Brno Hat

Jiri Eischmann's Blog

Most popular email clients among Fedora users

In the desktop team of Red Hat, I’m responsible for development and Fedora/RHEL maintenance of apps which also include email clients Thunderbird and Evolution. It’s quite useful for me to have a rough idea what email clients Fedora users use. So I went ahead and asked them on Google Plus and Facebook and here are the results:

Google+:

email-clients-gplusFacebook:

email-clients-fbThe results from Google+ are probably much more representative because they come from a much larger number of users. Facebook doesn’t support polls, so users had to answer in comments which resulted in much fewer votes. Polls in G+ only support 5 options, so if someone wanted to vote for a different client than web, Thunderbird, Evolution, Geary, or Kmail, they needed to write it in comments as well. It might have disadvantaged other clients a bit.

Web – this includes all web clients, vast majority of it is Gmail which seems to be by far the most popular email service among Fedora users. On Google+, web got almost 40% which is not a number that surprises me a lot. A fairly large portion of users doesn’t use desktop email clients any more, but it’s also not big enough to say that desktop clients are obsoleted. 2/3 of users still use desktop clients to access their mail.

Thunderbird – the most popular among desktop clients, it’s a solid email client with many years of development, and many users value its support for various platforms, so that they can use it on other OSes, too. The most mentioned weakness was (in)ability to be a good groupware client (calendaring, Exchange support,…). Some lost faith in Thunderbird after Mozilla announced it wanted to spin off its umbrella which many understood (probably wrongly) as killing it.

Evolution – the second most popular client is the default client of GNOME – Evolution. Clearly the most appraised feature of Evolution is its groupware nature and support of Exchange, it’s probably the only Linux client that reasonably supports Exchange. On the other hand, it lags behind Thunderbird in IMAP support and it’s Linux only. Like Thunderbird, it doesn’t have a big developer force behind it any more. Red Hat is currently the only one who invests in Evolution, unfortunately.

Geary – it’s the biggest surprise to me. Considering its author – Yorba Foundation – ceased to exist at the beginning of the year and Geary has been dead for months, it’s still pretty popular. It’s a modern client with really good support of Gmail, but if Thunderbird and Evolution don’t seem to face big future, chances that Geary will be further developed are currently minimal.

Kmail – another surprise to me, I thought the default client of KDE would be more popular, it may be caused by the fact that Fedora is primarily a GNOME distro, but it may also be caused by the fact that users have lost faith in it after many ups and downs in development after KDE 4.0.

Mutt – I expected Mutt to be in TOP6. A CLI client will never win popularity contests, but it has a fair amount of loyal users. Another CLI client Alpine only received less than half of votes.

Among other mentioned clients were Claws Mail, Sylpheed, Mu4e, Nylas N1, Lotus Notes, Pine, Zimbra, Seamonkey… but they each got fewer than 10 votes.

Linux desktop clients are not dead, they’re still used by majority of users, but none of the traditional ones has a larger community of contributors and very active development which brings poses questions about their future. It will be interesting to watch new approaches to desktop clients such as Nylas N1 which moves IMAP client to the server and provides just a really thin desktop client.

13 responses to “Most popular email clients among Fedora users”

  1. Dominik Avatar
    Dominik

    I guess that there is a selection issue by asking people on social media sites about their tastes: first, you select people using social media sites (not a big issue in terms of numbers. Second, you select people following specific tech related topics (ie. “you” 😉 on social media sites.

    1. sesivany Avatar

      They don’t have to follow me, the survey was shared through official Fedora accounts on FB and G+. If I had only shared it through my personal accounts I wouldn’t have collected almost 2000 votes.
      And I’m not saying the numbers are 100% accurate. As I said at the beginning, I wanted to have a rough idea, not 100% accurate numbers which is pretty much impossible to get.

  2. mrmcq2u Avatar

    https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Evolution if work started on having evolution follow the modern gnome hig like the mockups here I might go back to actually using it again.

  3. Jonathan Moerman Avatar

    Geary may be dead, it has been forked by elementary OS developers so it the end of Yorba may not be the end of the application.

    1. Jonathan Moerman Avatar

      ^ This wasn’t supposed to be a reply…

  4. […] Puedes conocer todos los detalles al respecto, remitiéndote al blog oficial de Eischmann […]

  5. Sudhir Khanger Avatar

    People make huge noise about privacy, open source, patents, etc. When you ask them what email service they use, most of them will say Gmail. There is a huge difference in what people and how they act.

  6. Doran L. Barton Avatar

    I really like kmail but it became horribly unstable with KDE4. It was at that point that I switched to claws-mail and found it to do just about everything I wanted in an e-mail app.

    1. dhardy Avatar
      dhardy

      I still use KMail. It’s still horribly slow with dodgy search results but otherwise *seems* to be okay now. I’ve stuck with it because I can’t find any other *client* which copes with maintaining thousands of archived messages at all (at least, last time I tried).

  7. mattias.jc.bengtsson Avatar

    “The results from Google+ are probably much more representative because they come from a much larger number of users. ”

    Hm, that’s not really how statistics work. :/

  8. […] Most popular email clients among Fedora users […]

  9. mjog Avatar
    mjog

    Just a quick note for anyone still reading… Geary isn’t dead, in fact it’s seen a number of releases this year: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

  10. John Avatar

    I like Geary but I guess you can’t change the mail body to a light gray to not screw up my dark theme?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *