Best E-mail CLIENT

I tried to install Thunderbird Email client and it looks like it’s just another webmail browser - not a client.I need to find a privacy-conscious EMail client that doesn’t use any Chrome or browser -stuff-. IDEAS for a good client for Pure?

TIA
S

I use Mutt :smiley:

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Hm, my understanding of Webmail is a web application which the user opens with a web browser. We might say a website or web page.

Thunderbird of my understanding is a full blown local email client program. It can display HTML email of course, but it has anti tracking protections (though I don’t know if these are active as default). You can manage multiple email accounts and addresses / identities.

Edit: P.S.: Maybe some of Thunderbird’s UX is not very intuitive, e.g. the way email accounts are added, but I didn’t compare it to other clients for a long time.

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Thunderbird is an email client, it’s made by Mozilla and has some components of Firefox such as a basic web browser.

If you want a simpler email client then take a look at Clawsmail.

The first run of Thunderbird will get you a small web page on the bottom right advertising itself, before you click on your first incoming email. That is where the text of your first email will appear. Maybe that’s what you saw?

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That is a very good question.
Thunderbird is not private any more as it has this telemetry option that even when you disable it you can never be sure that have indeed done so! lol

But there are no other mail clients out there that are compatible with Thunderbird in order to switch to them and transfer easily the settings and the archived emails. You have to mess up the universe in order to make them work and some of them don’t even work.

Someone has to inform Thunderbird developer team that LESS IS MORE and PRIVACY IS PRECIOUS.
If we wanted to receive our emails on our browsers there are apps that serve this purpose. Those of us who use mail clients they do so because they don’t want to mess up with the web login page of their email accounts and they want to check their multiple mail accounts at once privately, from the back ports of their mail server.

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even when you disable it you can never be sure that have indeed done so! lol

Can’t you look at the source code and see what it does?

It is possible to switch from Thunderbird to Clawsmail, I did it last year, and then I switched back to Thunderbird :stuck_out_tongue: lots of fun.

There’s also Sylpheed which Claws Mail was forked from a long time ago.

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Easier yet, you can just firewall off the application with OpenSnitch and allow it to communicate only with the mail servers you use.

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I recommend Mailspring for Linux. It has a cloud element for some paid features, but you don’t have to use them. It has a glorious unified inbox that works well, and the client works with Protonmail’s protonbridge.I use it with 7 email accounts, and the overhead is not bad. It is a pretty efficient client. Also looks the best out of the Linux clients I’ve tried.

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Aha! So that’s what has been happening to the universe!

That, is what threw me. I’ve used Netscape Communicator > Tbird. I read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy novels, and friends tell me to stop doing that and I’ll feel better :slight_smile: But Moz includes a statement saying Tbird adheres to Firefox’s privacy and terms novels so things like using "… clear Gifs, cookies, and third party services… Google, Yahoo… " curls my toes.

I’ve used it to avoid the HTML 5 layer. I don’t leave parcels sitting on my doorstep for porch pirates, I also don’t leave my email hanging out on someone else’s computer - be it ISP server, cloud (AKA server too), my own mail servers or mangled with free-Wmail (Google, Live, Hot, Yahoo…) and avoiding Amazon AWS at all cost.

I’m going to check out some of the suggestions here by @Julie21, @morgan (view source code), @2disbetter and @dpr with “Snitch” (whatever that is - it sounds good).

Thanks everyone for some great starting points
~s~

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:smile:

Wikipedia sometimes has list and comparison tables for program categories, although further details have to be researched on an individual basis.

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Edited to fix lame verbal duplication…

Thunderbird is not a webmail client, but over the years, the UI has evolved to look like one. The good news is that with a little effort, you can configure it to look and act pretty old school. Mine is setup such that I almost never see more than one tab and I might be able fix that if I cared more.

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I have enjoyed:

  • Evolution
  • Geary
  • Kmail

[quote=“morgan, post:7, topic:13204”]
Can’t you look at the source code and see what it does? [/quote]

No… I don’t know how to do that and I doubt if those who have the knowledge to do so can invest the time and the effort that is required to check each and every application’s source code in order to check if it does what it claims.

It might be possible if you don’t have a large email archive. But if you have multiple accounts with thousands of mails archived then it is very difficult to switch to an other mail client.

That sounds more valid…

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Thanks @prolog – I usually spend a inordinate amount of time reading lots of -stuff- while learning, but sometimes its better to ask a human what they prefer.

Thanks Human

~s~

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I’ve very much wanted to like Geary, but their lack of a GPG implementation has stopped me. I did some research on their Github repository, and it looked like someone had started implementing GPG in Geary a while back, but all of the code was ultimately reverted (from the looks of it, there were some pretty big UI changes that the GPG patch wasn’t compatible with).

The last I saw, GPG was still on their list of things to do, but it hasn’t been accomplished yet

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I have multiple email accounts respective addresses, too. I wounder if the best would be to host an email server in the internal network which fetches all emails from the providers’ servers. Than all emails would only stay temporarily on external systems (given they the emails get deleted after fetching them).

For remote access a VPN into the internal network can be used.

Unfortunately I have no experience in maintaing email servers. E.g. I wonder how to send emails. Will third party email servers handle emails from my personal domain as spam? Do I have to become a member of a trusted network. And for email addresses at provider domains (e.g. Yahoo, GMX), do they have relay servers? I want to save all outgoing mails on my email server, too. It should become my lifetime email archive.

Yes, mail (most?, all?) providers support relay.

The mail transfer agent on your computer (or linux phone) can be configured to use a relay. For exim4, it is as simple as changing the line dc_smarthost=’’ in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf to dc_smarthost=‘mail.example.com’ (where mail.example.com should be replaced by the fully qualified domain name for the relay host of your ISP or mail provider.

Or you can configure your mail client to use a relay to send mail. For mutt the following 2 lines can be added to ~/.muttrc

set smtp_url=smtp://username@mail.example.com:587
set smtp_pass=“your_email_password”

Port number, host name, and whether a password is required may vary.

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First, my Tbird checks various email accounts on various servers. When it finds any, they are downloaded and ‘apparently’ deleted from host.

I have a number of domain accounts on several web Hosts. Each has an abundance of email addresses. I have some control at the server side via cPanel but nothing compared to a actual mail server.

Your thought of local mail server tweaked my curiosity and had me look at Pi.
Raspberry Pi suggests:

  1. Install Postfix to send emails.
  2. Set up Postfix to receive emails.
  3. Add Dovecot for POP / IMAP management.
  4. Install Roundcube as webmail.

I’m looking at the details to see what else is needed. Too, one should check with their ISP to see if they have rules against it.

You stirred my curiosity … new project soon as I’n with my multi-OS-boot sharing same data folder. Very close to done

~s~