Email clients: Opinions? RoundCube webmail is very nice these days
I've just setup RoundMail and it's very, very nice - even on mobile. Curious if anyone uses it or has any opinions? I've always considered webmail a 2nd class experience but I've had to update my opinion on that. Also, Thunderbird has been my go-to client since PolarBar ceased updates. I still like it, but Evolution has been quite good too. So, what are the group's thoughts on email clients? Also, if anyone wants to test out Stalwart for email / CalDAV / CardDAV / optional encryption-at-rest with S/MIME or PGP, I'd be happy to set up an account for testing. Connect with RoundCube or any client you wish. Stalwart also supports OAuth, OpenID Connect, etc. but I don't know what to do with them. It's the entire email tech stack redone in a single Rust package - quite desirable to do away with all the fiddly components...
Ron via Talk said on Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:41:19 -0800
I've just setup RoundMail and it's very, very nice - even on mobile.
Curious if anyone uses it or has any opinions?
I've always considered webmail a 2nd class experience but I've had to update my opinion on that.
Also, Thunderbird has been my go-to client since PolarBar ceased updates.
I still like it, but Evolution has been quite good too.
So, what are the group's thoughts on email clients?
Like you, I've always considered webmail a 2nd class experience, based on my wife's use of it and the few times I've used it for troubleshooting. I consider Thunderbird junk if you have a whole lot of stored emails. The things I dislike about Thunderbird are innumerable. I like Evolution, and use it when Claws-Mail screws up. I use Claws-Mail on a daily basis, but the community experience is less than ideal, so I sometimes switch to Evolution, which is *almost* as good. I'd like to learn Mutt and switch to that, but Mutt is tough to use with IMAP and Mutt is very unforgiving of user error. Before 2001 I used Eudora on Windows and loved it. Eudora on Linux isn't as good, and I get the impression that Eudora was good enough for a 1999 email load, but not for a post 2012 email load. I used Kmail 2001 to 2012, and it was excellent, until the Kmail2 experience with nepomuk and akonadi made me a refugee dragging my email archives to whatever port would have me. To prevent any one email client from owning me, I keep my emails all in my on-computer ("Sovereign" is the new buzzword) Dovecot IMAP with a Dovecot Maildir. In my opinion all email clients suck, and Claws-Mail sucks the least.
Also, if anyone wants to test out Stalwart for email / CalDAV / CardDAV / optional encryption-at-rest with S/MIME or PGP,
I've never used any of those technologies in my life. PGP sounds nice, but I don't think most people can handle receiving it, so what's the use.
[snip]
Stalwart also supports OAuth, OpenID Connect, etc. but I don't know what to do with them. It's the entire email tech stack redone in a single Rust package - quite desirable to do away with all the fiddly components...
My opinion is that I'd like each of those stack members to be independently accessible so I can put together exactly what I want. I had an old Schwinn 1 speed bike in 1968 at the age of 18. Total tools needed: Adjustable wrench, a pliers, and a flathead screwdriver. A year later I bought a 1959 Plymouth with a flathead 6 engine. Tools needed to do a tuneup, replace the fuel filter, replace the thermostat: My bicycle tools plus a gapping tool and a spark plug wrench. My 1968 bicycle would still function perfectly as a city bike in 2026, as long as there aren't significant hills and you can afford to take 15% more time than with a derailleur bike. As a matter of fact, my current neighborhood bike is a Schwinn from the 1960's, although my transportational bike is a 00's Electra Townie 7D. My 1959 Plymouth was a gas guzzling gross polluter that should never be on the road today: Cars need computers to achieve their current gas mileage and low pollution. But if I were to ever get another car, my ideal would be if only the engine, timing and spark were controlled by a computer. No power windows, no power locks, no speed sensitive steering, no speed sensitive suspension, no power steering, no power brakes, a simple AM/FM radio or no radio at all, and probably no air conditioning. Spark plugs and spark plug wires and coil/coils within easy reach to do my own checks and replacements. I t j u s t w o r k s . T M I want the same for my computer, especially because if my computer is simple enough, I can make any custom components I want or need. Yes, I'm old and have a long gray beard all the way down my neck, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
From: Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
I consider Thunderbird junk if you have a whole lot of stored emails. The things I dislike about Thunderbird are innumerable.
Good to know.
I'd like to learn Mutt and switch to that, but Mutt is tough to use with IMAP and Mutt is very unforgiving of user error.
I'm more retrograde than you. I still use Pine/Alpine. Since the early 1990s. I used to switch MUAs every decade: /bin/mail from 1975. BSD mail from about 1985. The great thing about a terminal based MUA is that you can use it over SSH. But you don't have to. The awkward thing is HTML attachments. Too many of them thise days.
