Best email client for Linux

Despite the increasing dominance of instant messaging and collaboration tools, email remains an essential pillar of professional communication. Its ability to facilitate detailed discussions and serve as a reliable record of correspondence ensures that email continues to play a vital role in business and personal productivity.

While mainstream options like Outlook and Apple Mail are not natively available on Linux, the open-source community and third-party developers have created a robust ecosystem of email clients tailored for Linux users. Whether you need advanced features, seamless desktop integration, or a simple interface, there’s a solution to fit every workflow.

To help you in making an informed decision, we have evaluated a range of email clients, including Evolution and Kontact, which serve as the default options for the GNOME and KDE desktop environments, respectively.

What to look out for when choosing an email client

When evaluating Linux email clients, compatibility is a top priority. All the clients featured here support IMAP, ensuring smooth integration with most major email providers. Many also offer POP or Exchange support, so you can connect to a wide range of services without issue. Some clients are more specialized: for example, Hiri is designed exclusively for Exchange accounts (including Microsoft 365, Hotmail, and Outlook.com), while Hey only works with its proprietary Hey.com service. If you’re unsure which protocol your provider uses, you can either check with them directly or simply try logging in with your chosen client; most paid apps offer a free trial, so there’s no risk in testing compatibility.

Once set up, it’s important that your client not only manages incoming messages but also maintains a searchable archive. Evaluate each client’s search capabilities and choose one that matches your workflow. For instance, Thunderbird offers multiple search tools, such as Quick Filter, which some users rely on exclusively, while others might prefer scrolling through a sortable inbox or disabling threaded conversations for a more traditional view.

While premium email clients often include advanced features, many users will find that free options like Thunderbird, Evolution, and KMail provide all the essentials, plus extensive customization through add-ons or plugins. Paid clients such as Mailspring and BlueMail offer additional productivity tools, but for most home and small business users, free versions are more than sufficient. Thunderbird, in particular, stands out for its flexibility and robust feature set, which can be further expanded to suit individual needs.

The best email clients for Linux

BlueMail

Blue by name, blue by nature. There's a definite theme here, although you can dress it up in one of 18 different accents if you prefer. You can even color-code your mail accounts to make them easier to distinguish. Everything else is conventional: a sidebar and preview pane, a unified inbox if you set up multiple accounts, the option to turn off 'conversations' (aka threads) application-wide, and a built-in calendar and contacts. You'll quickly feel at home.

Triaging your email is easy, courtesy of the Later Board. This has its button at the top of your inbox, which, when clicked, sweeps away your message preview to reveal a table of three columns, for Today, Later, and Done – you can add other columns if you need them. Drag emails from your message list to the appropriate column, and when their allotted time arrives, a notification pops up. By default, dragging into the Today column sets an email's due date as two hours hence. But, drag it into Later and it will throw up a dialog through which you can set a specific time and date, use a more vague 'this evening', 'tomorrow morning', and so on, or delegate it to 'someday', in which case it will be stashed for safekeeping without a specific due date. If you've ever used a Kanban system like Trello, the workflow will be immediately familiar.

Meanwhile, the clever cluster feature acts like a slightly blunt thread tool. Turn it on (it's an option) and it automatically groups all emails from a particular sender, not just the emails from a particular conversation. Then, when a new email arrives from that sender, the whole cluster jumps to the top of the list. Only your new message is displayed when you click on the cluster, but a chip below the sender icon indicates how many other messages the cluster contains. Clicking it reveals them. It's an effective way to reduce clutter in your inbox without you manually dragging messages into subfolders.

BlueMail’s core features are available for free, including unified folders, integrated calendar, clusters, customizable interface accents, and dark mode. For advanced functionality, such as full theme customization, desktop email backup, and access to GemAI (BlueMail’s generative AI assistant, which uses ChatGPT) for context-based email replies, you’ll need the BlueMail Plus plan, which is priced at $5–$6 per user per month depending on the provider. The Business Pro plan, at $12–$13 per user per month, adds a corporate management dashboard, policy and device management, app integrations, advanced corporate configuration, video conferencing, and priority support. Most individual and home users will find the free tier more than sufficient, while business features are reserved for the paid plans.

Most home users will manage well with the free tier, which offers a fully featured email client with some nifty features. The highlight for us is the Later Board, which takes much of the effort out of sorting and dealing with email in a timely manner.

Evolution

If you're using the Gnome desktop environment, you may already have Evolution in your dock. It might even be ready to roll without you having launched it. That's because it refers to the account logins you can specify when first starting Gnome, or add through the Online Accounts section of the Settings app.

This isn't the only way it's integrated with the desktop environment, either: reminders appear in the notifications drop-down when you click the Gnome clock, and incoming messages populate the same panel. If you're comfortable working through Terminal, you can even tweak some of its settings by writing to Gnome variables. If you aren't, don't worry: pretty much anything you'd want to do is also accessible through dialogs.

