in managing my mails but also comes close to Outlook with its calendar and contacts management. Unlike Outlook, it support more open protocols like CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box.
AquaMail on Android, because of its customizability.
I don't use any web clients, because I prefer a unified experience across email providers but from those I tried, I prefer Fastmail's web clients. It somehow feels faster than all these native desktop apps and if I could use it as a generic IMAP/SMTP client like Roundcube, I would use it instead of native desktop apps.
As part of being a consultant I need to interact with about 6-7 exchange/o365 e-mail accounts, so Outlook is mandatory anyway.
On Android I use Nine. Sandboxing of exchange accounts was my primary reason for buying it several years back, and it's an excellent e-mail client.
I use gmail both mobile and web (Also in Outlook) for anything signup/newsletter/forum/junkmail related.
The churn rate on third party iOS mail apps always seems way too high and I don’t want to get used to a new app every 2 years.
A simple GTK 2 interface, extremely stable, very fast, and does the job really well.
I am a GNU/Linux user and specifically a Plasma 5 desktop user. Due to that fact, I am partial to KMail/Kontact. However, several years ago, back in the KDE 3-4 transition, I lost data with Kontact in one of the upgrades. Since then, I began to use Claws-Mail and while I miss that smooth Plasma integration afforded by Kontact, Claws-Mail's reliability is legendary.
Claws Mail now manages my inbox, with several gigabytes and going back to a lot of years, without hiccups. And that's the best part. The Linux version builds fast and cleandly; and for cross-platform convenience, it has a Windows version. Recommended.
EDIT: seconded what others said about K-9 Mail in Android. Great app, and my go-to place for email in my phone. Also highly recommended.
Comes Spark. All shiny, with nice fast search and much fresher UI. Fast-forward half a year, and after an update, it loses all my custom signatures (I use a lot), rebuilds the whole search database (took almost a whole day), and still no support for SOCKS proxying neither app-wide nor per account.
Tried Mailspring after that, similar UI, good search, but too many bugs and freezes on core things: sending emails, receiving emails can take forever. Also the need for Mailspring account is creepy and unnecessary.
So I'm back to Thunderbird, it got a bit better over the years, but still, if I need to search Chinese I have to go to the corresponding web UI.
Will try MailMate once I have some spare time.
Haven't found any email desktop applications that were enough better to get me to switch back.
This is now my second console-based mail-client. I'm almost ready for #3, but I know it will be a huge timesink.
In case you hadn't noticed: the “ASCII video” has been archived by asciinema (whatever this means), meaning there's a dead link in the first paragraph of the Lumail home page.
On mobile, I use Mail.app from Apple and connect to mailboxes using IMAP. The only exception is ProtonMail, which doesn’t support IMAP directly, needs a bridge software on the desktop and supports it only for paid tiers (which is a fine business decision).
For productivity, I don’t think any desktop app or webmail could compete with well configured command line applications (like Mutt, Emacs, etc.).
Had problems with Claws Mail, dont use it.
This never got off the ground: https://ivelope.com/
Also tried this one out: http://www.memecode.com/scribe.php
Mobile? I'm still running a Blackberry Z30, hopefully replacing it with a Librem 5 later this year. I use the default Blackberry app and it works superbly with my multiple accounts (I'll miss it).
For email I have used VM (<http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/>) for 24 years. It does a great job of rendering HTML mail in a text console. When I choose a URL (whether HTML or in plaintext), Emacs sends the URL to the Mac's browser over ssh.
I always wanted to leave App.mail, and then Mail-Butler 2 went broke and begun losing scheduled mail (sic).
Thus, I got the motivation to switch back to Thunderbird which might be old and clunky, but mail is old and clunky.
I am super-fine with Thunderbird right now. It's stable. It's free. It got tons of add-ons. It's a great piece of software.
PS : I used pegasus mail on windows 3.11 and I loved it for its simplicity and good choice of features
- multiple identities
- multiple accounts
- a very good search
- imap idle support
- nntp client
It could be better on a lot of aspects, like the ui looks a bit outdated (I use it on kde, so it does not integrate very well with the rest of the de), the search could use some more filters, and I can not sort folders in the left pane. But apart from that, it has all the bells and whistles a real email client needs to have to make it really useful.
I haven't tried Thunderbird though. I guess I'd like it because I like Firefox very much.