Best email client (free or paid) OTHER than Outlook

Edwin · Oct 12, 2022

laugher said:
Does it now have a filtering engine where I can filter emails to subfolders?

I have a Business Pro Lifetime license so..., yes it does.

Quandary · Oct 12, 2022

laugher said:
I use both Outlook and Thunderbird. Thunderbird was my main email client but I can no longer recommend it which is why I searched and found this thread.

Reasons:

Slow - in some ways, much slower than Outlook when downloading email. Furthermore, I always have had issues seeing some downloaded emails. They don't show immediately and you have to wait awhile before the email is displayed.

Corrupted Emails - I have been having issues seeing downloaded emails. Especially the ones that are newly downloaded. Sometimes, they will appear corrupted or mashed with other emails. I needed to login to my ISP's webmail facilities in order to move the emails around to different folders (and back again) before they are re-downloaded by Thunderbird and shown properly again.

Lost emails - With the recent build, I am losing sent emails. I would send them in Thunderbird and they will not appear in the Sent folder. I use and email a lot from my Android email client and iOS Mail client and never have a problem. Outlook also does not have an issue here.

Terrible Support - if you are like me and you have a problem, you would want to reach out to a dedicated support channel for issues but guess what? Its a best effort support team at best and community support at worst. There isn't a lot of people staffed to field support issues posted to their support site so even the community support is a bit lacking.

For what its worth, I have been using it since its release and in its current form, I cannot recommend it.

I'm going to eM client next before settling back to Outlook 100%. The reason why I moved my mail client from Outlook was because I found it complicated to use. I am a power user but I absolutely loath the Outlook interface. Its rules engine could also do with more work.

My wife and I have been using TB since the inception and we each use it in very different ways. I am the technical support and have never had any issues. Twice recently she has complained about corrupted emails, but this was easily fixed by doing a repair (rmb on the folder, click Properties, and click Repair Folder). She receives tons of emails per day and keeps everything, with a few thousand emails in her Inbox which may be the source of the problem (time to move some of these emails to local folders). Performance is fine for her and lost lost emails.

Suggest you try a repair on all of your folders. If that does not help then a reinstall of TB may be necessary. Make sure you have a backup of any local folders.

mart44 · Oct 12, 2022

eM Client (paid) is my choice. It has a good interface. I also like Mailbird, especially for the simplicity of the search function. Double-click an e-mail's search icon (it has one next to every email) and Mailbird immediately finds and lists all other emails from that sender.

laugher · Oct 12, 2022

Quandary said:
Suggest you try a repair on all of your folders. If that does not help then a reinstall of TB may be necessary. Make sure you have a backup of any local folders.

Thanks @Quandary - I have already tried repair. I think what the repair function does is re-download each and every email you have in that folder you are repairing from the IMAP servers writing over what has been stored locally. This works sometimes but it doesn't work everytime. It also takes a very long time to repair because if my folder contains tens of thousands of emails, the repair will take just as long to download each and every email.

The surefire way to make sure it works while not spending too much time in repair is to login to the ISP or cloud provider's web mail interface, find then move the email in question to another folder. Any other folder. Then move it back. Thunderbird detects the changes and it only downloads that one email.

The repair does not fix missing Sent items however so I have already posted to the Mozilla forums but no one is biting.

Zardoc · Jan 21, 2023

Win 11 finally integrates Outlook as a replacement to Win Mail.
Man, it's about time.

Now does it perform as well ?

We'll see

Edwin · Jan 21, 2023

Zardoc said:
Win Mail

??? The Mail & Calendar App???

TM21 · Jan 21, 2023

Zinc,
Did you ever find what you were looking for?

