Kia ora!
I’ve recently set up asahi linux on my macbook - it’s been probably 10 years since I last seriously spent time using linux, so I’m real out of the loop! I’ve been playing with hyprland and really enjoy it - its approach to window management and productivity is feeling really instinctual, which I love.
With that in mind, I’m on the hunt for email clients on linux - I’m open to trying a good few, because email is my bugbear and I’m invested in finding something that really works. Something that makes it easy to process them would be great - and if it’s customisable in terms of looks, even better!
Thunderbird is and always has been the GOAT. The only real downside is the lack of a tray item, but this can be partially solved by installing Birdtray. I think Thunderbird 115 released with this feature, but it only works on Windows. Fingers crossed that it comes to Linux soon
What I don’t like about Thunderbird is the mbox mail format (one file per folder). It’s not a good fit for my use case — personal email where some folders can amass many thousands of messages — Thunderbird bogs down eventually.
I’ve been using Claws Mail, it’s fast and customizable, with great filtering and scripting abilities and tray notification plugin included. Claws uses MH format which is one file per message. But it doesn’t support maildir.
Evolution is another good client with the ability to use either mbox or maildir, but it stores the metadata in its own format.
mutt is the absolute best if you don’t mind a console client.
I heard good things about Balsa but last time I tried it (years ago) it was still not mature.