Doctacosa

This has been bugging me for a while now.

I want a good email client. Not something web-based, a real thing, with downloaded messages and all that. For some years now, that's been Microsoft Outlook, the giant in the room. It's been good enough, fast, stable, although I had a few nagging issues with it. The key issue is that Outlook works great for emails themselves, but anything else (calendar, contacts, notes...) assumes that you're communicating with an Exchange server. If you're like me, with custom CalDav and CardDav addresses hosted elsewhere, there's no real way to make it work. Something as simple as having your calendar and contacts hosted by Google is not possible either. It's too bad, because I can only use one facet of a software that could do so much more.

For the calendar and contacts aspects, I had been using the built-in apps of Windows 10/11. They've been surprisingly competent in doing what I needed: integrating with third party services while giving me reliable notifications when something scheduled was coming up. Unfortunately, Microsoft is set to deprecate those, forcing me to look for a replacement. Oddly enough, a major lack of competent calendars on Windows that also support CalDav.

The obvious replacement for the above is the New Outlook, which is currently in beta and should have most of the features I need. Unfortunately, as it's been widely reported, the new Outlook doesn't actually work directly with your IMAP accounts: everything goes through Microsoft's servers. This is not acceptable for something that I mean to live stand-alone – I'd be using webmail otherwise! As the company wants to eventually replace the current Outlook with this new version, I need to look elsewhere.

An obvious candidate is Mozilla Thunderbird. It does it all, including the integration with third party services. I've used it before. It's my current client at work. It's recently had a large update to overhaul its looks and give it some air of modernity. Yet there are some nagging user interface issues that annoy me. For example, it's a small thing, but the calendar will display an event stretching over several days as several individual blocks instead of a line. It makes it more difficult to read your agenda at a glance. Unrelated but still on my radar, the XMPP chat integration is functional but is really rough to use. I'm hoping it gets better. All the building blocks are there, but it needs some polishing.

My main browser, Vivaldi, has introduced mail, calendar and related features some time ago. I had really been looking forward to these, but I can't say I like its user interface. It feels cramped and somewhat counterintuitive on many points and I keep bouncing off it. Maybe it will mature over time, it would be nice to have an all-in-one solution that works well! Netscape Communicator says hello.

After yet another search, hoping to find something new, I unearthed eM Client. My first impression was that it was like Outlook, but done right: the inbox structure is similar to my current one, while I can easily integrate my CalDav calendar and CardDav address book! Bonus, the interface is pretty customizable. I've been using it for a few days now, and it's been holding up. I'm surprised it hasn't come up earlier, since I went looking several times!

The main thing holding me back from switching right now is that it would be more challenging to switch back if I change my mind. Any valid email client will include an importer from Outlook, since it's unavoidable. However, they usually don't include an exporter in a compatible format, so it's a one-way trip. The same goes for eM Client: you can import from Outlook or Thunderbird, but you can only export as individual .eml files. There are ways to go around this, but as someone who likes to have a way out, it's something to keep in mind!

Side note, and I don't know what's up with this, but the Apple world is surprisingly good at offering solid options. Both MacOS and iOS have several options I'd love to try if they were available on other platforms.

Here's hoping I finally found my champion!

#email #calendar #contacts #caldav #carddav #outlook #thunderbird #vivaldi #emclient

– Doctacosa