I have been looking for an email client on Linux after being tired of Gmail and Outlook web clients.

I had Thunderbird installed on my system and thought I’d give it a spin. I set up POP for my email accounts and it worked fantastic… For a total of 2 hours, after which I realised that searching in Thunderbird is simply not going to work for me. I need to search by attachment name and sometimes even by text inside attachment and unfortunately Thunderbird can’t do that (I think I tried an extension too but it made the UI super clunky to the point that I couldn’t even understand how to navigate it anymore).

Does Betterbird or any other email client fix this problem? I’m willing to try other options if they are FOSS.

Thanks

  • Singletona082@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    I’ve been having a grand time with sylpheed.

    Mostly because thunderbird changed its presentation layout and i took it personally. Plus sylpheed is lighter weight.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

  • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    I’ve always liked Thunderbird. Geary is also nice. Not sure if it can attachment search.

    You can filter messages with attachment on Thunderbird btw

    • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      Yes but I can’t search by the name of the attachment. Unfortunately that’s a deal breaker for me. I need it to search the Content-Type field at the very least and I don’t think it can do that without an extension

      • ISOmorph@feddit.org
        2·
        15 days ago

        You can use the FiltaQuilla extension to add content-type as search category. It’s a pretty powerful yet straight forward extension

      • 𝚝𝚛𝚔@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Yes but I can’t search by the name of the attachment.

        I just searched for text thats in an attachment filename and it worked - with a caveat. I have a filename called “PMASUP236 - Operate Vehicles In The Field.pdf” on an email. There is no reference to the PMASUP236 in any other part of any email.

        If I search “PMASUP236”, it returns the email as a result.
        If I search “SUP236” it does not.
        If I search “Operate Vehicles” it returns that email (along with a heap of others containing the word “Operate” and “Vehicles” in any order).

        Admittedly this is on Windows at work, though I do run Thunderbird on Linux at home. Will have to try it there to confirm.

  • a14o@feddit.org
    1·
    15 days ago

    Where indexing and searching mails is concerned, notmuch is the best I’ve seen. Do note that this is not an e-mail client, it only indexes, tags and searches (following the “UNIX philosophy” of doing one job well).

    I personally use it with neomutt as a mail user agent, which is almost certainly not what you want. Notmuch supports other clients but they’re all pretty arcane.

    So this is not a recommendation, just a glimpse into advanced e-mail setups I guess.

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    24·
    15 days ago

    Any time I want to watch my emails I just go to the web ui for it. I doubt any 3rd party client will ever come close to what google and Microsoft offer for their own email accounts.

    • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      I’d prefer not to go to their Web UIs because of how much tracking is present on those sites (adding rules and filters to ublock origin for Gmail nearly killed me). I’d prefer a FOSS option.

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        21·
        15 days ago

        … they already have your emails. Not only that, but just about everything else they could possibly want to know about you.

        Unless you plan on moving to a more private provider I wouldn’t worry about that.