If you ever used the Vista's Windows Mail, you'd probably love "O.E.Classic".
I used the Windows Mail on Vista, Win-7, Win-8.1, but never did get it to work on Win-10 or Win-11, so I just tried O.E.Classic at the advice of a good friend.
The FREE version is a great little replacement for Windows Mail, but there are some limitations, like only two accounts, limited spell checker, etc. So I just bit the bullet and Bought the program. The price for a quality piece of software was at par for such, and I now have all the bells and whistles.
I have it in my Startup folder and it pops right up with my new email every morning when I turn on my PC, with my old familiar "You've got mail!".

Zardoc · Jan 21, 2023

Edwin said:
??? The Mail & Calendar App???

Yeah, A beta button showed up and the update is changed to Outlook.

Edwin · Jan 21, 2023

Zardoc said:
A beta button showed up and the update is changed to Outlook.

I see nothing of the sort!

wimorrison · Jan 21, 2023

I use the regular Outlook 2021, and it performs perfectly for me with 7 email accounts from different companies, and 2 different calendars.

Can't imagine wanting to change from it to anything else.

Zardoc · Jan 21, 2023

Edwin said:
I see nothing of the sort!

I installed the RP 22261.1192 That's probably when it showed up.

safron · Jan 21, 2023

jimbo45 said:
If your email provider isn't in the "standard database", you have different inbound / outbound servers with different account names (user id's) and passwords etc you are hosed up

I don't understand @jimbo45 - can you please elaborate?
We have 8 active accounts in Thunderbird, one of which is is on our own domain hosted by InMotion- both certainly not "standard" - and setup was smooth out of the box.
The app is so actively supported, I get tired of being prompted to install updates. It's has powerful search capability and a flexible rules engine which we use extensively. We also like that Thunderbird is fairly straight-forward to Administer. I agree with @glasskuter that it does have it's warts, but overall, Thunderbird is our go-to email desktop client.

jimbo45 · Jan 22, 2023

@safron

This "Oldie" still works -- with imap (and Exchange if required). The original OE on a Win XP VM !!!!

Multiple accounts supported etc

For security - send via a gateway .

If you break down how email actually works and look at the commands to send email rather than a GUI you can see nothing much has changed with the command line from donkeys years back. Very simple one here to try (use WSL or if you don't like bash then try equiv commands from a windows batch file) but you can add security, passwords etc but you should get the idea. !!!!

#!/bin/bash
# Send email from bash
# simple script to send simple email with your IP address (external)
read -p "Enter SMTP email server address: " server
read -p "Enter SMTP Port: " port
read -p "Enter Your Email Address: " from
read -p "Enter Recipient's Email Address: " to
# get your public IP address
myip="$(dig +short myip.opendns.com @ReSolver1.opendns.com)"
# create message
function mail_input {
echo "ehlo $(hostname -f)"
echo "MAIL FROM: <$from>"
echo "RCPT TO: <$to>"
echo "DATA"
echo "From: <$from>"
echo "To: <$to>"
echo "Subject: Testing SMTP Mail"
echo " "
echo "Your public internet address is "
echo $myip
echo " "
echo "finished"
echo "."
echo "quit"
}
mail_input | netcat $server $port || err_exit

Don't forget to finish the inline text with the "." line before the SMTP quit command.

I use the above script (or a modification of it) to send me my current internet address every 2 hrs so I can still have a non static internet address from the ISP and this helps me avoid having to use things like Teamviewer or other people proividing "Dyn DNS" who are basically only doing the same thing and charging for it.

Cheers

jimbo

safron · Jan 22, 2023

Thank you @jimbo45

kelper · Jan 22, 2023

I think Gmail is superb, especially its filters and labels. It also collects my Outlook, Duck and Btinternet accounts.

Edwin · Jan 22, 2023

Best paid:
Mailbird
Best free:
eM Client
BlueMail

balloon66 · Jan 22, 2023

please look for Kuno Mail. It is from
Germany! It has many features. It is „Incredemail 4.0“.

hawkur · Oct 30, 2024

Has anyone tried The Bat!?

Best email client (free or paid) OTHER than Outlook

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