Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#341

Post by nobody9999 »

mnd999 wrote: post #307
GordonS wrote: 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…

I would add to that GPG just doesn’t work. They have support for it but if you try to use it fails to store any keys.

That hasn't been my experience at all. I used to use the Enigmail plug in which worked okay.

Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.

I can generate, store and use keys without issue.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#342

Post by nobody9999 »

HNAbusesUsers wrote: post #328
NoboruWataya wrote: post #326

I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always…

After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I…

>For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and shoulders above other MUAs, I'd have dumped it.

Then again, I have emails in TB accounts going back to 1996, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#343

Post by notpushkin »

mauvehaus wrote: post #60
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…

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?

I love Mailspring, it's modern and open source: https://getmailspring.com/

The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#344

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

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…

On my Linux machine, there's noticeable latency when scrolling through the messages pane. I use the vertical (side by side) layout, but the delay disappears when I use the stacked layout. The jankiness seems to be a function of the messages pane's height.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#345

Post by wankle »

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…

> For me it runs lightning fast

Same here, been running it for years, it even runs and looks great on my oldest (10 years old) machine.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#346

Post by migf »

imiric wrote: post #203

I'll add one more negative sentiment. > Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point. No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional b…

The thing is, people want to read html emails. MS outlook doesn't need a web browser to run, because it uses ... MS Word to render emails, which if you've ever tried to send formatted emails programmatically you'll know it's a dark, dark state of affairs.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#347

Post by wankle »

jeltz wrote: post #38
reaperducer wrote: post #35

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.

Not seeing, not at all, runs great, zero lockups, zero performance issues, looks great, how odd.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#348

Post by wankle »

winrid wrote: post #102
magnat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.

I want my email to stay in the same structure Thunderbird has now.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#349

Post by xarope »

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)?

I tried that before, blew out my storage (obviously since each small file now takes 4KiB block minimum in ext4, unless you specifically mkfs with a smaller block size or use zfs)

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#350

Post by wankle »

WalterBright wrote: post #339

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)…

> One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times.

In all the years I've used Thunderbird, it's never happened to me, several machine types.

I like the way the file/folder structure is and do not want to see it changed.

Post reply on HN