Best Email Clients For Linux [2021]
Most of us access our emails from the web browser. While web browsers may be a common way of accessing emails but not quick and efficient. Email clients for Linux easily sync email accounts with the system and notify users of any new email.
Email clients can add multiple email accounts and keep users informed about each and every new email. If needed, email clients also support plugin-ins for adding any missing feature. Email clients can also read feeds from your favorite blogs.
In this article, I will review some of the best email clients for Linux. Even though this list contains 8 email clients, many of them still be out of the list. Let me know if you use any email client that you think should be in this list.
Best Email Clients for Linux
Features at a glance
There are hundreds of email clients available in open source World. What should you choose depends on your needs but for a good email client, it should have at least the following features –
Push notifications
For most users, the basic purpose of using an email client is to keep in sync with the inbox. An email client creates a push notification as it receives a new email.
Calendar & Contacts
Calendar is an important tool for making schedules and helps keep track of important events of life. An email client with a calendar can easily create schedules, mark important days, and even auto-detect dates from incoming emails and add them to your schedule. Just like our phones, email clients can also manage contact lists.
Plug-ins support
Email clients’ functionality can also be extended using plugins. If you are a developer, you can create plugins or use the plugins already developed by the email client or community.
Best Linux Email Clients
Before we dive in to the list of best Linux email clients, here are the few things you should know first.
Most of the email clients I am going to mention are either available in most Linux distributions repositories or available as a snap and flatpak. In case an email client is available as a snap or flatpak, you’ll need to install the required package manager on your distribution. Head over to the links in this paragraph for instructions. Don’t worry it takes a few seconds.
Thunderbird
And what can be on top besides Thunderbird, the best open-source email client for Linux? Thunderbird comes pre-installed on most Linux distributions. It is actively developed and recently got a big user interface update.
The email client is developed by Mozilla foundation, the same company that develops Mozilla Firefox. Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client. It has almost the features that one needs to stay up-to-date with his email accounts, favorite blogs, manage schedules with calendars and manage contacts list.
Users can add multiple accounts in Thunderbird. No matter what email provider you use, it can easily add it.
For security, thunderbird added PGP support for encryption. Earlier one had to depend on additional plugin called Enigmail.
Thunderbird has built-in support for Do Not Track and remote content blocking. No report is sent to the sender when you open up an email.
Add-ons support
Besides having several built-in features such as encryption, privacy tools, address book and calendar, there are hundreds of add-ons available to extends its functionality even more.
Thunderbird has been around for a long time. It has great community support and thousands of plugins allow its users to add almost any feature. Whether you want to improve security & privacy, add language support, or enhance its interface, there are always multiple add-ons for that.
Built-in Feed reader
With Thunderbird, you can always stay up-to-date with your favorite blogs. Just enter the blog feed and it’ll sync all the latest articles for you.
Thunderbird Themes
Similar to add-ons, Thunderbird has thousands of themes to change how it looks and feels like.
Install Thunderbird
Thunderbird is available in most Linux distributions’ repositories. Just use the package manager to pull it into your system.
Evolution
Evolution is another popular email client from Gnome. It is useful if you need some basic functionalities such as email integration, calendar, and address book. With a simple interface, Evolution is easy to use, lightweight, and provides built-in PGP encryption.
To encrypt an email in Evolution, there is no need to install any additional plugin, just create a new email, from the options menu, toggle on PGP Encrypt.
If you are using Gnome, Evolution will automatically add the account configured on the system setup.
There is an offline mode just in case you want to stop sending/receiving emails. Or download messages for offline usage.
Evolution is pretty basic email clients. It has plugins support but only a few plugins are available. If you are a developer, you can build your own plugin using the newly designed framework in Evolution 2.32.
Install Evolution
Evolution can be easily installed from the repositories. Just use the package manager to install it in your Linux distribution.
For Debian or Ubuntu or derivatives Linux distributions –
sudo apt install thunderbirdThunderbird snap app is also available. If your distributions’ repository has the older version of Thunderbird, then use snap version.
sudo snap install thunderbirdChaseApp
ChaseApp is one of the most feature-rich applications on this list. It is not merely an email client. It is an app that integrates very well with over 30 applications such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Github, Jira, Azure, Slack, AWS, Bitbucket, Box, and many more.
