Are there any reasonable alternatives (please, no outlook)? I love Thunderbird on principle but it's been years and the whole damn UI still freezes while it's downloading messages.
The Future of Thunderbird
81–90 of 473 posts
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#82I wanted Thunderbird to be the answer to the question I have been asking for years. "How to replace Outlook in the corporate environment?" Every time I investigate it, Thunderbird is a resounding no. Why? This is not the vision of the Development Team. But if it was a side goal it would afford them the development money to do all the other things.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#83> “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…
Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB.
It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."
But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#84Unfortunately, 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…
> the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.
Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#85Earlier 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/
Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#86Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable. Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.
I believe you missed the part where the codebase has become impossible to work on. This isn't change "for change's sake", it's "because if we don't, this product is dead".
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> UI isn't a fashion show. Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
Only for UI designers who put aesthetics before usability.
IOW, for most UI designers on current software products.
Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries.
If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives.
We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users.
You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#88I am still running TB 91.13.1 as there are too many issues with 102 (not just performance). I get annoyed every day by TB prompting me to upgrade (config switches did not help to suppress that).
And now this?! Guess this really is the time to look for an alternative.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#89I'm dreading the redesign, even though at the moment I have no idea of how it will look like. What webmail can one use to read and write mail for multiple accounts? I will need to have a sort of unified inbox for at least 5-6 accounts, and to see the folders of all those accounts in the same window.
It seems Roundcube [0] has a 3rd pary plugin for that[1].
There's also cypht [2], I like it's modular concept but I think it's still in alpha state.
[0] https://roundcube.net/about/ [1] https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch [2] https://cypht.org/
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
at the very least, check which version you're on. The auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.