I use evolution and it works well for everything besides my work Gmail but that has more to do with security policies than evolution
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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I was pleasantly surprised with Evolution the last time I tried to use Gnome, it used to be a buggy, bloated mess. But alas, I can't manage to use Gnome for more than a release or two. Now I'm looking for a decent Wayland native alternative to Thunderbird, but it just doesn't exist without DE bloat at this point. Maybe someone will build a modern replacement for Sylpheed/Claws.
I have had the exact same issue as you. Thunderbird is great, but their attachment search is not. I spent a lot of time looking for a way to make it work and what I settled on is using a third party program to serve this function: Recoll (https://www.recoll.org/index.html).
It should be available in your distro's package repository.
You'll need to download your messages to your computer, but it will work in the way that you expect search to work (I.e. search by filename, search by text within attachments, search by text within emails). Setup is straightforward. You just need to point it to the Thunderbird profile directory where your emails are saved. As a bonus, you get good desktop search for all the other files on your computer too.
Sadly (don't throw anything at me), the only desktop email program that I have found that does search properly is Outlook desktop. On Linux, that is obviously a non-starter.
Honestly I might try this. Or maybe I can use grep lol. We'll see how it fits in my workflow, I'm comfortable in the CLI but haven't really entertained the idea a CLI email client before. Thanks
Recoll (thankfully) has a GUI. It isn't the prettiest app, but it was easy to set up and I've otherwise quite happy with it.
Just coming back to say that I'm loving recoll. I've set up Thunderbird to download everything with POP and I've pointed recoll at the profile directory. Since Recoll also seems to be able to read PDFs, it is giving me amazing results at blazing speeds. Honestly if there was a decent application to just pull down email with POP I probably wouldn't even open thunderbird other than to reply to stuff
mutt or nothing
I learned about mutt ~12 years ago, and it changed my email-interface forever
all mutt, all the time
hows the search fuction in mutt? For eg, if i want to search an email thread from like 3 months ago, does it function well or do I need to open my broswer....
How has your experience been with Mutt? I've heard about neomutt from a lot of people but I'm honestly a bit intimidated to move to a completely CLI-based email client especially because it's another configuration file which I'll need to be mindful of
I really liked the client but HTML emails are a real pain in the ass.
Claws searches reasonably quickly and unlike thunderbird it isn't a total resource hog. OTOH it suffers from not being multi threaded, which means when you first install it, expect it to take literally hours before it finishes syncing all your emails.
Mutt is not multi threaded either. Only thunderbird and kmail are, and kmail is a buggy mess, while thunderbird eats your ram like it's a plate of cheese danishes.
I've settled for using Thunderbird for POP + Recoll for search. I can't believe how good Recoll is; in my opinion this is even better than Gmail's search in their Web GUI. I will be using Recoll for a lot more things now, but my immediate need for search has been fixed for now. Though running Thunderbird just for downloading emails does seem a bit overkill. We'll see
If it works, it works -- glad you found a way
Why not Roundcube ?
Geary or Mailspring are the best options. Neither is perfect. I lean toward Geary.
I used mailspring for about 6 months because I love the idea and it looks beautiful. But when you check the forums you see people are complaining about major bugs that seemed to remain unfixed for eternity, developer never comments.
I like mainspring but I can’t get my corporate outlook account to work with it
Tired of Gmail? Switch to Kmail!
Oof
You do you, but some of us don't miss 1995
Looks fine to me! ¯\(°_o)/¯
Buggy as hell 😐
sudo apt install claws-mail
Fast, reliable, insanely functional - weird formats. Yes it has a calendar, works great.
Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.
The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it's grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it's missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.
nmh is the way
I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn't look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there's like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn't do it as far as I can see.
I've always liked Thunderbird. Geary is also nice. Not sure if it can attachment search.
You can filter messages with attachment on Thunderbird btw
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Where indexing and searching mails is concerned, notmuch is the best I've seen. Do note that this is not an e-mail client, it only indexes, tags and searches (following the "UNIX philosophy" of doing one job well).
I personally use it with neomutt as a mail user agent, which is almost certainly not what you want. Notmuch supports other clients but they're all pretty arcane.
So this is not a recommendation, just a glimpse into advanced e-mail setups I guess.
this is one of the things that struck me about email clients on Linux – CLI and GUI clients have followed two very different evolutionary paths – the CLI clients went for the “doing one job well” path (where you end up assembling a whole system of apps for sending and receiving email) and the GUI clients went for the “everything and the kitchen sink” path (where you end up trying to hide half the options so they don’t get in your way)
I've been having a grand time with sylpheed.
Mostly because thunderbird changed its presentation layout and i took it personally. Plus sylpheed is lighter weight.
Last stable version is over 7 years old. Ouch...
Sylpheed has all the features I would expect an email client to have, and they all work. No reason to change anything, unless email as a technology changes, or it stops building.
This is why no-one in the right mind uses Sylpheed, but the actively maintained fork Claws Mail (which just recently had a new version released).
Sylpheed handles large amounts of email much better. It's fast even at 50k plus emails. Last time I tried Claws Mail, it choked on that.
Edge cases are not the norm, though.
I'm not so sure that it is an edge case. I'm just an average person. I'm sure there are many people who have reason to receive and/or save much larger volumes of email than I do. Regardless, it's always better to have software that works well under a wide range of circumstances.
On my company mail account I have collected circa 10000 mails during the past 10 years, which is circa 80 mails a month - and that is a lot.
If you're not following multiple high-volume mailing lists since a decade and archive every single e-mail I don't think its normal to have 50000 mails in a mailbox.
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