Desktop email client

[Nairou]

Email clients exist, such as Thunderbird, but every one I've tried that is freely available is ancient, clunky, and slow.

Webmail is the current trend, and all development effort seems to have gone into making webmail fast and friendly. But having to host a web server (and the accompanying database servers) just to access email is ridiculous.

[bvisness]

I'm not persuaded on this one. Webmail seems broadly fine to me since you already have an email server somewhere. If you use a hosted email service, then you need to provide credentials for their server anyway and accessing it through the web just means you can get the same experience on any computer. If you host the mail server yourself, it's not really any different, and now you're also hosting a server :)

Certainly some webmail solutions are slow and bad, but the argument for a desktop app doesn't seem as compelling because of the hassle of setting it up on each of my devices separately. It's an internet service; it kinda makes sense to me to access it on the internet?

[kiwec]

Webmail is fine if you only use one email address. But in many cases you need more than one; for instance, having a "work" address, or burner addresses used to sign up to online services, etc.

I disagree with the opinion that internet services should all be accessed via a browser. Discord, Slack show that this isn't a good idea. That being said, Vivaldi browser integrates an email client, which does make sense imo. But alas, it defaults to HTML emails, which are annoying to read and write.

Claws-mail is a decent mail client, but can crash (debatable security) and all UI operations are blocking. Other than that, newer mail clients seem to be TUIs. If you decide to create one, make sure to support all the weird mail server setups, with autodiscover, and the big tech ones that require oauth login (via your browser).