I love eM Client. I’ve been using it for years on Windows. Unfortunately I’m also dumping windows and any applications that ONLY run in Windows. It’s going to be painful, but it’s necessary to stop MS from continuing to use it’s customer base (me for one) as a product.
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Maybe you could think about launching a kickstarter campaign selling linux licenses in advance?
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I read an article singing the praises of wine 11. I have seen various comments that emclient sort of works with wine 8 but has anyone tried with latest wine?
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Not yet, and I can’t imagine that the behavior under Wine will be anywhere near that of a native version, but we should give it a try 
I know many people looking for good native email clients for Linux and there is none besides Thunderbird on that professional level. With a native emclient for Linux, this would change a lot. I guess emclient could have a lot of new users.
I have another tool that was Windows only. They also prepare for cross platform and switched to .NET and Avalonia UI. Linux now has about 5% market share on desktops and first companies prepare for more to come.
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Installed wine 11 on mint 22 and then downloaded the msi of emclient and installed via wine.
It installs. It starts. But setting up a new client crashes the app when changing the authentication name in outgoing server for pop3 (default is my email address - changing that crashes emclient)
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Copy/pasting the text below as I found it (haven’t tested this yet):
I remember there being talk about how to get eM client to run on linux in the past and i just tried and it worked flawlessly (I think, I didn’t really like it so haven’t used it much and went back to thunderbird) using bottles with their “caffe-9.7” runner. just give it the .msi eM client installer from their website and go through the setup as normally
just for posterity: there’s this error at the start of the installation
no idea what it means so just hit okay and continue on with the installation and it will still work
and this is the runner you want:
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This works. I had not heard of bottles. Installed, set up “bottle” using cafe 9.7 as you suggested. Then run the emclient msi and then set up an account.
This time it allowed me to define a pop3 account under “other”. Then it gets interesting because though I am running 10.4.4xxxx on both windows and linux, they are slightly different. So under accounts, options such as remove email from server, copy new email to sent, etc, etc are missing. But pop3 works.
Need to run it several more times to properly investigate but so far so good.
Thanks for help.
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Cool - thanks for the feedback.
I’m using Betterbird on Linux for now.
I suppose it is not profitable to develop Em Client for Linux because that is a tiny market compared to Windows and even Mac, but I for one would be happy to pay for it. Betterbird is great, but Em Client is better.
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I’m using Bettebird too, works great never had a problem and it starts very fast.
I used cafe 9.7 and it crashed every time I opened a menu item. Changed to Sys-Wine-11.0 and so far it only crashed once, but after that looks stable
Thanks for bringing up Bottles, I used Linux for 28 years but never heard of it. 
It works really well with other apps I use e.g. VievMate (Gerber Viewer). I’m still working on Evernote.
I heard about it recently myself - from a member in the CraneMail discord channel when I mentioned how cool eM Client was (but no Linux version).
I often wonder why Mac port is possible but Linux not?
Because of windows 11 Desaster more people change to Linux.
That’s not true. That’s only “a few small minority” of Windows 10 users” globally who either have old outdated hardware and carnt upgrade or just don’t want to upgrade due to whatever reason.
I and my friends and business peeps have no issues with Windows 11. Don’t know why you say it’s a disaster. We use it everyday & works fine.
I often wonder why Mac port is possible but Linux not?
It would be a complete native rewrite in my view and you carnt just port eM Client directly to Linux.
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Don’t know why you say it’s a disaster.
If around 50% do not upgrade or can’t upgrade, it is not a good sign.
And a search in web told me it is about 13-25% of the users which can not upgrade to 11 because of hardware - IMHO not a small minority. Around 180 to 200 mio devices.
Yes, me included. And currently PCs are too expensive for me to upgrade because of RAM prices.
I considered Linux. But email software is just a smaller issue. Ive got other software which has no way to Linux.
It would be a complete native rewrite in my view and you carnt just port eM Client directly to Linux.
Its a serious question from my side. I really wonder why it is easy for Mac but not for Linux? Especially as Mac is closer to Linux than to Windows.
Thats allways the case with any Windows computer over the years. Windows 10 is over 10 years old now and Windows 11 is also nearly 5 years old now. So need new hardware.
If you carnt afford a new pc, then I would look around for a eg: cheaper second hand refurbished Win 11 or Mac computer. Lots of home and business peeps sell them on the second hand market hardly used near new and sometimes with warranty too. Suggest to look around.
It’s all about licences and the need/risk to open the source to public, I guess. A lot of basic functions (libraries) are derived from the OS. Doing the same on Linux distros could result in having to apply GPL instead of LGPL. Maybe AI brings us closer to overcome that in future, by checking and dividing. Implementing to Linux distros is not as easy as adapt the code to the compiler and OS, unfortunately. And Linux itself is just the kernel - it’s hard to support every distro then.
Edit: An approch could be a Java eMClient (poor) or a complete rewrite in a new established daughter company to divide and protect the HQ. Using a free OS also brings the free-of-charge-idea. People are likely less ready to pay for software (mainly you only pay for support here, not software) that brings one or two more functions (that they use) or a better design, when there’s something free that fulfills their basic needs.
Doing the same to Linux distros by eM would require a rethinking. Maybe a fork of a good basic client or as an add-on. eM could use its reputation and fan base by labeling an eM adapted client and adding unique or rare features, e.g. “Thunderbird - eM Edition” or “eM Bird”. Thereby also making clear: it’s not eM Client.
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“This works. I had not heard of bottles.”
But… I literally told you… back in November 2025. I’ve been using eM Client since then.
@Thornskade since you have been using it since November 2025, has it been reliable? Have you run into issues or errors while using eM Client in a Bottles environment?
Would be interesting to hear more Linux users trying to use Linux Bottles (https://usebottles.com/) to see if that might be the solution to get eM Client running in a Linux environment in a reliable way. I think right now using something like that is probably the only solution to get eM Client to run on Linux since it has already been explained by eM Client staff that it is not easy to port to Linux, and the financial incentive doesn’t make sense for them based on platform desktop usage. So I think the best near-term solution is to use a WINE based solution like Bottles to run eM Client on Linux.
@lancealot With the runner sys-wine-10.0 (now 11.0) I’ve run into three minor visual issues:
- Text doesn’t render on notifications (until they fade out) so while notifications work you get no info until you check the main window
- Maximizing the window causes the desktop environment’s window decorations to appear but the content isn’t shifted down so it overlaps the search bar (but it’s still partially visible and usable)
- Lack of anti-aliasing on profile icons which appear pixelated, not smooth
Functionally everything seems to be working though other than these graphical discrepancies. I imagine they could work with custom runners or Windows libraries but I haven’t experimented with that. I should probably check how to add custom runners to Bottles.
I switched from the default runner Bottles uses (soda something) to sys-wine because with soda, eM Client would crash any time a pop-up menu would appear.
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I am not sure, if Linux users would not buy for licenses. I would 
Maybe it depends on the kind of users. Till now, maybe you are right. But with the upcoming of Linux for typical users, this could change.
Thanks for the betterbird advice. I would never rely on an emulated version of emclient. Thus, betterbird will be the way to go for Linux maybe.