Why have a email client in Nextcloud?#

You may be thinking: what is the purpose of a Email client in Nextcloud? Why can’t I just use Thuderbird and/or K9mail?

Well, you’re right that you can use other mail clients that you can install on your desktop/phone. But for me there’s just something comfortable about having the same client on all my devices and the devices I’ll be just using once.

You need to do something on a frend’s PC because you didn’t thing you’d need your laptop? This will save you and you’ll have all your accounts, all your settings and whatnot at one place. And you’ll be in Nextcloud! You’ll have your calendar, contacs (I’ll mention this later), and all the other apps you use.

Rainloop#

Why do I mention another mail client?

Because Snappymail is a fork of (the Nextcloud plugin is now archived) Rainloop. Rainloop has been available for Nextcloud for a long time now. It was probably the best you could do with email in Nextcoud as it was the fastest, easy to setup and probably the most reliable. Installing it was as simple as installing the plugin and then adding the allowed email domains in the admin’s settings page.

The default email client in Nextcloud does have some advantages. It was harder to get contacs working in Rainloop (it works the same in Snappymail). You had to set a url to CardDav server (your Nextcloud’s dav url) which is easy but it worked out of the box in the default email client. Also you couldn’t save the attachments to Nextcloud and couldn’t upload attachments from Nextcloud.

But’s it’s not like there’s no reason why people don’t like to use the default client. The main reason being large email inboxes. I personally didn’t have this problem but my friend did. It would sometimes take more than 5 (sometimes even 15) minutes for the default app to load his inbox which is just insane.

Some people aso don’t like the layout of the default app. I don’t know if that was changed, but the last time I checked I didn’t find any way to change the layout. In Rainloop you could do a vertical/horizontal split or no split.

But for many the pros outweighted the cons.

Snappymail#

Let’s finally talk about Snappymail

Why is Snappymail better?#

First of all there were almost to none updates to Rainloop lately. As of writing this the last update was on 31st August 2022 (almost 3 moths ago). Meanwhile snappymail had an update an hour ago. There are updates almost every other day and the developer(s) are quick to respond to issues.

There are also more benefits in the backend, but I’ll let the project’s README tell you that.

Nextcloud integration#

It integrates well. Way better than Rainloop ever did.

It has support for multiple Nextcloud apps.

  • Contacts
    • I am yet to set this up, but I think that you still need to setup the Dav connection.
      • But it’s a one time thing.
  • Calendar
    • I am yet to set this up.
      • After a quick look in my user settings I cannot see any Dav setup as I do with contats. May be it uses the same settings or mayble it’s set up automatically. Either way, it can be set up and I’ve seen a calendar icon appear every now and then.
  • Attachments
    • You can upload attachments directly from your Nextloud files!
      • No more downloading a file to upload it again to your Email client!
    • But you cannot save attachments to Nextcloud as of now. Or I cannot find the button. Either way it’s not there.

Speed#

As I mentioned above, you should read the README of the project. Because yes. It’s faster. By a lot. It’s almost instant and that’s running from a Raspberry Pi 4 from a harddisk! But what does the most is the better pulling of emails. That’s what took the most time when you opened you client and this one is fast.

Conclusion#

Install it! I mean it, give it a try. It’s a really good app with all the good from Rainloop with so many things added/made better. It’s really worth at least a try.