Email Client for Ubuntu: Thunderbird vs Evolution

Thunderbird is the right default on Ubuntu: it is preinstalled on 24.04, it takes unlimited IMAP accounts, and its filtering is the deepest on the platform. Evolution is the better pick if you live in GNOME and want calendar, contacts and tasks in the same window, or if you need to reach an Exchange mailbox. That last reason now comes with a deadline, and it is the part of this comparison that changed in 2026.

Ubuntu is the distribution most people are on when they ask this, so the practical field is narrow: Thunderbird, Evolution, Geary, Claws Mail and Mailspring all install without drama. What separates them is not features on a list. It is how many mailboxes you are holding and which desktop you work in.

What is the best email client for Ubuntu?

Thunderbird, for most people. Ubuntu 24.04 was the first release to preinstall it as a snap, it handles unlimited IMAP accounts, and Unified Folders merges them into one list. Evolution is the better answer if you are deep in GNOME or need Exchange access. Geary suits a single personal mailbox. The choice only gets hard once you pass four or five accounts.

Is Thunderbird preinstalled on Ubuntu?

On a full install of 24.04 and later, yes, and it arrives as a snap package rather than a deb. Ubuntu stopped shipping a Thunderbird deb in its own repository with that release. The minimal install, which has been the default option since 23.10, leaves mail out entirely, so a fresh machine may have nothing at all.

If you would rather have the deb, the Mozilla Team PPA still publishes one and is maintained by people on the Ubuntu developer team. Flathub carries the official Flatpak. All three are the same program; the difference is update cadence and how the sandbox handles things like attachments and system integration. Snap confinement occasionally surprises people who expect a file picker to see every mount, and that is usually what is behind a "Thunderbird cannot open my external drive" thread.

What is the difference between Evolution and Thunderbird?

Evolution is a groupware suite that happens to include mail. Thunderbird is a mail client that happens to include a calendar. That sounds like a distinction without a difference until you use both for a week.

In practice: if you use GNOME on Ubuntu and you want one window holding your week, Evolution earns its place. If you mostly read mail and you want the strongest filtering and add-ons, Thunderbird wins, and it will still look right if you switch to KDE next month.

Can I use Microsoft Exchange on Ubuntu?

Today, through Evolution and its EWS connector, which is the single most common reason people run Evolution rather than Thunderbird. That route now has a published end date. Microsoft's own documentation states that Exchange Web Services starts being disabled globally for all organizations in October 2026 and is fully disabled in April 2027, with Microsoft Graph as the replacement. On premises Exchange Server is not affected.

That matters more than it sounds. It is not a deprecation notice with no teeth. Microsoft widened the scope of the work after the Midnight Blizzard incident to cover its own applications as well as third party ones, which is a strong signal about how firm the date is. If Exchange Online access is the only reason your Ubuntu machine is workable at your job, that is a question worth putting to the GNOME project now rather than discovering in March.

The IMAP fallback is closing in parallel. Microsoft finished retiring basic authentication for Exchange Online in April 2026, so a managed Microsoft 365 mailbox will not accept a password from any mail client, and Microsoft has said it will remove basic authentication from Outlook.com as well and rely only on OAuth. Between the two changes, "connect it over IMAP instead" is not the escape hatch it was two years ago. Everything that is not Microsoft is unaffected: Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, iCloud, Zoho, Fastmail and any mailbox on your own domain all still issue app passwords and connect normally.

Is there a lightweight email client for Ubuntu?

Geary is the usual recommendation. It is a GNOME application with a deliberately small interface and a conversation view, and for one personal mailbox it is genuinely pleasant. Claws Mail goes further down the same road: it uses almost nothing, starts instantly and will run happily on hardware you were about to throw away, at the cost of an interface that looks its age.

Both are honest picks for a single account. Neither is designed for someone holding six. Geary lists accounts side by side rather than truly merging them, and Claws Mail needs a plugin to approximate a unified view. If the reason you are reading this is that you have too many mailboxes rather than too little RAM, these are the wrong branch of the tree.

What about Mailspring on Ubuntu?

Mailspring is worth knowing about because it is the one client in this group that looks like a modern commercial product. It uses a native C++ sync engine rather than rendering a web app, the core is open source under the MIT license, and development picked back up in 2025 after a quiet stretch. Version 1.19 added vCard support and calendar work, with ARM64 and Wayland builds on Linux. It does have a real unified inbox.

Its limits are the same as everyone else's here: it merges your accounts and then leaves the merged list to you. The paid Pro tier buys features like link tracking and templates rather than anything that reads your mail and decides what matters.

Which clients cannot be installed on Ubuntu at all?

This is the part that catches people switching from Windows or macOS. eM Client, Mailbird, Spark, Canary Mail and Mimestream all ship Windows or Apple builds and stop there. Microsoft has never shipped an Outlook desktop build for Linux and shows no sign of starting. Superhuman has no native Linux client and only accepts Gmail or Microsoft accounts anyway.

So a general "best email client" roundup is close to useless on Ubuntu, because most of what it recommends cannot be installed on the machine. The full breakdown of what does and does not run, distro by distro, is on our email client for Linux page.

How do I add Gmail to an Ubuntu email client?

Over IMAP, at imap.gmail.com on port 993 with SSL, and smtp.gmail.com on port 587 with TLS. With two step verification switched on, and it should be, Google will not accept your normal account password from a mail client. You generate a sixteen character app password in your Google account security settings and paste that into the password field instead.

Evolution and GNOME Online Accounts can do Google sign in through OAuth, which avoids the app password entirely and is the smoother route if you are already on GNOME. Thunderbird also supports OAuth for Google. If a client rejects your password at setup and you are certain you typed it correctly, an app password is almost always the answer. The full host and port reference for the other providers is in our IMAP settings guide.

When does the desktop client stop being the answer?

Somewhere around the fifth mailbox, and it has nothing to do with Ubuntu. Every client above will connect all five. Thunderbird will merge them into one list. What none of them will do is tell you which of the ninety messages that arrived overnight is the one you needed to see.

Developers and sysadmins hit this earlier than most, because a good share of their mail is machine generated. Cron output, deploy notices, certificate expiry warnings, and alerts from monitoring. If the mailbox on your own domain sits on a box you provision and keep patched yourself, that stream is larger still. Filters help until the day an important message arrives in a shape you did not write a rule for, which is the failure mode every rule based system shares: it only catches what you already predicted.

That is the gap we built for. Inboxes is a web based client, so Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch or a Chromebook all behave the same, and there is no package to choose. Connect your IMAP mailboxes with an app password and a model reads each message as it arrives, assigning it a category (Important, Newsletter, Notification, Spam, or Other). Archive and junk decisions push back over IMAP, so your phone and the provider webmail agree with the board.

It is not a replacement for Thunderbird in every case, and we would rather say so. There is no offline mode, no calendar and no contacts, and plans start at $29 a month against a Thunderbird license fee of nothing. If one or two mailboxes is your situation, run Thunderbird and enjoy it. If you are reading this because you have lost track of what is in six of them, the merged list is the problem and merging harder will not fix it.

The short version

Install Thunderbird on Ubuntu and you will be fine, and on a full 24.04 install it is already there. Choose Evolution if GNOME integration or Exchange matters, while Exchange over EWS still works. Choose Geary or Claws Mail if the machine is old or the mailbox is one. And if the count keeps climbing, the question stops being which Ubuntu package to install and becomes what reads the mail before you do. Our comparison of Thunderbird against a sorted board covers that trade in detail.