I use Thunderbird and I like it, but I keep wondering: shouldn't there be a way to store all email in Postgres locally, instead of on the filesystem? It just seems like it would be a great idea. I can see lots of pros and cons, but I feel like the pros would easily outweigh the cons for someone who uses Postgres often.
The Future of Thunderbird
271–280 of 473 posts
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#272They are most definitely changing the UI to be white space fancy and in-line with new users. It is a reset of features. That’s what they are doing with K9 too. Not the direction I was hoping they would go in. They should forget the rewrite. And forget the UI change. They should separate the UI stuff into a different module. And let others innovate on it. They should only focus on maintenance changes with Firefox. And…
Filelink is an add on. They have added it.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#273> 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.
> UI isn't a fashion show. Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
Ok, but whilst you wear your clothes out in front of people (a literal fashion show), few people parade their MUA's UI in front of their friends, do they? Like, get check the chrome in my mail program guys...??
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#274I use Thunderbird and I like it, but I keep wondering: shouldn't there be a way to store all email in Postgres locally, instead of on the filesystem? It just seems like it would be a great idea. I can see lots of pros and cons, but I feel like the pros would easily outweigh the cons for someone who uses Postgres often.
If you're going that route, SQLite seems like the most appropriate candidate.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.
HN is really bad on touch devices. Call me young and naive, but I mostly read HN on the couch on my tablet.
I mostly read HN on my iPhone using the website with the zoom cranked up a little bit and I find it works better than the variety of native clients available.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the…
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…
> Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.
This is a perfect example of complicating what should be a simple thing to support a very, very niche use case. Thunderbird should just use sqlite so all normal operations including search are fast across all platforms, and if you have a use case like wanting to synchronize with other mail clients using maildir, then write a plugin that will duplicate the sqlite db to a user-specified maildir.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#277> “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…
It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#278I 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...
I'm still using Eudora because I can't bear to part with it! Yes, its poor HTML renderer and lack of UTF-8 support, amongst other things, have no place in 2023, but other modern mail clients still seem to fall short on the features Eudora just gets right.
There's hope that the HERMES Mail project, which was formed after the Eudora source code was release, will one day be a viable replacement:
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).
Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?
The SMTP client is now written in javascript and most of the IMAP client as well.
The whole calendaring system is written in javascript.
The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in javascript.
Re: The Future of Thunderbird
#280> “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 quirk…
Same, I have a pretty decent gaming PC. Only about 1GB of mail in my archive from what I can see though.
Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.