381–390 of 473 posts
I don’t really need changes at this point, and find the UI is a pretty good local optimum. Information density is nice!
I hope the Thunderbird crew understand how incredibly important this software is and how much some of us depend on it. Good IMAP clients are hard to write and most civilians have become so used to crappy browser-based email that there's not much demand for IMAP clients except among people like the ones who frequent this website. Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago so now that world is basically Ou…
Please elaborate on this point. I’d like to know how it was before and how it is now.
> so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable.
Please also elaborate on why Outlook is unacceptable. I like hearing different perspectives.
I personally don’t use Outlook and don’t like it because it pushed a lot of non-standard things (for want of a broader and better word), is actually slow and painful to use, and exists to satisfy Microsoft’s agenda to make everything proprietary (AFAIK Outlook365/Microsoft365/Exchange Server by default disables IMAP, SMTP and POP citing those as insecure even though they’re usable with OAuth2).
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…
It’s been a while since I used Thunderbird and looked at its internal files. But I remember some .dat file inside the profile that stored the filters and could be copied across.
Edit: Found it. The filter rules are in a file called msgFilterRules.dat. This answer and others on super user (from more than 10 years ago) have the details. [1] I’m sure the Thunderbird forums would also have this information.
> “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 switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.
Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.
> “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…
The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.
The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.
> 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
By the time it was renamed Thunderbird, Netcraft had already confirmed /. was dead. Now get off my lawn!
> “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…