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Ask HN: What email client are you using?

by edu on 2/27/25, 9:01 PM with 12 comments

  • by rstuart4133 on 2/28/25, 7:23 AM

    Thunderbird on my Debian desktop, BlueMail on Android.

    Thunderbird gives me the irrites because of it's mbox storage format isn't robust. That's because isn't journaled, and POSIX append to file isn't reliable. It doubly irritating because their is robust alternative: maildir. Also it's google calendar plugin doesn't work if someone shares an invite with you. But on the positive side it's IMAP so losing local data isn't a disaster, and everything else about it is better than the proprietary alternatives.

    BlueMail's nit is it isn't open source. Everything else is literally perfect. It's more capable the GMail or Outlook for example, which amazes me. I don't understand how / why they make it available for free, in fact it's downright suspicious, given it's so good I'd pay for it if there was a way. Still, I'd abandon it for an open source alternative if they did basic stuff like support subfolders. FairEmail doesn't. k9 was worse when I tried it.

  • by jasonpeacock on 2/27/25, 9:08 PM

    Fastmail's iOS client on mobile, and their browser client on desktop.

    I de-Google'd my life and Fastmail is amazing. I use their own clients because I'm creating new mail filters to sort my incoming email just often enough that I miss not being able to do that when using other clients.

  • by gostsamo on 2/27/25, 9:22 PM

    Thunderbird, mainly because it is more accessible even than the web clients and because I don't need to remember different key bindings for different email providers.

  • by dlcarrier on 2/27/25, 10:40 PM

    Seamonkey on my computers, and K-9 Mail version 5.6 on my phone. (Later versions don't have reliable IMAP IDLE notifications.)

    I'm sure that's a pretty standard workflow.

  • by billybuckwheat on 2/27/25, 10:51 PM

    The Fastmail app on my phone. Even then, I don't use it all that much. On the desktop, I don't use a client. I just log into Fastmail.

  • by marssaxman on 2/27/25, 10:15 PM

    For personal messages, I use Thunderbird locally and Roundcube on the web, connecting to a privately hosted IMAP server.

    At work, it's just mail.google.com.

  • by ColinWright on 2/27/25, 9:20 PM

    Command line scripts I've written over a period of a few years.

    Written in bash, python, and AWK.

    About 2% to 5% of the time I use a webmail client, usually Roundcube.

  • by beretguy on 2/28/25, 2:55 AM

    Proton, Evolution, iOS Mail.

  • by PaulHoule on 2/27/25, 9:13 PM

    emClient