When comparing Roundcube vs Mu4e, the Slant community recommends Mu4e for most people. In the question“What are the best native e-mail clients for Linux?” Mu4e is ranked 10th while Roundcube is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Mu4e is:
The UI is designed to allow for quick keystrokes to get around and is pretty clean. Header View: ![](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e-2.png) Message View: ![](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e-3.png)
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under GPL v3 with code available on GitHub.
Pro Actively maintained
As of 2022 it is still maintained.
Pro Plug-in support
Roundcube allows third-party plugins and has a temporary plugin repository (until the official plugin repository comes out of beta) with over a hundred plugins available, covering authentication, improved security and settings among many others categories.
Pro Sophisticated address book
Each contact can have their e-mail address, phone number, location, photos and associated URLs added to them. You can then group contacts and address your mails to the group instead of having to enter each person separately. Additionally, you can import vCards and CSV files as contact information. And, it has LDAP connectors.
Pro Access control support
Roundcube has built-in support for access control lists (ACL).
Pro Multiple identities
You receive mail from multiple sources in one account.
Pro Drag & drop support
Roundcube supports attaching files simply by dragging and dropping them in.
Pro Multilingual
Roundcube is available in over 70 languages.
Pro Auto-refresh
Has auto-refresh functionality for email boxes.
Pro Good documentation
You have access to the documentation for APIs as well plugins development.
Pro Built-in caching
Roundcube caches messages to allow quicker access to your mailbox and to alleviate the strain put on the server. You can turn off caching (change 'enable_caching' property in your config/main.inc.php file) if you need messages to appear instantly.
Pro Reactive UI for mobile
With elastic skin, Roundcube has an excellent UI also on mobile devices since version 1.4.
Pro CardDAV addressbook integration
CardDAV integration available via rcmcarddav plugin.
Pro Spell checking
You can enable/disable spellcheck by changing "enable_spellcheck" in main.inc.php file.
Pro UI optimized for speed
The UI is designed to allow for quick keystrokes to get around and is pretty clean.
Header View:
http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e-2.png
Message View:
Pro Asynchronous
Heavy actions never block emacs, unlike most other emacs email clients.
Pro Fully Search Based
Mu4e has no folders or other organizational tools, rather it relies on very fast search queries to help you find your mail.
Pro Can write rich text emails
Using the (beta) org mode, Mu4e can compose fully rich text emails.
Pro Built-in Autocomplete
Doesn't require you to import address books for autocomplete, learns from your emails just like Gmail.
Cons
Con Klu
Unfortunately, all interfaces of roundcube look very old. I hope there will be a progress soon, Google Mail and Outlook Webmail should be the role models here. But also Yahoo mail offers an intuitive design.
If this open source software should survive, it must be completely renewed and bring up to new standards.
Con Themes
Not easy to create your own themes.
Con Mobile use
Does not translate to mobile use very well
Con For search there is no reverse index
This means it is very slow.
Con Extremely clunky unintuitive interface
For example the mouse cursor may start getting stuck and lag.
Con Search option are limited
You can only search for one item at a time instead of multiple search terms, which makes it difficult to go through large amounts of emails.
Con You can't make multiple accounts
It is not possible to make more then one account.