Cross Platform Email Clients

Listed below are some of the best cross platform email clients. Most of them will work on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.


Thunderbird: Thunderbird is a free open source, cross-platform email client which has quickly gained huge popularity, with a reason. It is extremely easy to use, fairly powerful and robust. Backed by the open source community and having a good extension framework, this is the client that can have it all.

Opera M2 is the email client integrated into the Opera browser. As many other things that come out from the Opera lab, it uses an innovative approach to email, the same labeling approach that Google adopted for its web based service. M2 is a smart and flexible client.

Mulberry: Mulberry is probably the most powerful email client around. It has been designed with IMAP in mind, but provides excellent POP support too. It does require some time to get used to, but it is well worth the effort.

Columba is an email client written in Java, featuring a consistent and clean user interface and internationalization support - you can read and write messages in every language or character encoding you want. This also includes more sophisticated charsets like BIG5 or kyrillian. Columba is a safe and secure client (GnuPG, SSL/TLS), comes with integrated Bayesian spam blocking, powerful filtering capabilities, virtual folders for saved searches and is extensible through Groovy and Jython plugins.

Pine is a robust, fast and flexible command line client with excellent IMAP support.

Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail user agent (MUA) for Unix based operating systems. A Windows port is also available, which makes Mutt a fully cross platform app. Mutt is used to read mails. Not to send, fetch, or filter mails, nor to write them. To complete your mail system you might want to use sendmail to send and receive mails; fetchmail to fetch mails from external POP or IMAP accounts; procmail to process and filter incomming mails; abook to store, edit, and search your address book; and your favourite editor to write the messages. Mutt supports several standard methods for storing and accessing mail, such as mbox, mh, Maildir and IMAP.

Scribe is a small, but powerful and fast email client which can run from a removable drive. It comes with a highly accurate bayesian spam filter, an intergrated contact database and calendar. It supports all the major internet mail protocols and uses international standards where possible. The free version comes with support for one account only.

Eudora is a popular, free/adware, solid email client for Windows and Mac OS X. It is robust and extremely customizable, but many find its interface nonintuitive. It is also one of the bloatest clients around. The free versions come without a spam filter.