Live data from Hacker News

The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

151–160 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#151
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.

Yeah, you can use Thunderbird with Office365 authenticating with OAuth2.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#152

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…

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?

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac?

... is Mail not OK?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#153

Uhg. 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.

You can turn off auto-updates or build off a present revision. Those won't go away.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#154
For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#156
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, that is annoying. It seems as though they are preparing to release 1.0 soon, so we'll find out soon enough.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#157

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts. I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to in…

So the solution to Thunderbird's problems is to move your email to a different piece of software?

Well, the solution to search / archive.

I could argue that those are two very different functions. I could also argue that with a new architecture, Thunderbird could satisfy both functions well. It just doesn't now.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#158
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember it was crazy fast I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware. I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk. Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.

Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#159
post #120

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts. I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to in…

| after migrating from SeaMonkey Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.

Yeah, well, being very old myself, stuff like Mosaic / Navigator / NetExplorer / SpyGlass still all seem sorta recent to me.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#160

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…

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?

Apple Mail on Mac and iOS/iPadOS works great. I'm using pobox.com (Fastmail's sibling) for forwarding.
Post reply on HN