EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In my last post, I shared that I was unhappy with the email situation. I am happy to report that has now been resolved. I tried multiple Linux clients, but they all had their issues. With the release of Thunderbird 103 though, I have moved to Thunderbird and it meets all my requirements for now.
ON MAC
On Mac, the default email client and calendar is more than sufficient for the average user. On iPhone, the email client is also sufficient, though I never figured out how to filter on mobile. I dealt with it for a long time, but recently my emails have been exploding.
GNOME ONLINE ACCOUNTS
First thing I looked into was Gnome Online Accounts. This would let me try multiple email clients while only having one configuration. I set up one of my personal email accounts as a "Gnome Online Account" to try it out. Gnome Online Accounts in the future would make it easier to do separate apps for email, calendar, and contacts while having the configuration in one spot. That is the ideal, but we're not there yet.
FIRST EMAIL CLIENT TESTED: GEARY
I figured that I should try the default email client, Geary. Geary is new. Too new for me. Gnome is remaking everything to be simpler, and then letting you add features as "extensions". For the desktop itself, this is working great. For Geary, there are currently too many missing features.
Here are the features I was missing from Geary:
Geary is implemented as a "responsive app", but I felt the email list was always too wide. The Framework laptop screen size would often make only the email list show, when I felt there was enough room for both the email list and one email to be viewed. You can't resize panels manually yet, and as far as I could tell, there is no resizing extension. I always felt the email list was too wide.
I couldn't create new email folders on Geary. They acknowledge they are missing this currently. I worked around this by installing both Geary and Evolution and creating folders in Evolution. Truly a hack.
Filters and rules are also not implemented yet. While they have some good ideas, this feature has been missing for a few years.
SECOND EMAIL CLIENT TESTED: EVOLUTION
My second installation for email was Evolution. Geary is supposed to be the replacement for Evolution. While Geary has a newer UI, Evolution has the traditional "old Outlook" style UI. As development has been speeding up for Geary, it has been slowing down for Evolution. Evolution allowed me to create folders. It was not ideal having two email clients though.
THIRD EMAIL CLIENT TESTED: BALSA
I liked Balsa, but it didn't integrate with Gnome Online Accounts. It had better panel handling than Geary. I wanted to keep using Gnome Online Accounts, so I stopped playing with Balsa.
AND THEN... GOA BREAKS
After an update, Gnome Online Account started throwing an error for my personal email account. Because of these errors, both Geary and Evolution stopped showing emails from the account. This isn't Geary's or Evolution's fault, as I had set up other emails directly inside the clients and those email addresses kept working.
RETURN OF THUNDERBIRD
While I was going through all this testing, Thunderbird announced that they would have a new version of Thunderbird to be released - Thunderbird 102. Thunderbird had been thought of as clunky for awhile, but with the newer releases, they have been working on making the UI better. They had improved dark mode, and this release introduced folder colors - and I like folder colors! They had also recently added CardDAV support (think: Apple Contacts). Once the 102 release stabilized, I downloaded it and tried it out.
I successfully added all my email accounts. I then added all my address books from my email accounts. This was very easy. Calendars were next. I successfully added GMail calendars (easy) - including one that was shared with me. Then I added my Apple calendars. This was the most difficult part, because Apple hasn't made it easy. It still was successfully done.
FROM NATIVE TO FLATPAK - EXPORT AND RESTORE
I originally downloaded Thunderbird as a native Manjaro Linux app, but I have been moving my Linux apps to Flatpak when possible. I will discuss Flatpak in a future post, but makes the apps less likely to interfere with other apps or the system, which improves stability. One of the new features (since Thunderbird 91) was the ability to Export your profile and import it again - as long as your profile is less than 2 GB. Even though I have multiple emails, my email accounts are small, with very few attachments that are large. I wanted to test this feature out.
I exported my profile from native Manjaro Thunderbird. I had enabled Flathub.org as a repository earlier, so I downloaded Flatpak Thunderbird using the Manjaro Add/Remove Software app. I imported the profile into the Flatpak Thunderbird and... one email account asked for the two factor authentication to be re-entered, and then... success! All my emails were in the Flatpak version!
THINGS TO LIKE ABOUT THUNDERBIRD
The filters on Thunderbird work amazingly well. If you rename a folder that is being used by a filter, Thunderbird pops up an alert letting you know that it is updating the filters for you. The filters keep working!
On the appearance side, dark mode looks great, especially with folder colors. I was able to show both favorites folders and a unified inbox. I have grown accustomed the unified inbox on mobile, so it is a welcome view for me.
On the extension side, the Thunderbird themes and extension are available and work. If I ever do get above the 2 GB limit (and the Thunderbird team hasn't increased it by then), the "Backup and Restore NG" extension gives you options to backup and restore all the way down to the message level if needed!
I did have some emails where Thunderbird couldn't copy my sent email to the "Sent" folder. However, instead of losing the email, Thunderbird copied it to an easy to find local folder and I was able to copy it to the server later. This kind of thoughtfulness pleased me.
Thunderbird's unified search is very powerful. It has been able to find emails from years ago very quickly for me. If you have an old email account that has expired, and it is in the "mbox" file format, you can import it into Thunderbird. Thunderbird will search quickly through it as well as any online accounts.
THOUGHTS ON CROSS-PLATFORM
I am currently on Linux because it is the best option for me. There is a possibility in the future that I may switch to another operating system in the future. I have followed the news on Redox OS (written in Rust) and Fuchsia OS (written C, C++, Dart, Go, Rust, Python) with interest. If I moved to something else, Thunderbird would probably be ported to it before I moved. Operating Systems are tools, and it is the apps on the OS that make them useful.
It was good to try out other email clients before trying Thunderbird again. I appreciate all the work that all the teams have put into their respective clients. For now, I am going to consider my email journey closed. I am going to work on other things that make my OS work for me.
Thanks for reading!