Linux Email Clients

Email clients make it much easier to manage your online messages. Some are rather basic in function, while others are more advanced and come with the ability to read feeds and support for professional templates and plug-ins.

If you are running the Linux operating system, there are a number of options for email clients that are compatible with your system. Below we have listed a few recommendations that may be of interest.

Evolution

This Linux email client combines message, address book, calendar and task list management capabilities into a single package. Evolution has a similar look and feel of Microsoft Outlook with its clean interface. This software separates itself with distinct features, such as full-text indexing of incoming messages, support for Apple's iCal application and powerful spam filters. Evolution can be used on a Microsoft Exchange Server with the aid its web interface feature and supported add-on utilities. It also has the ability to synchronize Palm Pilot devices, cellular phones and a host of other PDAs.

KMail

Kmail is another capable email client for the Linux environment. It comes with folders, email filters, international character sets, and allows you to view HTML coding. For incoming mail, it supports POP3, IMAP, dIMAP and local mailboxes. The program can also send messages with Sendmail or SMTP. Users can make configurations of a threshold size to prevent oversized files from downloading on the hard drive and even perform manual filtering directly on the mail server. Kmail makes a perfect choice for someone just getting started with their mail.

Mutt

This text-based email client is suited for Linux and other Unix-like systems. Mutt is classified as MUA (Mail User Agent), meaning it cannot send messages. In order to perform this function, it must communicate with a MTA (Mal Transfer Agent), which can be done by using the Unix Sendmail interface. More recent versions of Mutt have been developed with support for an SMTP-URL configuration that allows you to send mail directly from the interface.

Alpine

Alpine is the successor to the Pine email client, primarily based on the PMS (Pine Message System). Alpine is simple to use and well suited for beginners and the more experienced user that demands more power. The user interface is clean and offers plenty of customization. Just as with Pine, Alpine is developed by Linux software programmers at the University of Washington.

Balsa

Balsa is a compact yet highly functional Linux email client under the GNOME project. It comes with a graphical front end and supports inbound and outbound MIME attachments. Balsa also supports a number of IMAP and POP3 protocols. Some of its best features are the spell checker along with support for GPG and PGP encryption. Balsa supports numerous mail storage protocols, but comes with only basic filtering capabilities. There is also some built-in multi-language support with an array of character fonts.

Balsa can be integrated with other open-source projects including aspell, GNOME, gmimi, libtool and libESMTP. It also have the option to use libgtkhtml for the purpose of HTML rendering and openldap to support LDAP functionality.

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