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Add to SafariWhen comparing Geary vs Alpine, the Slant community recommends Geary for most people. In the question“What are the best native e-mail clients for Linux?” Geary is ranked 4th while Alpine is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Geary is:
Setting up accounts is a simple as putting in the users e-mail address and password.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Straightforward and simple UI
Setting up accounts is a simple as putting in the users e-mail address and password.
Pro Native GNOME application
It looks and works like a GNOME application should, so it Just Works™.
Pro Fast and responsive
Geary is faster than most e-mail applications, upon starting the program or even just browsing in folders.
Pro Beautiful UI
Everything about the look and feel of Geary is a breath of fresh air after the clunkiness and ugliness of it's competitors.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Threaded conversations
Threaded conversations means all subsequent replies are view-able underneath the initial e-mail.
Pro SQLite DB for email
It uses SQLite DB for storing email messages from all accounts in one single DB file.
This makes it portable as in you can just copy one SQLite DB file and move your offline mail content to another PC/location. Also, one SQLite DB file for all messages means it is incredibly fast.
Pro Work in background
Pro TNEF support
Support for Outlook-specific email attachments (TNEF).
Pro Extremely user-friendly
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.
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.
Cons
Con No PGP
No encryption available.
Con No horizontal layout
There is no optional horizontal layout for those that want to be able to view their emails headers across the full screen.
Con Made for Gnome 3
It may look out of place in any other desktop environment.
Con No incoming message rules
Con Too basic
Very Basic, cannot format date, cannot create new folders - What!!
Con Not seen as a secure app by Gmail
Con No native Exchange support
Whilst possible if your Exchange server and account are using Davmail as a proxy, at the moment you can't natively add an Exchange account.
Con Development is pretty dead
No real development since October 2017.
This should be changed from a "Con" to a "Pro" as the Librem 5 smartphone has Geary as the default email application. There is ongoing development happening as can be seen at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/commits/mainline
Con No Pop3 support
Con Bad HTML rendering
The HTML rendering of email messages is not full fledged. Some messages can appear a bit off compared to their appearance on browsers
Con No images in HTML signatures
Whilst it is possible now to add a HTML or plain text signature per account, there is no support for per images in the signatures. This is a must for when an employer imposes a set signature with images.
Con Its bloated
IT requires many GNOME dependencies or it will be unusable on the most non other X11-desktops
Con No proxy support
Seems like it can't retrieve email from behind proxy.
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.
