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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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171–180 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#171

Post by tlamponi »

Karellen wrote: post #71
mr_machine wrote: post #54

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/downlo…

Claws is really great, but it IME it lacked in getting the search results - I just never could find things as easily as in thunderbird; maybe I was not knowing how to "hold" it best yet, though.

That said, I need to scan through a lot of mails for some specific things, thunderbird is barely getting a long with that anymore (the day I have to setup notmuch for real seems to be around the corner), so for most people Claws search may be easily good enough.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#172

Post by ncphil »

haunter wrote: post #75

I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer... https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

Was just thinking that the other day. But Eudora, like Tbird until a short time ago, had issues with HTML mail (_1997_ era HTML maiil).

Still, if you ever do dive in I'm up for doing some beta testing!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#173

Post by yamtaddle »

mauvehaus wrote: post #169
yamtaddle wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?

You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.

I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure)

Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#174

Post by mcjiggerlog »

So much negativity in this thread, jeez.

I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04.

Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release.

I can't wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team!

[0] https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-p...

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#175

Post by ncphil »

magnat wrote: post #98
boplicity wrote: post #50

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…

> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

Damn. I _knew_ there was something I forgot to do setting up Tbird this time!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#177

Post by jraph »

narag wrote: post #112
boplicity wrote: post #50

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…

I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all. After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing. Suggestions very welcome.

My suggestion would be to wait and see.

They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options.

I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state.

Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery.

If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all?

As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now.

[1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#178

Post by pja »

boplicity wrote: post #50

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…

There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations complete immediately.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#180

Post by _a_a_a_ »

The best I can say of thunderbird is it isn't entirely broken, but I'm still looking to move away from it very soon. I need a stable reliable tool, not what TB has become (realistically, what it's always been - not good). Suggestions welcome.
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