Ergonomics and security of graphical email clients

Inbox

Attitude Thing

The Edit menu gives you access to a visually modern-looking, unusually detailed configuration dialog that is divided into several categories accessed from a buttonbar at the top of the window (Figure 12). You can change the appearance, modify key combinations for quick access, create signatures for outgoing email, or make general settings. In the Accounts group, you can also integrate additional mail accounts into the client.

Figure 12: In Mailspring, you complete the configuration from numerous dialog boxes.

Security

Mailspring currently offers neither an option for encryption with OpenPGP nor an option for S/MIME cryptosystems. However, for transport encryption of content, the common TLS specifications are implemented in the mail program.

You can filter out unwanted messages by manually tagging them as spam, after which the client moves them to the spam folder. No rules can be defined, nor does Mailspring perform any genuine spam filtering. For email providers that operate spam filters on the server side, this shortcoming is not significant. However, if you operate your own IMAP server that delivers email to clients, you will need to add a spam filter there to avoid time-consuming manual sorting of spam on the clients.

Plugins

The modular Mailspring supports extensions. The developers explicitly invite users to write their own plugins and publish them on a community platform. The project provides detailed documentation for developing such extensions. Themes for customizing the appearance of the application can also be downloaded here and integrated into Mailspring. If needed, you can even design your own theme and make it available for other users to download. The corresponding documentation is available for this, too.

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