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Add to SafariWhen comparing Roundcube vs Mailspring, the Slant community recommends Mailspring for most people. In the question“What are the best native e-mail clients for Linux?” Mailspring is ranked 6th while Roundcube is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Mailspring is:
Mailspring has great integration with gmail features and tags.
Specs
Question 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 Great integration with Gmail
Mailspring has great integration with gmail features and tags.
Pro Neat UI
The UI is very well designed and neat.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Snoozing support
You can swipe to archive / snooze messages and specify when you'd like them to resurface in your inbox.
Pro Unlimited number of accounts
Only in the paid version though.
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.
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?
Con Slow updates and bug fixes
It takes months to fix some simple bugs. For example, they can't fix bug with notifications on mac OS from April 2019! Upd: they fixed it after 6-7 months
Con Unstable, have to keep fixing passwords
You have to keep "updating the password" because it continuously finds it hard to sync with multiple Outlook accounts.
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.
Con No addressbook
Con No way to see messages as plain text
And HTML is only optional.
Con Does not support Microsoft Exchange
Con Very limited user interface
No way to see the messages as a list, no way to rearrange views.
Con No portable windows (.zip) bundle available
Con Does not support POP
Just IMAP.
Con Does not support multi-user installation (Windows)
But instead installs to the user's home directory.
Con UI is sluggish (Windows)
Click and only after a tiny delay (~half second) something happens.
