Have you tried kmail, it's pretty mature. I use TB,YMMV.

mxuribe · on July 17, 2020

I recently jumped from linux mint to Fedora...just to play because i haven't lived in anything related to redhat for many years (no offense to fedora or red hat, just formed a habit of ubuntu-derived distros like Mint)...anyway, i've always been a tunderbird user, but now that i am trying fedora i set it up with KDE...so figured I'd try kmail - which i had heard good things about. Well, my experience was ok/so-so as compared to thunderbird. Please don't interpret this as some start of a flamewar...i don't hate kmail by any means...it just felt like it was a similar to thunderbird but i don;t know less polished or with fewer features that were exposed. I'm sure that i have to give it more time to be fair, but so far kmail has disappointed be a little bit. I'm going to continue using it to see how things go. (Obviously my experience is not based on any evidence, nor is a formal review or anything like that...just early usage feelings.)

EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!

kevincox · on July 17, 2020

One feature that I can't live without that is surprisingly rare is the ability to view full threads. In Thunderbird you can Right Click -> View Conversation (or something like that) and it will show you the entire tree of messages. This is invaluable for trying to understand messages in a long discussion.

But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.

berkes · on July 17, 2020

KDE-1 was my first DE, (SuSE 6.x) and I used that for years, so I really know and used KMail. KDE-PIM was my favorite and long time the only piece of K- software on my otherwise gnome en (back during the kde3 drama, I threw it out and went full-gnome).

I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird.

It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.