this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
38 points (95.2% liked)

Open Source

31028 readers
621 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Besides Thunderbird, is there any good desktop mail client for Windows that doesn't involve uploading mail to a cloud first?

all 29 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

You had one job....

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What do you mean by uploading to the cloud first? Any email goes over the internet

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They mean mail apps that keep a copy of your emails in their servers

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you saying that Mozilla keeps copies of your emails on their own servers?

🤨

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I am saying that OP is looking for an alternative client, which also doesn't upload their emails. For example, mailspring would be a bad recommendation because, as far as I know, it uploads your email to their server

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you show any evidence that suggests that either Firefox or Mailspring keeps copies of your emails?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

No one said that Thunderbird keeps copies of your email. But there are apps that do that and the OP does not want one of them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There was a Linux client I saw a while ago—Spring Mail or something like that?—which first downloaded your email from your provider onto their own servers, then your local client got them from their server. This additional cloud step is what I want to avoid.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried the Thunderbird redesign yet?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have not, but from screenshots it seems only a minor reskin.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Still no html composing, right? It would be a serious contender for many people if it just had that feature... Even though, from my experience, most personal email doesn't really use html...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Em client is pretty good. I'm using the pro version and its the what Outlook replacement I have used so far.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is also Mailbird (not FOSS, costs money and has some weird NordVPN-like fake sales, but the app seems somewhat competent) and Mailspring (partly open source but afaik not completely, built with a MacOS-esque UI but works for Windows and Linux as well).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Say "MacOS-esque" three times really fast.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The built-in Mail app is pretty nice, other than that eM Client is good too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s going to be killed off in favor of Outlook in the near future, from what I understand.

If OP is willing to do a bit of extra legwork and somewhat masochistic, then pretty much any Linux-based mail client is fair game with WSL2. The only one I’ve used lately other than Thunderbird is Evolution, but that was just to test a particular distro’s default offering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

New Outlook is an automatic update to the Windows Mail app, it will look mostly the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Then why are you recommending them. This is the FOSS community.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And that's why I'm explicitly noting that they're not FOSS, doofus. Besides, if you're using Windows anyway, using its built-in email client is not a huge stretch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, yes. But why would I want my emails also to go through the spyware OS. What you're saying sounds like "you're already using a OS that tracks everything, giving them your emails at this point wouldn't hurt."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could already have access to your emails, because… you’re running their OS. They can slip in any code they want and run it with NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM-level privileges (comparable to root-level privileges on Linux systems).

If you run any other OS you’ll also have to trivially trust the makers of that OS with root-level privileges (or comparable).

(Personally I don’t believe that MS is scanning all your local emails, but they certainly have the technical possibilities to do so very trivially.)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

They could, but we don't know. Not using their mail app at least makes that a possibility.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But why would I want my emails also to go through the spyware OS

Beats me, but you're the one using Windows, so...

If your email provider offers a webmail client, then you might give that a shot, though it's still going to run under Windows.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is the FOSS community.

Given people are regularly promoting proprietary trash and being upvoted for it, while people taking a pro-FOSS stance are downvoted, I don't think this is a FOSS community in anything but name anymore.

At the very least I'd have hoped we'd left the childish name calling behind at reddit, but it seems you can't really take the reddit out of the redditor.