In this article, we’ll install the Outlook email client on Linux using an open-source package developed specifically for this purpose. Outlook is a personal information managing app by Microsoft. It includes a calendar, a to-do list, contacts, and of course an email service. Outlook can be very handy especially when you work in a professional environment and want an easy way to manage your day-to-day tasks (or if you are forced by the company to get Outlook).
However, Microsoft does not offer an official application or client for Linux. Thankfully the open-source community has found workarounds and it is possible to have a fully-fledged Outlook app on Linux. Let’s see how this is possible to use Outlook.
Workarounds to install Outlook on Linux
Prospect Mail is an electron-based desktop app for Microsoft Outlook. While there are other applications like Freelook and outlook-for-linux which do the same job, Prospect Mail is the most up-to-date and actively maintained. Additionally, Microsoft has also launched its Outlook service as a web app that you can run directly from a web browser which is slightly less feature-rich compared to the native Outlook client.
Native Linux Alternative
Linux also has its own email client that is very close to Microsoft’s Outlook client, which is Thunderbird. Thunderbird is routinely maintained and kept up-to-date by the Mozilla Foundation.
Here’s a Snapcraft link to help you directly install Thunderbird. Here’s a complete tutorial on how to install Thunderbird if you are still stuck.
Install Outlook on Linux using Prospect Mail
There are multiple ways to install Prospect Mail. Let’s look at the most popular ones.
Method 1: Appimage (All distributions)
This method includes downloading the latest appimage from the Github releases page and then making it executable. The latest appimage as of right now is v0.3.0.
wget https://github.com/julian-alarcon/prospect-mail/releases/download/v0.3.0/Prospect-Mail-0.3.0.AppImage
chmod a+x Prospect-Mail-0.3.0.AppImage
./Prospect-Mail-0.3.0.AppImage
Method 2: Snap (Almost all distributions)
You can use the snap package management by Canonical which is available on most popular distributions to install Prospect Mail too.
sudo snap install prospect-mail
Method 3: Distribution specific package (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Redhat)
Prospect has released distributions specific packages for Debian (and its derivatives like Ubuntu, Mint, Elementry etc), Arch (and its derivates like Manjaro), Fedora, Redhat, and CentOS. We’ll get the packages using the wget command:
- Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
wget https://github.com/julian-alarcon/prospect-mail/releases/download/v0.3.0/prospect-mail_0.3.0_amd64.deb
dpkg -i prospect-mail_0.3.0_amd64.deb
- Arch/Manjaro
wget https://github.com/julian-alarcon/prospect-mail/releases/download/v0.3.0/prospect-mail-0.3.0.pacman
sudo pacman -U prospect-mail-0.3.0.pacman
- Fedora/Redhat/CentOS
wget https://github.com/julian-alarcon/prospect-mail/releases/download/v0.3.0/prospect-mail-0.3.0.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -i prospect-mail-0.3.0.x86_64.rpm
Note: In all these commands, wget downloads the package from the official releases page. Since the latest version at the time of writing is v0.3.0, these commands install v0.3.0. In case of a new release, you can manually download the relevant package from here and install them using the package manager shown above.
Conclusion
We have covered how to install Prospect-Mail, an unofficial Outlook desktop for Linux. You can get more info regarding Prospect Mail on the official Github page.