What is the best alternative to Geary?

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score 26 · Answer 1

Mu4e

Top Pro

UI optimized for speed

The UI is designed to allow for quick keystrokes to get around and is pretty clean. Header View: Message View: See More

Top Pro

Can write rich text emails

Using the (beta) org mode, Mu4e can compose fully rich text emails. See More

Top Pro

Built-in Autocomplete

Doesn't require you to import address books for autocomplete, learns from your emails just like Gmail. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous

Heavy actions never block emacs, unlike most other emacs email clients. See More

Top 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. See More

26 0

score 10 · Answer 2

Alpine

Top Pro

Extremely user-friendly

Top Con

Updates are not frequent

Alpine is not updated frequently. This means that new features, bug fixes or security updates come much later than in other email clients. See More

Top Pro

Can use the built-in text editor or can be integrated with another text editor

Alpine comes with pico, a lightweight text editor which can also be used as a standalone tool. It can also be integrated with vi, vim, emacs, etc... if the user prefers to do so. See More

Top Pro

On-screen contextual help

Alpine has contextual help that can be displayed on-screen. Removing the need to consult the man pages every time you forget a command or how to do something inside it. See More

Specs

Based On:None

Default Desktop Environment:NA

Release Schedule:Rolling

10 0

score 47 · Answer 3

Claws Mail

Top Pro

Low resource client

Claws Mail is a low resource e-mail client that is often default in low resource Linux distributions. See More

Top Con

Blocks and freezes all the time

Top Pro

Clean interface with 5 layout variants

Top Con

saves password in plain format

Top Pro

Has many plugins for extra functionality

Top Con

Interface looks old and setup is not easy

The icons as well as the rest of the interface look like an application from the early 90's, with this there is also no easy setup options built in like the more modern e-mail clients. See More

Top Pro

Good support for Google's services

Top Con

Saves emails in uncompressed format

This takes more space on the HDD. See More

Top Pro

Saves emails in uncompressed readable format

Allows one to read archived emails with a text editor. See More

Top Con

Also supported on Windows

This makes switching the platform easier. See More

Top Pro

Has very strong filters

The filters a much stronger than in thunderbird See More

Top Pro

Traditional user interface

Top Pro

Open-Source

Top Pro

Has many themes

Specs

Platforms:BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, Unix, Windows

47 7

score 53 · Answer 4

Mutt

Top Pro

Terminal based

Top Con

Terminal-based

It runs inside the terminal so it doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements. See More

Top Pro

Small and efficient

Top Pro

Highly configurable macros

Top Pro

Threads emails

Top Pro

Active development

Even though it was first released in 1995, Mutt still enjoys an active community following it and having new releases constantly. See More

Top Pro

Work with regular expressions

Mails can be filtered, deleted, flagged, etc. with regular expressions which makes mail management very efficient. See More

Top Pro

Compose mails in your favorite editor

Edit mails efficiently with an editor you already can work fluently with. See More

Top Pro

It runs inside the terminal

It doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Search:Yes

Lic:GPLv2+

See All Experiences

53 12

score 182 · Answer 5

Mailspring

Top Pro

Neat UI

The UI is very well designed and neat. See More

Top Con

Can't use without creating a Mailspring ID

There is no need to create a third party ID for an email client. What if the Mailspring closes in the future - can't install a previously downloaded Mailspring software any more to continue using it or access your stored emails? See More

Top Pro

CPU / battery efficient

Mailspring uses a C++ sync engine designed to be as efficient as possible, so you can leave the app running and not see your laptop battery life drain away. See More

Top Con

Pro subscription model

To use some features, like contact profiles and link tracking more than a few times a month, you need to pay for a Pro subscription. See More

Top Pro

Snoozing support

You can swipe to archive / snooze messages and specify when you'd like them to resurface in your inbox. See More

Top Con

No addressbook

Top Pro

Unified inbox

Using a single inbox for all of your email accounts helps you get more done in less time. Mailspring supports every major mail provider—Gmail, iCloud, Office 365, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, and IMAP/SMTP—so you have a single, streamlined command center for all your messages. See More

Top Con

No way to see messages as plain text

And HTML is only optional. See More

Top Pro

Read receipts and link tracking

Activity tracking is built into Mailspring so you get notified as soon as contacts read your messages and can follow up appropriately. See More