D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk said on Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:27:35 -0500 (EST)
From: Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
I consider Thunderbird junk if you have a whole lot of stored emails. The things I dislike about Thunderbird are innumerable.
Good to know.
I'd like to learn Mutt and switch to that, but Mutt is tough to use with IMAP and Mutt is very unforgiving of user error.
I'm more retrograde than you. I still use Pine/Alpine. Since the early 1990s.
How well does Pine/Alpine work with IMAP, specifically, leaving all messages on the IMAP server and simply using the email client as a window into the IMAP? SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
From: Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
How well does Pine/Alpine work with IMAP, specifically, leaving all messages on the IMAP server and simply using the email client as a window into the IMAP?
I don't know. One of my family uses POP. To a local server, so security doesn't matter. I still have to inject a cert into Thunderbird (since it is self-signed) once a year. Another one uses fetchmail through an SSH tunnel. I assume IMAP would be better but I haven't needed to figure that out. I kind of recollect that both Pine and IMAP came out of University of Washington, from the late Mark Crispin (I'm to busy/lazy to check). So they ought to interoperated. I glance at the alpine users mailing list. A fair bit of the trafic is about IMAP authentication: GMAIL seems to have changed how that works (OMAP2, I think). People do struggle but have solutions.
D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote on 2026-02-24 05:49:
I glance at the alpine users mailing list. A fair bit of the trafic is about IMAP authentication: GMAIL seems to have changed how that works (OMAP2, I think). People do struggle but have solutions.
Can confirm, Alpine does IMAP with Gmail. I recall having to set up an application password via Google's web site and use that for ¿OAuth2? authentication, I think.
This may have been Steve Litt: | > I'd like to learn Mutt and switch to that, but Mutt is tough to use | > with IMAP and Mutt is very unforgiving of user error. That hasn't been my experience with mutt over the past decade plus. My IMAP setup my my .muttrc file is basically: set spoolfile=imaps://mail.mailserver.com/INBOX set imap_user="myname@example.com" set imap_pass="password" set smtp_url = "smtp://myname@example.com@submit.mailserver.com:587/" set smtp_pass="password" set smtp_authenticators = "login" set ssl_force_tls = yes Or if you're more careful than I am, mutt can prompt for your password. You can refer to IMAP folders, or local folders, you can use mbox or maildir local storage. And, if you need to deal with M365 mail, you can use davmail as the IMAP/Exchange gateway. My .mailcap file is set up so that if a message is HTML only mutt passes it through "elinks -dump" automatically, and I can easily view an HTML attachment in my browser if I'm so inclined. Admittedly, I've refined all this over more than a few years. I use mail on my phone and on multiple desktops/laptops, IMAP makes that possible. (Well, that, plus a little puppet configuration and unison file syncing.) I happen to get a lot of machine-generated status mail - I couldn't reasonably deal with it without mutt. I don't currently use procmail or imapfilter for my primary mailboxes, but I do have a mutt command file that I can source which does sorting into folders that I might otherwise do with procmail. I have some mailboxes that I collect mail from with fetchmail, and then read that locally. For anyone who is command line inclined, and dealing with non-trivial amounts of mail, I'll certainly strongly recommand mutt, with IMAP, or local mail. Hope that's helpful and/or of interest. Cheers John
D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote on 2026-02-24 12:12:
This message had to be manually approved. MailMan blocked it because "Message contains administrivia". Odd.
I don't see anything in that message that should trigger such a thing. I even sent a good portion of it to the test list and it wasn't rejected. "Odd" indeed. Oh, a second test with full message to test *did* trigger Administrivia warning. After a dozen+ test messages against test@lists.gtalug.org, I've narrowed it down! It's from this block as *only* these lines fail delivery: set smtp_url = "smtp://myname@example.com@submit.mailserver.com:587/" set smtp_pass="password" set smtp_authenticators = "login" set ssl_force_tls = yes Sending just this line *does* get delivered: set smtp_pass="password" It is *this* line that offends the Almighty Filter: set smtp_url = "smtp://myname@example.com@submit.mailserver.com:587/" Sending that alone triggers the filter. Administrivia <https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rules/docs/administrivia.html#administrivia> The administrivia rule matches when the message contains some common email commands in the |Subject:| header or first few lines of the payload. This is used to catch messages posted to the list which should have been sent to the |-request| robot address. It's too bad the Mailman3 documentation on testing Administrivia does not work as indicated: docs.mailman3.org Administrivia — GNU Mailman 3.3.11b1 documentation <#> 🔗 https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rules/docs/... <https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rules/docs/administrivia.html> Haven't verified versions, but the Python code exploded when I attempted it.
