Poll: What should our email client be in 21.04 and later

As you know - Ubuntu Budgie is a community distribution - it is you who are central to who we are and what we do.

We have shipped with an email client for a number of years; the question here is what should that email client be moving forward.

Note - the choices are for the key email clients shipped in the repos - we are not polling for non-repo based clients.

Please let us know your thoughts below.

Email Client
  • Geary
  • Thunderbird
  • Evolution
  • No email client

0 voters

Thunderbird and Evolution are both fantastic email clients if you want something comparable to Outlook and I would totally use either for a workstation where I had to manage work calendars, hundreds of emails, folders, etc. Thing is, I use Budgie on my personal PC where the only account I have added is my gmail. Geary makes much more sense for a simple personal email account. Instant notifications of new mail, super light weight and elegant. For what is essentially just a bundled application just there to get you started, Geary makes the most sense and would be the least intimidating for new users. I would say have Geary bundled as the default, but maybe have an added page in the Budgie Welcome where Thunderbird / Evolution are listed as more feature-packed email clients for those who want more than a simple email client.

2 Likes

Geary can’t deal with global Inbox (or merged folders, whatever you call that) and doesn’t have a calendar feature where you can add external calendars.

In Gnome, you get the Gnome Calendar that makes up for this missing feature when coupled with online accounts, but Raven doesn’t have Calendar integration.

Geary is way too basic an e-mail client. Evolution may be a bit overdone on the other hand and doesn’t do Global Inbox either.

Thunderbird might look a bit outdated, yet it’s still the best compromise between having a crapload of features to fit everyone’s workflow and not being overloaded by a heavy interface.

Compared to Evolution, Thunderbird is more lightweight. Searching is also a bit faster. And recently Calendar was integrated instead of having to use the add-on.

That fits Budgie, full functionality, easy to use but lightweight and swift.

Easy choice.

2 Likes

Thunderbird.

As it’s the only one which is really multi-OS, and would let you have a common workflow regarding e-mails in any context.

All other e-mail client are interesting, but kind of limited to Linux users : not really a problem from a personal use case point of view, much more of a problem if you’re dealing with e-mail at a team / organization / business scale.

1 Like

Mailspring ?
which is ofcourse not a choice here but i really liked it.

2 Likes

It’s not in the repos, so not a choice we can choose.

Same here.
I tried it at some point ± a year ago. Was much more impressed by Mailspring than by Geary. I really don’t understand the fuss with the latter.

1 Like

I would pick Thunderbird to be included with the ISO for a standard installation. I use Mailspring ,but select the minimal option during installation.

I voted for Geary, the other clients looked outdated to me and setting up Thunderbird the way I wanted was confusing at best, options were buried away etc,…

Geary had the best overall UX/UI exprience for me.

2 Likes

Thunderbird! :grin:

Though for me at least the vast majority of day to day emailing is done via the browser

@humblebee I see what you mean, though for absolute ease seems most browser email boxes are even slicker still at this point

1 Like

I would love that, I feel budgie is more focused on esthetics, and both Thunderbird and Evolution are pretty powerful, but being honest, I have loved Geary so far, when I installed budgie I was impressed by the simple yet elegant mail client. I feel anyone who might want more should have an easy way to change their preferred mail client. I would also consider adding Mailspring as one of the options!

Either way, I would like to be able to return to budgie if it gets changed.

When was your last try with Thunderbird ?

Aesthetic matters but is not enough.

As mentioned, it depends of who is the target of an email client. Most people using only one mail account may even not bother at all with an email client, only webmail through internet browser.

But for anyone dealing with many accounts and possibly at the scale of a team ( organization, business, etc ) where mails and agendas are sensitive, Thunderbird fits.

Instead of changing default email client, maybe adding an easy way to create « webapp » from any webmail ? Something like Peppermint’s ICE GitHub - peppermintos/ice: Tool to create Chromium/Chrome/Firefox/Vivaldi SSBs in Peppermint OS. or https://launchpad.net/~peppermintos/+archive/ubuntu/p10-release/+sourcepub/10465529/+listing-archive-extra It adds a .desktop file in the menu for the web page and opens it like a « normal » app window. Use it for a couple of years, very convenient for things like syncthing, deezer, online-editors…

Not sure if I should explain my preference here, but here we go.
In my opinion, a mail client should be robust, error free, at least have the possibility to send mailings, mail should be searchable easily. Good looking is great, unless it is getting in the way of functionality in a professional environment.
Summing up these things, together with the fact that (the option of-) having a calendar & agenda included is a pre, for me, at this moment, Thunderbird is the best choice by far.

1 Like

When was your last try with Thunderbird ?

Last week, when I was trying out different distros and I have to add I’m coming from a macOS background, so I guess I’m used to ease of use and good looking design .

good looking design - that is so subjective.

But you may be right, I think I use Thunderbird ( and Firefox ) since … well, it hurts, almost since they exist. It was on windows 2K, XP was a brand new thing in those days !

Never been rich enough to get introduced in Apple’s realm so I can’t compare, but adding email accounts in TB nowadays is quite straight forward, automatized for much providers. And if manual settings are needed, they’re always the same : pop, imap, smtp servers, id and pwd, and so on.

Let’s say I’m biased by habits.

1 Like

I haven’t used OS X (or whatever the previous versions were called) since my university days (computer room), probably 18-20 years ago. But if configuring any kind of setting is as badly implemented as in iOS (forced to use it at work, unfortunately), I’ll take Thunderbird for ease of use any day of the week.

Voted None, but again I choose always minimal installation of UB and then add stuff myself.

1 Like