Email clients for GMail in Debian Bookworm

I've been using the Thunderbird email client in Debian Bookworm XFCE for a while, but it seems to have a bug causing it to use 50-60% of the CPU and 500-600MB of RAM constantly, so I thought I would try out the alternatives.

I tried Geary but that won't run without the Gnome online accounts service, so I tried Claws Mail. That can read emails from GMail with an application password, but cannot send emails by SMPT, [See correction below] I suspect because GMail is constantly imposing increasingly restrictive security requirements. Claws now supports OAuth2, Google's latest security hoop, but getting an authorisation code is a process intended for software developers and not users. I tried it at one point, but gave up when I was asked for my credit card details. It's a shame because Claws seems quite suited to the feel of XFCE.

Which left me with Evolution, actually my favourite email application in Gnome. It installs without bringing down a lot of Gnome stuff with it, and runs OK.  Unlike Thunderbird it only uses 300MB of RAM, and CPU usage at idle is 0-1%.

It's a shame only big projects can afford the cost of enabling OAuth2 login for users (for which Google apparently charges a fee). GMail users on XFCE really only have the option of using Evolution a the moment it seems. I would be nice is there was a more minimalist option like Geary is in Gnome. Claws could be that option, but at the moment it is crippled by Google's security restrictions.

 

Update: Correction, Claws can send emails with a GMail application password, just, for some reason, not to yourself, which is how I was testing it. LinuxQuestions.

I also managed to get it to work with OAuth2 (entirely by accident) without giving Google my credit card details. I will try to work out how it happened in a future post.

Evolution Calendar - Syncing and adding reminders

Adding events to the Evolution calendar is intuitive, so I won't go into details: click on a day, add a time and a description and the basic event entry is done.

After that I had a couple of issues that took me some time to work out.

The first was that as Gnome is integrated with my Google account, I expected the event to appear in my Android phone's calendar, but it didn't. I couldn't work out how to sync the evolution calendar with my Google account.

The answer is to select the Google calendar as the default calendar, because the local calendar (On This Computer) is set as the default.

Select your Google calendar account, right click and select Properties, then tick Mark as default calendar.

The next issue was setting reminders. As I usually forget upcoming events, I like to get plenty of reminders from my computer and phone, so I clicked on the Reminders tab and selected 15 minutes before from the drop down menu.

Gnome applications are usually intuitive to use, but I have to say this window was not. There are to my mind several problems that actually make it counter intuitive.

First of all is the infinitive in Pop up and alert: The infinitive in computer GUIs usually presents an opportunity to give a command: Play, Pause, Stop, for example. Yes, I want to Pop up and alert, what do I do about it? I expected an OK or Confirm option here. I think Alert 15 minutes before the start, or Alert set for 15 minutes before the start would be clearer. Maybe it's just me.

The second problem I had was that I like to set more than one reminder, and the Add button was greyed out. It wasn't just me here as someone else had the same problem. I wrote "was" because Evolution was updated overnight and the Add button is no longer greyed out, as you will see in the screenshot above: it sets the Custom option, which allows more than one reminder. The solution if you have a version of Evolution with the greyed out button is to choose Custom from the drop down list.

 

Filter emails in Evolution

Here is a quick tutorial on how to filter emails in Evolution. It took me a while to work out how to do it, so I thought I'd make a note of what I did to remind myself when I inevitably forget later on, and to help anybody who wants to do the same thing.

First, right click on the folder where you want to create a new folder to put your filtered emails in. Click on (you guessed it) New Folder. I put mine in Google Mail > All Mail.

To filter emails by sender, right click on an email you want to create a filter for and select Create > Create a Filter Rule for Sender.

In the dialogue that appears, select the folder you created in the first step.

Click on Add Condition if the sender uses more than one address to send emails from. (My daughter's school has used four different domains to send emails, so I had to add four conditions.)

To apply the filter, click on Message > Apply Filter.

To filter all existing emails, select you inbox and click on Edit > Select All then  Message > Apply Filters.