Thunderbird
Mozilla's free email app with calendar and address book. The usual replacement for Outlook on a home computer.
Our verdict
Thunderbird is the closest thing Linux has to Outlook for home use. Add your email address and password and it works out the server settings on its own for the common providers, then pulls your mail, calendar and contacts into one window.
Coming from Outlook it looks busier and more old fashioned, and the calendar sits in a separate tab rather than along the bottom. Give it an afternoon and the shape of it makes sense. Gmail, Outlook.com and iCloud accounts all connect normally.
The real gap is work email. If your office runs Exchange and expects you to see shared calendars and room bookings, Thunderbird needs a paid add-on to talk to it properly, and even then some features will be missing. For a personal mailbox there is nothing to worry about.
What's good
- Set-up is mostly automatic once you type your email address and password
- Calendar and contacts are built in, so it covers most of what Outlook did
- Handles Gmail, Outlook.com, iCloud and ordinary mailbox accounts
- If you already used Thunderbird on Windows, your whole profile can be copied across
What to know first
- Corporate Exchange mailboxes need a paid add-on or a workaround
- The interface is dense and takes some getting used to
- No Microsoft Teams or Outlook meeting integration
- Searching a very large mailbox can be slow
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (MPL-2.0)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), .deb installer, App store (Snap), Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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