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Mailspring Review: Everything I've been asking for

Mailspring Review: Everything I've been asking for

I've been looking for an email client for a while now. I have half a dozen email accounts and keeping track of them individually is a serious pain. It's much better to be able to have a local client that helps me deal with all of them.

The necessary criteria:

  • Fully supports IMAP
  • Is simple to use (no terminal based clients)
  • Supports "conversation view" like gmail.
  • No ads
  • Multi-account support.

The "nice to have" criteria:

  • Looks & feels modern
  • Keyboard based navigation (c to compose, v to sort, etc)
  • Cross platform, specifically Linux support.
  • Open source.
  • Doesn't track me.

So what have I tried so far?

Thunderbird:

Thunderbird is generally a very good option. It's cross platform, open source, ad free, and after the 115 update it even looks modern. It also has full IMAP support and works with basically every email provider flawlessly. It even has Matrix support! Why don't I like it then? The big issue for me is that it doesn't have native "conversation view." Now it is available as a plugin, but this plugin is community maintained. This is a problem because to me conversation view is core functionality of an email app. To illustrate this, we only need to look at the update from 112 to 115. This update changed how Thunderbird functioned a great deal and broke the conversations extension. I really do appreciate community members supporting plugins, but the fact is conversation view was broken from March to August. That is a long time to go without functionality, or stay on an unsupported version.

I also have had resource utilization issues with Thunderbird. I've had times when it just killed my battery doing who knows what. I haven't experienced this since 115 though.

Why I stopped using it:
I stopped using Thunderbird after the 115 update broke the conversations plugin.

Spark Mail:

Spark mail is one of the closed source options on this list. That isn't necessarily bad, but it does mean that privacy won't be to the same level as other options like Thunderbird & Geary. Spark is fast, modern, highly keyboard driven, ad free, and generally very good. The main downside for me are that it isn't fully cross platform. It's Windows & MacOS only.

There also was the controversy a couple years back about changing how the pricing worked. People... didn't like this. A lot of the features, including disabling the "sent with spark" signature at the bottom were paywalled at $60/yr. Personally, these changes don't bother me as I don't need the "home" functionality, and I don't mind saying I sent an email with spark. But I can understand why a lot of people don't like this.

Why I stopped using it:
I stopped using spark because I'd prefer to have a single client work on both Linux & Windows.

Blue Mail:

BlueMail seems cool. It's cross platform, has a free tier. It really seems like Spark but cross platform. Unfortunately the flatpak just refused to start on my Fedora 39 install. Can't really use an app if it won't open.

Why I stopped using it:
It didn't work.

Geary:

I really like Geary. It's clean, modern, fast, GTK, and integrated into GNOME quite well. It isn't cross platform, but that's all right as it is the built in GNOME email client. I've had a good deal of issues with it though. Like while conversation view is built in, it just doesn't seem to work all of the time. It orders things weirdly making conversations look broken in other clients.

Why I stopped using it:
A lot of functions just don't work in Geary, like creating folders. It's just not a feature complete email client.

Windows Mail:

Windows mail apparently used to be pretty good. This is no longer the case. Once I saw that they started putting ads in it I quickly looked for something else.

Why I stopped using it:
Ads. I refuse to use an email client with ads.

Outlook:

A lot of windows folk tend to recommend either Thunderbird or Outlook. Outlook requires a Microsoft 365 subscription to be used which is $70/yr. I'll have to pass on that. It may be good, but I can't justify spending that kind of money if I don't have to. Now, I could use something like MAS to use Outlook for free, but honestly I just don't want to.

Why I stopped using it:
I never actually used it because it requires a subscription.

So how do I like Mailspring?

Mailspring seems to thread the needle for me. It's cross platform, ad free, supports all my inboxes, open source, keyboard driven, has functional conversation view, and generally just seems to work.

Now it isn't perfect. It seems to suffer some performance issues and just "feel" slower than some other email apps. But it really isn't that bad so I'll just roll with it unless it becomes a serious issue.

Some people also take issue with the fact that there is an optional $8/mo subscription to the app to get more features:

But for me this isn't really an issue. Everything that I want to do works perfectly fine out of the box without any subscription. If anything, I actually like that they paywall some advanced features so the developers can make some money from power users. The app is still open source & free, you could fork it yourself if you want these features. But for many people like me we just get access to a great email app without any real issues.

TLDR:

There are a lot of great email client options, but if you share your criteria with me (cross platform, ad free, keyboard controllable, conversation view, open source, etc) then you should give Mailspring a shot.