Evolution Groupware

Evolution Groupware has quite an evolutionary history. It was initially developed by Ximian as a mail client for corporate Linux users. Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003 and Evolution moved to new ownership. Novell also acquired SUSE, which was a heavy contributor to many open source products such as Gnome and KDE.

Evolution has been the default mail client for Gnome, which was developed by Ximian co-founder, Miguel de Icaza. Novell transferred Evolution to SUSE, which decided to drop further development. Later, Red Hat, which is also heavily invested in Gnome, invested more resources to Evolution due to Mozilla’s disdain towards Thunderbird.

This is once again an excellent example of an open source model where a business competitor is capable of taking over the development of a project; something you won’t see in the proprietary world.

Evolution is far more complete than Thunderbird. It has a built-in calendar and contact support. Once you configure Evolution in Gnome, the rest of the components are automatically configured. Evolution has an extremely simple interface compared to the ‘heavy-looking’ UI of Thunderbird.

Pros:

• Everything works out of the box. Tightly integrated calendar.
• Simple interface

Cons:

• It’s no longer actively developed for Mac and Windows.
• It is a bit unstable and prone to crashes

Download and install Evolution

Kmail

As much as I love the Plasma Desktop and other KDE software, I found Kmail and the entire PIM (personal information management) to be in utter contrast with the rest of the KDE family.

Kmail is extremely rich in features, but it is also extremely complex to configure and use. It’s also very hard under KDE to get all the components – calendar, chat client, address book and mail client to work together just by configuring one account.

If you don’t bother with the rest of the components and just want to use a mail client with just one email account, you may give Kmail a try. If you have more than one email account, configuring them would be a hair-pulling experience under KDE.

If Kmail is so bad, why am I listing it among the best mail clients? The tools themselves (Kmail, Addressbook, etc.) are excellent — even better than the other mail clients I’ve mentioned. But for some reason the developers decided to make it extremely hard to configure.

Kmail seems to have been developed without the user in mind.

Whenever I manage to get Kmail to work, I love it and I only hope that since developers are working on Plasma 5, they will focus some resources on Kmail and its better integration with the rest of the system.

Pros: Extremely feature rich and customizable
Cons: Good luck configuring it

Download and install Kmail

Geary

Geary is a new and great mail client for the Gnome 3 desktop. It supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, and popular IMAP servers (Dovecot, Cyrus, Zimbra, etc.). It was initially developed by the Yorba Foundation, but in 2016 it became a Gnome project.

Geary has been adopted by elementary OS as their default email client, which means it will see substantial improvements and features over time.

If you are looking for a great, simplified mail client with modern, minimalistic, and elegant design, then Geary it is.

Pros:

• Simple design and configuration
• Upcoming calendar app

Cons:

• Limited features
• Early stages of development

Download and install Geary

Trojitá

Trojitá is a Qt based mail client which recently became part of the KDE project. It is quite the opposite of Kmail and offers a bit cleaner setting configuration. However, unlike Thunderbird, you need to enter the server information.

Trojitá is in a very early stage of development and supports only one email account at a time. So, from a multi-account user’s point of view it’s not a desired solution.

Since it’s in the early stage, I assume developers are open to feedback and suggestions. I hope they will have some calendar and addressbook integration as well as support for multiple email accounts.

Pros:

• A much simpler, and easy to use Qt-based mail client for KDE desktops (considering how hard Kmail is to use)

Cons:

• Very early stage of development
• No support for multiple email accounts.

Download and install Trojitá

Note: Originally published on CIO.com