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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

71–80 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#71

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that's not much of a bar. Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index…

> To my knowledge, [Thunderbird] still sucks less than any other free and open option,

Have you tried Claws Mail? It's a plain native traditional email client, and I find it really snappy.

There is even a Windows port. Not sure how "native" people might consider that as it's still based on GTK for Windows, and I don't have personal experience with it, but might be worth giving a try?

https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing featur…

> no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars. I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.

Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1]. It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean. [1] https://mimestream.com/

I second Mimestream, never had a problem until their most recent bug yesterday. They are fast on fixes though.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#77
post #64

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing featur…

I have multiple 0365 accounts, have done for years, and don't pay for a plug. Not sure what's different with your O365 auth process.

Signatures are a pain.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#78

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the m…

It has becoming rather frustratingly slow.

You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't make this better.

Probably worse.

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