Top Con

Very limited user interface

No way to see the messages as a list, no way to rearrange views. See More

Top Pro

Great integration with Gmail

Mailspring has great integration with gmail features and tags. See More

Top Con

Slow updates and bug fixes

It takes months to fix some simple bugs. For example, they can't fix bug with notifications from April 2019! See More

Top Pro

Unlimited number of accounts

Only in the paid version though. See More

Top Con

No portable windows (.zip) bundle available

Top Con

Does not support POP

Just IMAP. See More

Top Con

UI is sluggish (Windows)

Click and only after a tiny delay (~half second) something happens. See More

Top Con

Does not support multi-user installation (Windows)

But instead installs to the user's home directory. See More

See All Experiences

182 43

score 131 · Answer 6

Evolution

Top Pro

Great integration with Gnome environment

Top Con

RAM heavy

Very heavy on RAM usage. See More

Top Pro

Manages contacts, tasks, calendar and memos as well

Top Con

Only available on Linux

If you have to switch to another platform for whatever reason, you will need to search for a different email client. See More

Top Pro

Clean interface with 2 layout variants

Going to View > Preview has the option of switching between "Classical View" and "Vertical View". See More

Top Con

Tied to Gnome

Pulls in Gnome. See More

Top Pro

Supports exchange servers

Evolution is one of the few Linux desktop e-mail clients that's supports exchange servers. See More

Top Con

Can't choose different settings for each mail account

Settings have to applied to all mail accounts. See More

Top Pro

Good support for Google's services

Top Pro

HTML rendering is great

Of the many email clients available on GNU/Linux, Evolution has the best HTML renderer. It renders HTML and the entire email content exactly like it would appear on a full blown web browser. Not many email clients are capable of doing that. See More

Top Pro

Excellent GPG support

The integration with GPG is excellent. You can sign, encrypt, decrypt, authenticate and verify GPG signatures and GPG signed/encrypted email messages. All of that is just a setting away. See More

Specs

131 44

score 435 · Answer 7

Mozilla Thunderbird

Top Pro

Free (as in freedom and beer)

Top Con

Development slowed to only focus on stability and security

Mozilla Thunderbird has slowed down its development of features to only focus resources on security and stability. See More

Top Pro

Good filtering system

Mozilla Thunderbird offers a flexible filtering system with the ability to set flags and read/unread, as well as sort/assign to new mail directories. There are also numerous plugins available to assist in the filtering. See More

Top Con

Terrible integration with macOS

Simple things - drag/dropping pictures doesn't work, for instance. See More

Top Pro

Lightning Calendar and Address Book integration

Top Con

Subject lines can (temporarily) disappear from the list

This is sporadic behavior. See More

Top Pro

Large assortment of plugins available

Mozilla Thunderbird offers a huge amount of extensions to expand the usability and options of the client. See More

Top Con

Serious bugs

Clicking on a subject line can bring up the wrong email. See More

Top Pro

Available on Linux, OS X and Windows

Top Con

Outdated interface

Thunderbird's interface is very outdated and unpleasant. It feels more like a Windows XP application than like a modern MacOS one. See More

Top Pro

Very reliable

Version after version, Mozilla Thunderbird works as expected. See More

Top Pro

Consistent and involving a moderate learning curve

The app design of Mozilla Thunderbird has not changed significantly since its beginning, making its learning curve almost non-existent. See More

Top Pro

Great flexibility

More options and extended settings than most power users could dream of. Get it working how YOU want. See More

Top Pro

Tabs for navigation

Top Pro

Send large files easy

Install pCloud plugin for Thunderbird and your files (upto 20 GB free storage included) will be received as download links See More

Specs

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux

435 152

score 9 · Answer 8

gnus

Top Pro

It supports IMAP and POP3

… but you can use DavMail to connect to Exchange server via EWS. See More

Top Con

Difficult documentation

Originally a newsgroup reader, so its documentation uses Usenet terminology for everything -- which is confusing. See More

Top Pro

Everything is customizable

Yep, really. From Outlook-mode, where Outlook-typical TOFU mails are “repaired”, up to a high-sophisticated scoring and SPAM filtering, footer lines with quotes, rules depending on the recipient, MIME formatting, boxquotes, etc. See More

9 2

score 46 · Answer 9

KDE

Top Pro

Highly customisable

There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets. See More

Top Con

Perceived clunkyness and slowness

Compared to other options, KDE is still perceived slow. Especially, the desktop takes a few seconds to login. Mouse pointer can feel sluggish, or laggy, on older systems See More

