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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#461

Post by efreak »

ratiolat wrote: post #404
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've hit "Thunderbird is slow" many times and it has turned out that the reason is that GMail is applying rate limiting. I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

Gmail has all sorts of limits people don't realize, including a limit on the number of incoming emails (1/s, which does seem pretty reasonable).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#462

Post by efreak »

hedora wrote: post #386
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 miss the old UI (from like 20 years ago). 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.

SeaMonkey is still around. Dunno if they've changed the UI recently, but it was still the same old thing secretary years ago.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#463

Post by jen20 »

chrisandchris wrote: post #459
ilyt wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox. I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up > The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes wi…

Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day. How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?

I get several thousand emails a day but only a handful require reading or response.

Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.

Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.

Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#464

Post by jen20 »

ziftface wrote: post #430
account42 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one is that? Gmail and Outlook have very different (default) layouts.

That's a good point about gmail, but I was thinking of outlook, apple mail, the gnome mail client, and this one called mimestream that I use now. They all have that same familiar 3 column layout: mailboxes, list of messages, message contents. That layout has been the norm for a while, so I think calling it trendy is a bit of a stretch.

It’s also basically what Thunderbird has now, though.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#465

Post by alerighi »

Samis2001 wrote: post #323
alerighi wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be efficient. Usually pretty and efficient doesn't go well together. Pretty tools not only add useless things (such as animation, transparency, etc) that are not functional but consume resources, but also are designed towards looking good without thinking at the usability of the tool, for example a lot of whitespace and padding, big l…

In the case of houses, I would think in most cases there's less conflict between prettiness and efficiency, for things like furniture there's much less space for the aesthetics to make a given piece more or less functional or efficient. However the tension isn't entirely gone, Juicero and 'McMansions' spring to mind as possible counterexamples.

I don't think paragonating email clients to houses makes all that much sense. Unless you use them for personal stuff (but most people use mobile phones or webmails for that these days, that to manage 1 personal account it's fine) email clients are a professional tool, used at work.

So it's more correct paragonating them to a factory, where furniture doesn't need to look good but it needs to be functional, safe and reliable.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#467

Post by NavinF »

gattilorenz wrote: post #454
NavinF wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as bad as I am at actually deleting email People delete email? I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated. (Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversatio…

I don’t even archive them, I mark them as read and leave them in the inbox. What is the advantage of the archive, if you have to rely on search to find stuff anyway?

"mark as read" happens automatically whereas archive is an explicit action (pressing "e" on your keyboard after enabling hotkeys or swiping the email on mobile)

This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#468

Post by cmacleod4 »

WalterBright wrote: post #442
wankle wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You'll change your mind about liking it when it fails and you lose months/years of mail.

Surely this is what regular backups are for.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#469

Post by lathiat »

ilyt wrote: post #443
petre wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox. 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 liabil…

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox. I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up > The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes wi…

I was using thunderbird with the same very large accounts on Linux and windows.

For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.

There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#470

Post by mtrower »

soundsgoodtome wrote: post #466
mtrower wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Themes won’t get you what you want?

How do I install one on mobile?

Well tbh I didn't realize that Thunderbird had an Android release. Looks to be about a year old? That's super new in the history of Thunderbird, and I don't know anything about how it works.

If there's no theming support, then yeah, at minimum a dark mode is a totally reasonable request.

edit: or were you talking about HN?

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