There are no Pro or Plus versions as there are with BlueMail and Mailspring, and it's not extensible like Thunderbird. However, it is a competent if no-frills personal information manager for handling email and calendaring tasks, managing a contacts list locally or online, and subscribing to feeds. If you maintain a local address book, you can even expose its contents as a data source for use in LibreOffice, which could be useful when running a mail merge. The built-in calendar supports iCalendar, WebDAV, CalDAV, and Google Calendar, while the address book can sync with CardDAV, LDAP, and Google Contacts. This makes Evolution especially appealing for users who need more than just email management.

You can quickly filter your inbox using the Show menu, with direct access to unread messages, messages with attachments, messages marked as important, and so on, and tag your messages with color-coded labels. There are five default labels, including to-do, later, and personal, but you can add your own and specify a preferred color for each. You can then apply them manually or use rules to automatically tag matching messages.

There's a quick search box for subjects and addresses immediately above the inbox, which is supplemented by a more flexible Advanced Search dialog. This lets you specify multiple conditions across a wide range of variables, like headers, size, and status, or perform regex matching to target a defined subset of messages.

Evolution supports IMAP, POP, and SMTP protocols out of the box, with secure connections via SSL, TLS, and STARTTLS. For Microsoft Exchange, Evolution provides robust compatibility through the evolution-ews extension, which enables full Exchange Web Services (EWS) support for modern Exchange servers. For older Exchange environments, additional plugins such as evolution-mapi or evolution-exchange may be required. This makes Evolution one of the most versatile Linux email clients for users needing enterprise or corporate email integration.

Evolution includes support for PGP/GPG and S/MIME encryption, providing secure messaging for both personal and professional use. It also offers automatic spam filtering (via SpamAssassin or Bogofilter), search folders, and markdown email formatting. Additional plugins enable features like RSS feed reading and news aggregation, further extending its capabilities.

Evolution feels like a very workaday email client that, thanks to sharing the Gnome design principles, integrates smoothly with the operating system – assuming, of course, that Gnome is your desktop manager of choice. It might not have the eye candy of BlueMail or Mailspring, but it's certainly not an app you'd object to spending time in during your working day.

Incoming server compatibility: IMAP, POP, Exchange

Kontact

As Evolution is to Gnome, so Kontact is to KDE. They'll each run in either desktop environment, but it makes sense to pick matching applications.

Kontact is KDE’s integrated personal information management suite, bringing together email (KMail), calendar (KOrganizer), contacts (KAddressBook), notes (KNotes), news feeds (Akregator), and more into a unified interface. While each component can be run individually, using Kontact provides a seamless experience for managing all your communications, scheduling, and information in one place, with deep KDE Plasma integration for notifications, password management (KWallet), and system-wide search.

Kontact’s interface may feel somewhat dated compared to more modern clients like Newton and Mailspring, with certain design choices, such as the vertically oriented button for toggling between plain text and rich text views, being less intuitive and visually appealing. While recent updates have improved usability, some aspects, like Exchange account setup, can still be cumbersome due to longstanding configuration bugs, though workarounds are available and the core functionality remains reliable.

Looks aside, Kontact has all the features you'd expect of a modern email client. Incoming messages are flagged in the KDE Notifications panel, it has unified mailboxes, and, like Thunderbird, it will spot words like 'attached' in your message body and, if you've not attached a file, check that that's not something you've overlooked. That's not the only similarity to Thunderbird: open the Find Messages dialog and it's all but identical to Thunderbird's Search Messages pane, through which you can stack multiple criteria to zero in on a handful of matching emails.

You can schedule pre-composed emails if they need to be sent when you won't be around to supervise, and, rather neatly, if you set a message to depart at a specified time, you can also set it to repeat. So, if you need to send someone a weekly reminder but don't have access to their calendar, you could delegate the task to KMail.

The template system is particularly clever. Four defaults handle new messages, reply to the sender, reply to all, and forward messages, and define how quoted content and fields should be handled within the body area. You might, for example, want to include the subject line from an original message when sending a reply, or the time the original was sent, and define an entirely different setup for use when replying to all, or to a list. This could be very useful when sending messages in-house if your team wants to include specific data in each message so they're easier to surface in a search.

The latest versions of KMail have introduced features such as improved ad and tracker blocking, direct display of OpenPGP key validity, and warnings for expiring keys. Additionally, KMail now offers optional offline and open-source AI features, including translation via the Bergamot engine and speech-to-text with vosk-api, though these are disabled by default and must be enabled in settings

KMail, within Kontact, is a sturdy email client that does everything you need and as form is generally less important than function, criticizing its looks does feel somewhat shallow. The powerful template system, layered search tool, and recurring emails are all welcome, and the fact that it's free and so closely tied to the desktop manager – assuming you use KDE – is a boon.