Top Pro

Looks beautiful

The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some. See More

Top Con

KDE is awesome but it is overcomplicated for newbies for sure

Way too many options for newbies to digest before the learning curve is over. See More

Top Pro

Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity

Included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use. See More

Top Con

Interfaces are inconsistent and ugly in 4.x

While parts of KDE in 4.x can be very good looking, a common opinion is that the style is too hobbled together with inconsistent icons and styles clashing with each other. See More

Top Pro

Integrated advanced search

Plasma Desktop comes with an integration search system that makes it easy to find local files, emails, contacts, events and more. The file manager supports tagging and rating files as well as full-content searching and the KRunner command window and the Milou desktop widget makes searching for files, emails, applications and other content by name, subject, category, tag, fulltext, etc. very simple. It does this with essentially no noticeable interference with day-to-day usage of the computer, thanks to the scheduling built into the backend system (Baloo). See More

Top Con

HiDPI support is spotty

The log in screen as well as some other components of the OS do not scale properly under HIDPI. Everything in the log in screen will be displayed too small, as well as some areas of the OS. See More

Top Pro

Integrated components

Plasma Desktop generally comes packaged with a full set of applications to get users started, including a file manager (Dolphin), advanced file manager and browser (Konqueror), image and document viewers (Gwenview, Okular), the Calligra office suite, CD and DVD authoring (K3b) and dozens more. The desktop can be installed and used without these applications, but they add significant value for many people. See More

Top Con

Poorly named app menu with too many apps starting with "K"

This is better in KDE Neon with minimalist apps, which indeed in itself points out the problem. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard friendly

Nearly all actions can be driven with keyboard commands. Window management, including effects such as desktop overviews, can be triggered with a keyboard control (or mouse gesture) and some even support filtering results (such as windows shown) by typing. The KRunner tool (default keybinding: Alt+F2 or Alt+Space) provides searching local files, online sources, unit conversions, math and more all from a keyboard driven interface. See More

Top Con

Stability problems

Under certain conditions, most of KDE's components can be highly sensitive to race conditions, which leads to KDE applications frequently crashing, and, on rare occasion, kdeinit itself locking up. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Top Pro

KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model

KDE 4 is a great evolution on the classic Win95/Gnome/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors. See More

Top Pro

Active development

Top Pro

The session manager works perfectly

This is a much better session manager compared to solutions from other Linux desktop environments. See More

Top Pro

Bunch of coherent applications

What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour. See More

Top Pro

The search with the Windows Key is as awesome

Top Pro

Adheres to standards

Standards adherence allows for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops, with similar Wayland support being worked on. Applications not written with Plasma in mind work very well in Plasma as a result. The development team has also been instrumental in standard creation and adoption such as NETWM, X11 clipboard, icon themes, mimetype handling, application menu standardization, system tray protocols and notifications and more. See More

Top Pro

Multi-Device "Convergence"

Plasma Desktop provides seamless "zero config" integration of your Android device with your laptop and desktop machines via KDE Connect. Phone calls, SMS messages, cross-device copy and paste, media remote control, cursor control and more are supported. The technology that Plasma Desktop is built on, simply called "Plasma", also provides interfaces for phones, tablets, netbooks, and media centers in addition to the desktop. These additional interfaces use the same underlying frameworks and therefore work well together and have a unified feel to them. They also support a common set of applications across them which adapt to the input methods and screen sizes. See More

See All Experiences

46 11

score 224 · Answer 10

Gmail

Top Pro

Best support for Gmail features

Since both the Gmail Android app and Gmail itself is made by Google, the app supports all features Gmail offers (like labeling/starring) and gets new features implemented early - usually as soon as they are announced. See More

Top Con

Sorting mail by Unread is unintuitive

Nearly every other mail app has a clear way to sort mail by Unread. In Gmail app you can do that only by typing “label:unread” in the search field. See More

Top Pro

Incredibly fast, advanced & predictive search

Gmail brings much of the functionality and power of Google's search engine to the app's search. You can use operators such as label:, is:, OR, has: among others, define date ranges, limit search to specific groups and so on. And, you can do it all amazingly fast. The search will also try to predict what you're trying to search for before you've even finished your query and offer up those results. See More

Top Con

Too brights, no dark theme

Top Pro

Google Drive integration

The app allows inserting files from Drive straight to email or uploading attachments to Drive before sending them out. It will also notify if the person you're sending the file can open the file or if you should change the sharing settings for that file beforehand. Finally, you can choose which one of your Google accounts you want visible in the app. See More

