Aerc is a pretty good email client ;)

aerc

I use aerc at the moment, used thunderbird, but never something like mutter

I’ve tried a lot of email clients. I’ve tried all of the graphical ones listed here so far and I have to say that in my opinion Thunderbird is the least bad.

Pros:

• Option to view entire thread/conversation.
• Tree view of messages.
• Really good HTML rendering. (As it uses firefox’s engine)
• Acceptable search.
• View source option.
• Addons for any missing features.
• Multi-account support. (It is amazing to be able to move between two IMAP accounts by dragging and dropping your messages)
• Excellent offline support. I download all of my mail locally.

Cons:

• Slow. Overall it is responsive for me but locks up somewhat frequently for a second or two.
• The HTML editor is ok at best.

The best runner up I found was KMail but I ended up not using it because I heavily rely on the option to view an entire conversation that isn’t supported.

2nd question, do any of these handle encryption well? thunderbird is the only one I’ve tried that integrates encryption easily.

Geary looks nice, but is missing features, crashes alot for me and stops syncing. IMHO the only thing that has similar level of functionality is Evolution. Its not pretty and looks like its from 2000, but it works really well. I tend to use Evolution over Thunderbird myself. I tried Kmail, and it took alot to get used to, but I can’t say if its the same level as the others. Evolution does have issues with Google calendars syncing for some reason.

Sylpheed and Claws Mail are light and pretty good but complicate to configure

Cannot say is better but Geary is simple and clean, i’ve been using it for a while.

Aerc

If you use Gnome then Geary is my favorite email client. Very simple and straightforward email client.

There is a “modern” version of mutt https://neomutt.org/

For FOSS and from the terminal, ‘mutt’ is the go-to, as far as I’m aware.

springmail