On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:41:19 -0800 Ron via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
I've just setup RoundMail and it's very, very nice - even on mobile.
Curious if anyone uses it or has any opinions?
I've always considered webmail a 2nd class experience but I've had to update my opinion on that.
Also, Thunderbird has been my go-to client since PolarBar ceased updates.
I still like it, but Evolution has been quite good too.
So, what are the group's thoughts on email clients?
I am running Sylpheed. I am not nuts about MH format, but at the time, over twenty years ago, I was looking for something that used POP mail and had a Send-Later feature. I regard its lack of rich text as a feature, not a bug. I can display HTML emails in Firefox if I am really determined to read them. My ISP still supports POP. Gmail used to support it, but not any more. I have stopped using it. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On 2026-02-23 13:10, Howard Gibson via Talk wrote:
My ISP still supports POP. Gmail used to support it, but not any more. I have stopped using it.
Oh? I switched from POP to IMAP 2 months ago (when I switched from Slackware to CachyOS), so Gmail was working with POP up to end of last year. I'm thinking going back to POP. There are problems with Thunderbird with IMAP, which I didn't have with POP. It could be Thunderbird issue. I looked at Kmail (KDE), but gave up. Way too many options, just too complicated even for me.
Every few years I make myself crazy trying to make mail clients functional. It is possible to find other nerds who love tbird or evolution or mutt or pine or others but one thing you might notice is that they are all 10+ and mostly 20+ year users. Almost never you find someone who is 2 years in. Its a good idea and I'm sure it could be possible but I do not think it exists. Thing is that I was spoiled by gmail. It let's you do things like manipulate server based filters in the client. Which ought to be possible like with sieve, but isn't. And would automatically know about aliases without having to program each device. And this whole thing about having to opt in to "polling" individual folders what the heck. Tres stupid. Apparently this is all problems inherent to the mail protocols that can only be got around by host-specific custom clients. My email host (fastmail) has OK webmail/mobile clients that can do most of what gmail did and thats why I stick with them after trying various other options. I find its very embarrassing to be forced to use a close sourced email application. email being like an archetypal open protocol. Sad.! On Sun, Feb 22, 2026, at 6:41 PM, Ron via Talk wrote:
I've just setup RoundMail and it's very, very nice - even on mobile.
Curious if anyone uses it or has any opinions?
I've always considered webmail a 2nd class experience but I've had to update my opinion on that.
Also, Thunderbird has been my go-to client since PolarBar ceased updates.
I still like it, but Evolution has been quite good too.
So, what are the group's thoughts on email clients?
Also, if anyone wants to test out Stalwart for email / CalDAV / CardDAV / optional encryption-at-rest with S/MIME or PGP, I'd be happy to set up an account for testing.
Connect with RoundCube or any client you wish.
Stalwart also supports OAuth, OpenID Connect, etc. but I don't know what to do with them. It's the entire email tech stack redone in a single Rust package - quite desirable to do away with all the fiddly components...
------------------------------------ Description: GTALUG Talk Unsubscribe via Talk-unsubscribe@lists.gtalug.org Start a new thread: talk@lists.gtalug.org This message archived at https://lists.gtalug.org/archives/list/talk@lists.gtalug.org/message/CWFYIMQ...
From: bitmap via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
Thing is that I was spoiled by gmail. It let's you do things like manipulate server based filters in the client. Which ought to be possible like with sieve, but isn't.
If I understand what you are asking for, it requires a MUA integrated with the MTA. There is no part of SMTP that allows directing a server to install or remove filters. I don't actually know about IMAP or POP.
And would automatically know about aliases without having to program each device.
I don't know what you are asking for here.
And this whole thing about having to opt in to "polling" individual folders what the heck.
IMAP, POP are polling protocols. That's because it is designed for clients / initiators that are transient. SMTP assumes a community of hosts, each usually on and connected, best with a static IP. The hosts are computers, not users' programs. Even then, your MUA is probably polling, but locally.
Tres stupid. Apparently this is all problems inherent to the mail protocols that can only be got around by host-specific custom clients.
Yes.
I find its very embarrassing to be forced to use a close sourced email application. email being like an archetypal open protocol. Sad.!
You are not forced, you are enticed.
participants (7)
-
bitmap -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Howard Gibson -
John Sellens -
Ron -
Steve Litt -
William Park