Top Con

Very limited HTML composing

Composing of HTML formatted mails is very limited. No inline images and only some basic text formatting options See More

Top Pro

Google Calendar integration

Top Con

Advertising has been added to the client

Top Pro

Comes bundled with Android for free

Not only is the application free, it comes bundled with the Android OS by default so you don't even have to bother downloading it. See More

Top Con

Too heavy

It should be lightweight. See More

Top Pro

Threaded conversations

Top Con

Limited notification buttons

Top Pro

Safely automatically displays images

The app does not require a confirmation to show images as Google now hosts the images on their own servers making it safe. You can still disable the automatic displaying of images in the settings if you wish. See More

Top Con

Changed theme and can't change it back!

Did it without permission and it looks terrible! Washed out look, solid white background with black lame fonts. See More

Top Pro

Tabs to automatically organize your e-mail

Gmail offers the ability to automatically organize your mail into specific categories: Primary Social Promotions Updates Priority Each of the categories can be disabled and you can move your mail around from category to category or set your own rules which sender should be put in which category. See More

Top Con

Search results are not good

Top Con

No intrinsic p2p encryption option

Top Con

Cluttered

Specs

Platforms:Android / iOS / Browser

Publisher:Google Inc.

Price:Free

File Size:Varies with device

See All Specs

See All Experiences

224 67

score 23 · Answer 11

Kontact

Top Pro

Multi-account, multi-identity

Supports both multiple accounts from different servers / services simultaneously (both inbound and sending) as well as multiple identities. Incoming accounts have a default identity and it switches automatically to the correct identity depending on the mail folder you are in. See More

Top Con

Crashes frequently

Top Pro

Integrated calendaring

The integrated calendaring support means that incoming invitations can be accepted with a click and they get put into your calendar automatically. See More

Top Con

Akonadi

Top Pro

Contacts, Todos, Notes, Journals, Feeds ....

There are numerous components that come with Kontact that augment the mail experience including contact management, todo lists, note takers and an RSS feed reader, among others. See More

Top Pro

Encryption

Fully supports PGP and S-MIME with built-in certificate management. Encrypt, sign and verify emails easily and securely. See More

Top Pro

Supports multiple groupware servers and services

Besides being able to connect to any IMAP, POP3 and SMTP server, you can also connect your Google and Facebook accounts and access Kolab and Tine servers natively. See More

Top Pro

Continuous, active development

Kontact has been actively developed for over a decade, with components such as the mail and calender going back even further. Development continues to this day with an active and responsive open source community made up of both volunteers and paid developers behind it. See More

Top Pro

Solid offline IMAP

IMAP support is a strong point for Kontact, with offline mail and sync being transparent and automatic. Read and create mails on the go and everything syncs quickly and reliably when network connectivity is available. See More

Top Pro

Built-in search

Searching for emails is simple with the search box in the main window which can scan through email bodies, email flags, recipients, etc. Lightening fast in recent versions. See More

Top Pro

Spam, scam and adblock features

Supports spam filtering, scam detection and adblock for HTML mails. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard friendly

Can be driven almost entirely from the keyboard. Moving an email, for instance, is a simple matter of hitting 'm' and then typing to filter through the list of folders that appears. See More

Top Pro

Plain text and HTML mail editing

Provides support for rich-text (HTML) mail editing, but kindly defaults to plain text. Also supports viewing HTML emails with several security features built-in. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Linux/BSD (all desktop environments and window managers), Windows and Mac. See More

Top Pro

Threading

Has flexible and powerful options, from "traditional" conversation-style threading to organizing by date, by senders and receivers, .... paired with "keep replies in same folder" it is easy to track conversations over time. See More

Top Pro

Filtering

Supports client and server-side filtering of mails by subject, recipients, mailing list, body text, etc. See More

Top Pro

Very flexible user interface

You can make the Kontact UI look and function how you want. You can re-arrange the main interface, as well as make the list of mails show or hide almost anything you could need. See More

Top Pro

Professional support

For enterprise deployments, having commercial support can be a big plus. Companies such as Kolab Systems provide professional support and consulting services for Kontact. See More

Top Pro

Integration with kde plasma

Based on qt, and part of plasma suite, it integrates well with other KDE apps like kwallet, calendar, etc. See More

Specs

23 19