Incoming server compatibility: IMAP, POP, Exchange

Mailspring

Mailspring is a modern, cross-platform email client available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Built on the foundation of the discontinued Nylas Mail, it stands out for its sleek interface, flexible layout options, and a focus on productivity-enhancing features

Search is well handled, and the way it's been implemented will be immediately familiar if you're switching from Gmail's web interface. It indexes your mail on a wide range of variables, so you can use prefixes like 'from:', 'subject:', and 'to:' in the search box to strip down the results. And these are just for starters. If you want to find emails that arrived in January, use 'before:' combined with the first date of February. Or, for emails that arrived this week, 'since Monday'. 'in:' lets you search folders or tags, while 'has:' lets you find messages with attachments. You can even combine multiple variables using OR and AND to precisely target an email you remember but can't immediately locate.

The free version of Mailspring includes a unified inbox, customizable themes, a powerful signature editor, language detection for spell check, translation for both incoming and outgoing messages, and efficient filtering and labeling tools. Most productivity features, such as email templates, scheduling (send later), reminders, and email tracking, are now available in the free tier, with some limitations on usage volume.

Mailspring Pro, priced at $8 per month, unlocks unlimited access to advanced tools including rich contact profiles, unlimited snoozing, advanced templates, unlimited send later, follow-up reminders, and detailed read receipts and link tracking. Pro users also benefit from enriched contact information and more granular analytics for sent messages.

Mailspring supports IMAP and Microsoft Exchange accounts but does not offer compatibility with POP servers. Setting up a Mailspring ID is required for features like snoozing and reminders, as these rely on Mailspring’s own cloud infrastructure to sync metadata across devices.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird has long been recognized for its powerful, flexible, and extensible nature, but its dated interface was a common complaint among users. That changed with the release of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”, which delivered a substantial visual and usability overhaul. The new design introduces a cleaner, more modern look, improved iconography, and better support for high-resolution displays. Thunderbird now feels at home on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and the need for custom themes has diminished as the default experience is much more inviting.

The layout remains familiar and highly customizable: you can toggle the preview pane, suppress remote images, adjust interface fonts, and manage most features, like your calendar, settings, and messages, within a unified window. Messages open in tabs by default, supporting efficient multitasking, while composing a new message still opens a separate window, allowing you to easily reference other emails or calendar events as you write.

A thoughtful feature is the attachment reminder: if you mention words like “attach” or “attached” in your email but forget to include a file, Thunderbird discreetly prompts you before sending. This small touch helps prevent common mistakes without being intrusive.

Sorting and searching have improved, but may still require some adjustment for new users. Threaded conversations are enabled by default, but can be disabled per folder. The main search bar returns results in a list view, which some may find less intuitive, but the Quick Filter tool offers real-time, in-inbox filtering that many users find more efficient for day-to-day use.

Thunderbird is more than just an email client; it’s also a contact manager, calendar, and newsreader. Calendar integration is now built-in (formerly an add-on), and an extensive library of add-ons is available through the integrated Add-ons Manager, allowing for further customization and feature expansion.

Now over 20 years old, Thunderbird’s recent redesign and ongoing development have made it more appealing, flexible, and user-friendly than ever. Despite minor quirks with search and threading, it remains a top recommendation for Linux users and anyone seeking a robust, open-source email suite.

Incoming server compatibility: IMAP, POP, Exchange (via add-ons such as ExQuilla or Owl).

Geary

Geary is a minimalist, modern email client designed for users who value simplicity and speed over feature bloat. Developed under the GNOME project and written in Vala, Geary offers a Gmail-like conversation view, making it easy to follow and reply to email threads without clutter. Its interface is clean and intuitive, with just enough features to keep daily email management efficient and distraction-free.

Geary’s interface is focused on usability: the main window presents your inbox and conversations clearly, with desktop notifications for new messages and a straightforward setup process that works with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, and any standard IMAP server. Adding accounts is quick, and integration with GNOME Online Accounts makes it even easier for GNOME desktop users. The conversation view keeps related emails together, and a fast keyword search bar lets you find messages using familiar prefixes like from:, is: read, or has: attachment.

The feature set is intentionally basic. It supports HTML and plain text composition, desktop notifications, and a full-featured search. However, it lacks advanced filtering, server-side rules, and plugin support, making it less suitable for power users or those who need extensive customization. Security is limited to SSL/TLS for connections; there is no support for PGP or S/MIME encryption, so it’s not recommended for users with high privacy requirements. Geary only supports IMAP and SMTP, with no POP3 option, meaning all mail stays on the server by design.

Geary is exceptionally lightweight and responsive, even on older or low-spec hardware. It uses an SQLite database to cache mail locally for quick access and search, but does not store full mailbox copies offline by default. Its deep GNOME integration ensures smooth notifications and password management via GNOME Keyring.

It is ideal for users who want a simple, fast, and visually appealing email client, especially those on GNOME-based systems or who prefer a Gmail-style conversation view. It’s a great fit for casual users, students, and anyone who doesn’t need advanced filtering, encryption, or plugin support.

Incoming server compatibility: IMAP, SMTP (no POP3 support).