I think non-webmail has been more trouble than it's worth for some time now.
Webmail is not great when you’re juggling several addresses and I don’t see that changing soon.
The Future of Thunderbird
221–230 of 473 posts
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact. Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients. I feel like just switching to maildir acro…
Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.) The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not a…
Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be. Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders full of small files. Hedgewars too.
I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer.
But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#223Unfortunately, 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…
If you’re on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender, can absolutely kill Thunderbird’s performance. There seems to be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be automatically scanned.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.) The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not a…
Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be. Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders full of small files. Hedgewars too. I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer. But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.
So much depends on the specific APIs, of course, and how many versions of Windows you are expecting to support, and what your seek patterns and locking expectations/behavior are. (In my experience, it has been misunderstandings of the Windows file lock model/ACL lookups that seem more often the problem than directory size, but obviously everyone's benchmarks are different. File locks are super "slow", especially if you are not opting out of locks you don't need.)
I'm not suggesting that architecting with lots of small files in a single folder is yet the best architecture on Windows, just that for Maildir specifically on Windows it is among the least of the problems.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#225Hopefully this is more than a UI improvement and also tackles pretty awful UX.
I use catch all mailboxes to combat spam after moving away from Proton, and thunderbird makes me "subscribe" to each one. If I'm not expecting a new mailbox to be created, I simply don't see it.
Plus, the subscription process takes 30+ second per mailbox. The entire UI just freezes. I also have to unsubscribe first, because the checkbox is already marked, and then re-subscribe. Perhaps this is some leftover of mail protocols that makes little sense anymore, but I digress.
I'm ready for email to just die. I don't know what a good alternative is but email feels like the printers of software.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#226Uhg. 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.
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Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#227So 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 be…
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Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#228i hope they will make it better, though I expect they will make it worse. much worse.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#229After all those horror stories of people getting locked out of Google, I started using Thunderbird as my email backup. Took a while to get all my emails but now that they have been downloaded, I just run it as a backup tool to fetch the emails. If I had to ask, more than improving the UI (which is an initiative I have nothing against), improving the performance (mainly search) should be accorded high priority.
If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#230> Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.
I bet you can go on Slashdot and find a thread from a million years ago with people saying they will never switch to this trendy new Thunderbird and that you can pull their pine/elm/mutt from their cold dead hands. I remember a time when running X11 with twm and an xterm was considered too fancy