On the status of lightweight GUI mail clients

November 3rd, 2021

I'll give you a bit of context first. Lately I've become frustrated with Xubuntu on my laptop. Long story short, having to update every 6 month and the general direction the OS is taking bothered me (flatpack by default... wait what?). Add to that the fact that every update broke something, so in the end I just reinstalled from scratch every 6 month.

Considering this, a few weeks ago I decided to ditch Ubuntu and go back to Debian. I say "back to Debian" because I actually used it as my main laptop OS a few years back. Although at the time I was using the stable flavor, this time I decided to install the testing flavor to avoid those dreaded updates. As usual I wanted to keep things small and simple, so I went with LXQt as my desktop environment. The project's about page states:

It will not hang or slow down your system

I can confirm it is very light. I don't know if it's Debian or LXQt making magic, or maybe both, but programs open up instantly, even on my 7 year old laptop. It's a refreshing experience.

By default, the mail client bundled with LXQt, at least on Debian, is Mozilla Thunderbird. It's a great client, but not exactly light and it also does not integrate well with my Qt theme. I could install KMail, but it will likely pull half of KDE along. So I went online in search of a light Qt-based mail client. I found only one, Trojita. Sadly, there's no package for it in Debian. Looking at the project's repository and bug tracker, it seems that development has been slow as of late. According to a bug report, it's been recently dropped from Gentoo because it uses an outdated web rendering component (I'll save my opinion on HTML emails for another post).

Even when considering GTK mail clients, there's only a handful of options to choose from. If you push aside those which are still based on GTK2, there is only one remaining: Geary. I've used it in the past, it's quite light and gets to the point, but it won't do better than Thunderbird in my Qt-based environment.

In the end I'm a bit short on options. It is sad that you can't easily install a Qt lightweight GUI mail client nowadays. Of course I could contribute to one of the previously mentioned projects and update it. Or I may explore CLI-based solutions. Or continue to use the webmail that comes with my provider. I haven't decided yet.