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

  • bluefishcanteen@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    11 hours ago

    I have had the exact same issue as you. Thunderbird is great, but their attachment search is not. I spent a lot of time looking for a way to make it work and what I settled on is using a third party program to serve this function: Recoll (https://www.recoll.org/index.html).

    It should be available in your distro’s package repository.

    You’ll need to download your messages to your computer, but it will work in the way that you expect search to work (I.e. search by filename, search by text within attachments, search by text within emails). Setup is straightforward. You just need to point it to the Thunderbird profile directory where your emails are saved. As a bonus, you get good desktop search for all the other files on your computer too.

    Sadly (don’t throw anything at me), the only desktop email program that I have found that does search properly is Outlook desktop. On Linux, that is obviously a non-starter.

    • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Honestly I might try this. Or maybe I can use grep lol. We’ll see how it fits in my workflow, I’m comfortable in the CLI but haven’t really entertained the idea a CLI email client before. Thanks