article: lightweight mail clients

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/20211103-lightweight-mail-client.md b/20211103-lightweight-mail-client.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..47a54b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20211103-lightweight-mail-client.md
@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+# 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](https://lxqt-project.org/about/) 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](http://trojita.flaska.net/). 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a [bug report](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365299), it's been recently dropped from Gentoo because it uses an outdated web rendering component (I'll save my opinion on HTML emails for another post).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](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/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.