Best Email Client for EarthLink Email in 2026

The best email client for EarthLink email is whichever one you already have, because EarthLink is one of the last major providers that still lets an ordinary password through. No app password, no secure mail key, no OAuth consent screen. That removes the usual obstacle and turns the decision into a plain one: how many mailboxes are you checking, and on how many machines. For one address on one Mac, Apple Mail is already installed. For one address on a PC, Thunderbird carries no license fee. For an EarthLink address alongside Gmail and something for work, across more than one computer, pick a client that merges them into one list.

The short answer, by situation

Six situations cover almost everyone who searches this. The table is the whole recommendation. The rest of the article explains the reasoning, the settings that trip people up, and the one thing about EarthLink that makes this choice more urgent than it looks.

Why EarthLink is easier than it should be

If you have set up any other legacy mailbox in the last few years, you have hit the password wall. AT&T issues a sixteen character secure mail key and wants a separate one for every address and every device. Yahoo and AOL issue app passwords. Gmail and iCloud do the same, and Google has been narrowing what a plain password can reach for years. Every one of those adds a trip to an account portal before a mail program will connect.

EarthLink does none of it. Its own help article on setting up EarthLink email gives the servers and then says, without ceremony, that the user name is your full email address and the password is your email password. The same credentials you type into WebMail go straight into Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail or anything else. There is no key to generate and nothing to revoke later.

That is worth knowing before you start, because most of the setup guides you will find for EarthLink were written by companies selling a mail client, and they tend to describe the process as though it were harder than it is. It genuinely is not. If a client rejects your password, the cause is almost always the user name field, which brings us to the settings.

EarthLink email settings for any client

These values cover earthlink.net and the legacy addresses EarthLink absorbed along the way, including mindspring.com from the 2000 merger and peoplepc.com from the 2002 purchase.

The word auth in the outgoing host name is not decorative. EarthLink expects an authenticated connection, so if a client sends fine on some networks and fails on others, check that outgoing authentication is switched on and using the same credentials rather than being left blank.

Apple Mail, if you are on a Mac

Choose Other Mail Account rather than picking a named provider from the list, since EarthLink is not on it. Enter the address and password and let Apple Mail try. If it cannot work out the servers, type them in manually from the table above. Once connected, EarthLink joins the All Inboxes view alongside any other account you have added, which for a lot of people is the whole job done at no extra cost.

Where Apple Mail stops being enough is the second computer. Every Mac you use needs the account added separately, and each keeps its own local store. If you move between a desktop and a laptop, you are maintaining the same setup twice. Our email client for Mac comparison goes further into where that line sits.

Thunderbird, if you are on Windows or Linux

Thunderbird is the reasonable default for a single EarthLink address on a PC. It is open source, carries no license fee, keeps a complete local archive you can read without a connection, and its Unified Folders view merges several accounts into one message list. For an address you have held for twenty years, that local archive matters more than it sounds: it means the mail exists somewhere other than EarthLink's servers.

Setup is manual and quick. Add the account, let Thunderbird probe, and correct the server names if it guesses wrong. The one thing to watch is that Thunderbird sometimes offers POP first. Take IMAP. EarthLink states outright that to see the same messages and folders in two places at once, the client must be set up using IMAP settings, and POP is how people end up with a phone and a laptop showing different inboxes.

Classic Outlook, if you already pay for it

Outlook connects to EarthLink without difficulty, with one caveat: do not trust autodiscover. Outlook tries to look up the settings for an unfamiliar domain and frequently guesses Exchange or picks the wrong ports. Choose manual setup, select IMAP, and enter imap.earthlink.net on 993 and smtpauth.earthlink.net on 587 yourself. Then open the outgoing server tab and confirm that authentication is enabled and set to use the same settings as the incoming server.

The new Outlook is a different proposition. Microsoft rebuilt it as a web application with the desktop shell around it, and the editable server settings that classic Outlook exposes are not all present in the same form. If you have been moved onto it and your EarthLink account will not behave, that is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on it. We compared the two in detail in new Outlook versus classic Outlook.