Simply add your accounts and press Ctrl + E. You can search all your email accounts, Github, Bitbucket, AWS, and over 30 applications simultaneously.
ChaseApp picks some popular apps for you to connect. Select the app and follow to authenticate the connection.
If you feel liking adding more apps, you can do so from Apps anytime.
If you have connected Google Calendar, ChaseApp will keep track of all upcoming events on Up Next page.
The app will even search the Internet for providing more information. For example, if I search dollar, besides searching the keyword in my email accounts and cloud drives, it also searches the Internet and find out the information that may be useful.
Best of all, it is free. You will need to pay only if you’re an enterprise.
Install ChaseApp
sudo snap install chaseappMailspring
Mailspring is a free email client for all major platforms including Linux. Its easy-to-use setup wizard lets users connect multiple accounts from different email providers.
All the basic functionality is built-in to the program such as
After the account is connected, it’ll ask to either toggle on Reading Pane or off. You can select whatever you prefer.
Mailspring has a unified inbox that shows emails from multiple email accounts in one inbox. And its search feature supports Gmail-like search where users can choose to only search specific emails against the query.
Other useful features of Mailspring are its built-in mail translator, read receipt, and link tracking.
Its translator can translate your emails from 5 languages into your system language. It supports Spanish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, and English.
It can show when a particular sent email was read and also track links inside the email.
Mailspring supports plugins for extending the client’s functionality but no plugins have been developed yet. Although, they have an extensive guide on how to create plugins but it’s not what most users would like to do. So we’ll have to wait for plugins.
Mailspring simple and sleek interface is pretty good. There are some pre-installed themes that you can choose from or visit the community page for more themes developed by the community.
How to install Mailspring
sudo snap install mailspringElectronMail
ElectroMail is an unofficial email client for ProtonMail.
Protonmail is an end-to-end encrypted email service developed by Cern and MIT scientists in 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland.
ElectronMail has many advantages over Protonmail’s official web browser email client. First of all, it’s on your system, provides quick notifications of incoming emails through a system tray icon. All the information the email client stores on your computer is encrypted with a master password.
Users can add multiple ProtonMail accounts in ElectronMail and easily switch back-n-forth between their accounts.
ProtonMail already has inbuilt ProtonCalendar, ProtonContacts, and even ProtonVPN service.
So if you use ProtonMail as a primary email provider, then use ElectronMail. It is secure and provides the same user-interface as ProtonMail in-browser email client with some additional features.
How to install ElectronMail
sudo snap install electron-mailTutaNota – A Secure Email Service
We send emails for sharing essential information that sometime can be as important as the password of your locker. TutaNota is a security-focused email service. It is developed to send encrypted emails to anyone, TutaNota users or non-TutaNota users.
Even if users send unencrypted emails, TutaNota saves them encrypted on TutaNota own servers in Germany.
TutaNota is free and premium both. Most of the basic features are provided for free with some restrictions. To remove restrictions users can pay a small fee of €12 per year.
Premium features include –
- Use extended and unlimited search on encrypted data.
- Use smart filtering for your encrypted mailbox.
- Add aliases to your Tutanota account.
- Add your custom domain & activate catch-all.
- Manage all Tutanota users for your business.
- Use several encrypted calendars in Tutanota
- Customize Tutanota for your business (whitelabel*).
- Whitelabel* feature: Login via your own website.
- Add multiple domains with the Business* feature.
- Add Secure Connect*, an encrypted contact form to your website.
- Sharing*: Share your encrypted calendars with other Premium users
- Get Tutanota Premium for free for your NPO.
TutoNota has an official email client for Linux users.
How to install TutaNota
flatpak install flathub com.tutanota.TutanotaConclusion
So here I wrap up the list for now. When I was writing this article, I found a lot of good email clients for Linux that I never knew existed. I will use those email clients before I add them to the list. Also, if you have any specific email client to suggest, please let me know in the comment section below. Or join our Discord server and be a member of our open source community.
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