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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#331

Post by solson4 »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #34

> 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.

On the other hand, I gave thunderbird a try after switching to linux and found their UI so bad that it was harming usability. After the app had finished taking up the screen with various controls, settings and the list of messages, there was a tiny window left over to read the email itself, and it seemed like the threading of messages was basically broken. It wasn't that it looked old exactly that bothered me (although it did), but that I was buried in a mountain of jank from the start.

I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#332

Post by HNAbusesUsers »

GordonS wrote: post #64
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

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…

How does it "not support" Office365? No Exchange support?

Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#333

Post by Gare »

neogodless wrote: post #83
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

> 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."

You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#334

Post by kdtsh »

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)?

Maildir support has been considered beta for a long time in Thunderbird, and using it for anything ‘critical’ doesn’t sound possible unless you like to live dangerously (for me, everything to do with email is critical- some messages are more important than others, but I really can’t deal with email being unstable, it’d be like the postal system being consistently unstable). Do you use the maildir format with Thunderbird? - if you have, how do you find it?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#335

Post by kdtsh »

yamtaddle wrote: post #152
mauvehaus wrote: post #60

Earlier 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?

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

I’ve found search in Mail.app to be hopeless, and the solutions you see online of rebuilding Spotlight indexing or deleting-and-recreating your accounts in Mail.app aren’t really solutions in my eyes since they don’t fix the root of the problem (or do so incidentally and invisibly). I use Mail.app only because it integrates with iCloud and my iPhone, otherwise I would go all-in on Thunderbird. On non-Apple machines I always use Thunderbird.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#337

Post by soundsgoodtome »

iillexial wrote: post #107
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #34

> 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.

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

I mean, dark mode would be nice.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#338

Post by lawgimenez »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #322
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance. For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings. Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that…

In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#339

Post by WalterBright »

My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption.

Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem).

Another minor thing I'd like to see is don't hide everything in multiple places.

There's still no way to backup my account settings.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#340

Post by mcny »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #322
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “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…

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance. For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings. Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that…

> I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.

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