Skip the EarthLink app itself

EarthLink publishes myEarthLink Mail for iPhone and Android. It is a real first party app from EarthLink LLC, updated as recently as August 2026, and it does what it says: reads your EarthLink mail, manages your EarthLink contacts, opens a support chat. It also carries 1.8 stars out of 5 from roughly 670 ratings on the US App Store, which is a hard number to argue with.

Because EarthLink accepts a plain password, you do not have to put up with it. Apple Mail on an iPhone and the Gmail app on Android both add an EarthLink account with the same credentials and give you a better reading experience. The app is optional in a way that a provider specific app usually is not.

On a computer the question does not arise, because EarthLink ships nothing at all. There is no EarthLink program for Windows, macOS, Linux or ChromeOS. The App Store listing mentions Macs with an M1 chip, but that is Apple allowing an iPad app to open in a window rather than EarthLink shipping a desktop product. If a download page offers you an EarthLink email program for a PC, it is somebody else's software with EarthLink's name on the page.

When one merged list is the actual requirement

Everything above assumes the EarthLink mailbox is the thing you are solving for. Often it is not. The pattern we see most is someone holding an earthlink.net or mindspring address from the dial up era that still receives statements, renewal notices and order confirmations, plus the Gmail they actually use day to day, plus a work address. Three mailboxes, three places to look, and two or three computers to look on.

Apple Mail and Thunderbird both merge accounts, and if you live on one machine, either is a genuinely good answer and costs nothing extra. Say so plainly: for that case, stop reading and install Thunderbird. The calculation changes when the machines multiply, because a desktop client has to be installed and configured on each one, and each keeps its own separate copy of everything. A browser based client is connected once and opens the same board on the desktop, the laptop and a borrowed Chromebook.

The second thing that changes the calculation is volume. A twenty year old address accumulates an extraordinary amount of automated mail, and the filters you build inside EarthLink WebMail only ever see the EarthLink account. Our EarthLink mail app page covers the desktop side of this in full, including the comparison across all eight routes and the settings table. The sorting applies across every connected mailbox at once, which is the part a per provider filter cannot do.

There is a related housekeeping job worth doing at the same time. An address that has been public since the late nineties is in a great many databases, and if you would rather it stopped turning up in them, it is possible to find out which companies still hold records tied to it and ask them to delete what they have. Cleaning the inbox and cleaning the trail behind the address are two halves of the same afternoon.

What none of these clients can change

Some limits sit on EarthLink's servers and follow you into whichever program you choose. Attachments are capped at 20 MB, with EarthLink recommending you stay under 15 MB as a safety margin. EarthLink WebMail will not send to more than 100 recipients on a single message. And storage is finite enough that EarthLink sells more of it through the account portal in 1 GB, 2 GB and 3 GB tiers, with the 3 GB option attaching to your primary address but extending to every address under that user for one price.

Changing client does nothing to any of those. What a client does change is where the mail lives and how many windows you need open to read it. If you are running out of room, deal with EarthLink directly. If you are running out of patience, that is the part a different program actually fixes.

The recommendation, in one line each

One EarthLink address, one Mac: Apple Mail. It is already there, it takes the plain password, and it merges accounts.

One EarthLink address, one PC or Linux box: Thunderbird. No license fee, a complete local archive, and Unified Folders if you add more accounts later.

Already paying for Microsoft 365: classic Outlook with manual IMAP setup. Skip autodiscover and enter the servers yourself.

Phone: Apple Mail or the Gmail app rather than myEarthLink Mail, purely on the strength of the ratings.

EarthLink plus Gmail plus work, on more than one machine: a browser based client that holds all of them, so the setup happens once and the sorting runs across everything rather than one mailbox at a time. If you would like to see how the accounts sit together, any IMAP mailbox connects the same way.