Thunderbird is made available under the Mozilla Public License.Ĭlaws Mail, a fork of Sylpheed, is a fast and flexible alternative that might be appealing to anyone concerned about performance and minimal resource usage. Out of the box, it supports POP and IMAP email syncing, spam filtering, and many other features you would expect, and it works flawlessly across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Thunderbird is full-featured, with a number of well-supported plugins adding everything from calendar support to advanced address book integration, and many specialized features including theming and large file management. Several new hires were made to advance the project, with plans to bring in new developers to fix lingering issues and transform the codebase to be based on web technologies.

In recent years, the thunder behind Thunderbird got a little quieter, and in mid-2017 the project announced it would move off Mozilla's infrastructure, but keep the Mozilla Foundation as its legal and fiscal home. Thunderbird has been around for over a decade and was immediately popular from the start, receiving over a million downloads in its first 10 days of public release. It was available on all major platforms, and it had great success alongside Mozilla's now-flagship project, Firefox.

Thunderbirdįor many years, Mozilla Thunderbird was the king of the open source email clients. In this roundup, we take a quick look at six open source options for desktop email, share a little bit about each, and provide you with some options you may want to try yourself. And just because you may be stuck on Windows doesn't mean Outlook is your only option many open source clients are cross-platform. Whether you're sticking with a desktop email client because of a corporate mandate or just personal preference, there are still many great options to choose from.

For many, the preference for a native application (and corresponding native performance), easy offline use, a vast array of plugins, and meeting security needs will long outweigh pressures to switch to a webmail email client. Mobile and web technologies still haven't made the desktop obsolete, and despite some regular claims to the contrary, desktop clients don't seem to be going away anytime soon.Īnd with good reason. This article was originally published on October 8, 2015, and has been updated to reflect new information and project changes.

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