Sunday, January 22, 2023

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.



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