Email Clients
Discover free, open-source, and secure email clients, along with some email alternatives you may not have considered.
When using end-to-end encryption (E2EE) technology like OpenPGP, email will still have some metadata that is not encrypted in the header of the email. Read more about email metadata.
OpenPGP also does not support Forward secrecy, which means if either your or the recipient’s private key is ever stolen, all previous messages encrypted with it will be exposed. How do I protect my private keys?
Rather than use email for prolonged conversations, consider using a medium that does support Forward secrecy.
Desktop Clients
Thunderbird
Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) client developed by the Thunderbird community, and previously by the Mozilla Foundation.
GNOME Evolution
Evolution is a personal information management application that provides integrated mail, calendaring and address book functionality. Evolution has extensive documentation to help you get started.
Kontact
Kontact is a personal information manager (PIM) application from the KDE project. It provides a mail client, address book, organizer and RSS client.
Canary Mail
Canary Mail is a paid email client designed to make end-to-end encryption seamless with security features such as a biometric app lock.
Notes
Canary Mail is closed source.
Canary Mail only recently released a Windows and Android client we don’t believe they are as stable as their iOS and Mac counterparts.
Mailvelope
Mailvelope is a browser extension that enables the exchange of encrypted emails following the OpenPGP encryption standard.
Mobile Clients
K-9 Mail
K-9 Mail is an independent mail application that supports both POP3 and IMAP mailboxes, but only supports push mail for IMAP.
FairEmail
FairEmail logo FairEmail is a minimal, open source email app, using open standards (IMAP, SMTP, OpenPGP) with a low data and battery usage.
Canary Mail
Canary Mail is a paid email client designed to make end-to-end encryption seamless with security features such as a biometric app lock.
Notes
Canary Mail is closed source, however on iOS there aren’t any other viable options for an email client which supports OpenPGP.
Canary Mail only recently released a Windows and Android client we don’t believe they are as stable as their iOS and Mac counterparts.
Text-based clients
Neomutt
NeoMutt is an open-source command line mail reader (or MUA) for Linux and BSD. It’s a fork of Mutt with added features.
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