email client with the functionality of Thunderbird
 

So a bit of a back story, I am fixing up an old Dell Latitude D430 for use with work and I am really impressed with it so far. I have installed q4os 64 bit and use LXDE. I have had a lot of good luck with this. I had a work tablet because I choose it but it sucked to do forms on and because I choose it there are no laptops available so I am using my old one. I just use the office computer but my staff recently broke into my encrypted folder and got into staff/employee review files and raises, etc. So This laptop is providing security and privacy as well. I also want to use Linux so using my own laptop is great.

I am using Thunderbird with my work and private emails and it is working great, but where Thunderbird shines is the lightning calendar. I can connect it to outlook calendar online and it it shows my appointments, resident appointments, reminders, and tasks for the day that I also have set up on my work computer. I can also alter the smtp settings to change the sever to encrypt my work emails. I work with medical records as well.

The problem is Thunderbird uses a lot of system resources and I am wondering if you guys know of another email program that offers the same functions but consumes less. Sorry if this is a newb question (I have used Linux for over 20 years actually).

Thank you in advance.

Darn few email clients have integrated calendar and a feature set like Thunderbird. All of them take more resources, but there may be one I do not know. (There are a LOT and not all are well known.)

A refurbished laptop with FAR better specifications should be pretty cheap, and make the load from Thunderbird trivial. I recommend heavier iron. (SSD, more ram, faster CPU with more cores, all help.)

Thank you and for a bit I did look at others, like some netbooks on Ebay that run linux. However I have solved a lot of issues on this dell and things are working out with it. I have done a lot of tweaking to speed it up greatly.

So far the answer to this question is evolution. Evolution can do all those things and it took a bit, but I got it running and it uses a bit less then Thunderbird, however it does not look as nice.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" applies here, but I was not concerned with appearance as much as functionality. Last time I tried Evolution the feature set was a bit different than Thunderbird (A couple of things E did that T did not, and vice versa) and the resource usage was about the same. If it does what you need and is even slightly lighter on that hardware that is great.

I find it odd that no one else has made a suggestion. I have tested perhaps a dozen email engines, and there must be ten times that many. If someone suggests something with the features you need that is even lighter I would be thrilled, and that should exist.

If it does not, one of us should write one.

Evolution can also do M$ MFA better than Tbird imho.
Including integrates ok with multiple calendars.
Only con that I have to deal with is that I have to use taskset to limit to a few cpus.

Claws-mail would probably be the lightest GUI mail application. After that CLI would be the next step.

"Yeah there is even a perk, and that is Evolution handles office 365 calendar better and can edit appointments for my residents and they immediately show up, Thunderbird this was very hit or miss and sometimes would unsub from calendars. I have a lot of shared calendars, 1 for massage (I am also a therapist), 1 for my resident appointments (run a group home with many facilities), 1 for my time off, 1 for my resident work schedules, 1 for their medicine times, etc, you get the point. the reminders are nice and calendars are essential.

I have written guides and things before, and I started one on q4os and linked it in the comment but it seems it was removed. I was going to write one on setting up evolution with office 365 as the ones that are out there are confusing and it took me several tries and many many hours. Evolution uses about 150mb-200mb less ram, but has active notifications running after it is booted. It also uses way less processor, at least on this machine.

I tried and liked claws-mail a lot, it was by far may favorite. However I could not get vcalendar to integrate with office 365 and found none in the way of how to do it except a very, very old method that is no longer applicable.

You might want to take a look at Epyrus, from Moonchild Productions.

These are the people who develop the Pale Moon browser.....a Firefox 'clone', forked off just before FF made the switch to Australis (around v28/9, if memory serves). I think it uses the same 'Goanna' browser engine as PM itself, and again is developed along UXP lines (Unified XUL Platform).

Epyrus is essentially a modern re-work of an older version of T-Bird, though with up-to-date APIs, etc. Much lighter than modern T-Bird, doesn't have some of the current feature-set, but DOES support the Lightning extension. Think T-Bird back around the 45/60 ESR versions, looks-wise......but compatible with modern web requirements.

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You can find it here:-

http://www.epyrus.org/

May help, may not. At least you now have the option to check it out.


Mike. :hattip:

AlbusLuna's "Icedove" include the calendar. On Slackware 14.2 with the Xfce desktop running it will occupy less than 300Mb of memory.We have to build it ourselves using the provided script. On a modest machine it may take 48 hours to build the whole suite / bundle (or the script may be modified to only build Icedove itself).
Icedove does not support O2Auth so IMAP / SMTP / Mail settings must be configured manually (works for Gmail and Yahoo mail).

EDIT: A bit of extra info here. I believe also woff2 was a dependency

I tried it and liked it! however it would not load my yahoo account and said either my username or password was wrong, however I entered it about 20 times. It was about 50 mb lighter though then evolution.

I tried to install it but ran into issues and could not get it installed. I used some of the "ice" programs back in the day.

@ Vanquishedangel - it looks as if Epyrus doesn't support Yahoo's Oauth2 login, and you probably must use a "3rd party password" generated on your Yahoo account to connect. On the other hand it looks as if Epyrus uncomplicated will connect to Gmail using two factor authentication.
I could (on a modified Slackware 14.2) build a 64bit GTK2 Icedove 2.6 with Pale Moon's platform 31.2.0.1 as back-end when using AlbusLuna's script, you can pick it up here for a test, if interested. Configuring Yahoo mail for Icedove is relatively simple where connecting to Gmail is a tad more complicated. This link may be of help:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-i...ou-create-one/

To me Icedove is a natural beauty and now, when set up, may serve me well for many years to come :)

Ok so I tried epyrus and I love it! got it working with yahoo, google, and my work emails but, tbsync plugin wont install so it will not at this time work with office 365. Tbsync versions 1.1 to 1.7 have a red banner about not being able to install in epyrus 2.01, Higher versions the banner disappears. Ram usage with palemoon, and teamviewer open is 1133.1 mb, with evolution (takes a bit longer to open) it is 10 mb less actually but Evolutions plugins continue to run in the back ground while epyrus was running taking up 175mb ram.