They've also made the usability worse in recent versions and are copying the insanely annoying context menus in Windows 11, which cannot be reverted.
I normally just manage it myself and I'm extremely happy to do so, as I consider it like my dotfiles, but I understand where the parent is coming from - settings sync is becoming common. (Chrome is a good example).
The profile import is a bit iffy and there was some odd issues with downloading profiles over 2GB IIRC, the last time I did it (which was over 2 years ago).
There seems to be a lot of focus on features that IMO that I couldn't care less about and some outright stupid UI decisions like the context menus being changed after 20 years for god knows what reasons.
The result was that I just gave up and use Thunderbird on one machine and web-mail on all the others. I suspect I will just drop Thunderbird as a result.
To the hell with AI. I just need a stable email client.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/new_thunderbird_esr_i...
Anyone else noticed something?
That said:
I tried to add a new mail account to Thunderbird after upgrading to version 140. Unfortunately, it shows an error message after merely asking for my name and my email address and then hangs in an endless animation.
What developers should do on such a critical and long standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click another one when they encounter it.
I would install that and be part of the solution.
Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very occasionally the machine would give patients massive overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition.
But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield. We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively washing our hands of our own creations.
I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we could reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized layers/adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all- better testability.
I've been amazed over the years this has never been fixed -- it's very hard not to make jokes about the standard lifestyle of open-source programmers, that they don't consider this a priority (note: that's a joke, I consider myself an open-source programmer. I would hope that's obvious, but someone just bothered to sent me a mean anonymous message)
One of my biggest bugbears with Microsoft Outlook has always been that its search function is terrible. If you can't find an email then it may as well not exist, and that's been a real problem on a regular basis during my career - particularly latterly when I was in leadership and necessarily lived in my email and calendar.
It's disappointing that Thunderbird has similar issues with such a fundamental function.
Perhaps there could be an option to disable stemming completely from the inverted index, which would be probably easier to implement than a post-search filter (which in itself doesn't sound very complicated..).
But of course, it's open source, anyone could contribute :D.
Not only is the UX a horror, its results rely on all sorts of technicalities. I, as a software engineer, can understand that a mail has to be downloaded in entirety locally in order to have it indexed and then show up in the results. And I understand that sub-sub directories aren't really a thing in IMAP, so searching this-dir-and-everything below is hard/impossible and so on.
But mostly the search algorithms are poor. So much so, that I often rely on (rip)grep to find mails. Or in a few occasions wrote a quick bash/python horror to push all my mail into a meilisearch instance and then use this search engine to get the lists and filters that I would expect thunderbird to have.
Yes. It's open source. So "go fix it" is a proper reply. But that doesn't make a complaint about the state of the search feature invalid.
Worse though, in Apple Mail I'll search an email address because I got an email earlier in the week and the first thing it'll show me is an email I got from that person 3 years ago with the correct result a few down. I really need a better email client for my phone...
1. Validate input, expect all external input (both human and machine generated) to be completely bogus.
2. Fail fast and early. If something seems off, crash straight away, and do not expect things to magically repair itself at a later stage.
3. Use pre- and post-conditions where appropriate.
I'm not sure about the exact definitions of defensive programming, but static type checking, and possibly unit testing, might also be part of it.
Imagine you're writing trading software, you have an algo go haywire and it machine guns the whole order book, and then you refuse to put a "max order size" outside of the algo to stop it from happening again because you can't figure out why it happened in the first place.
Try telling a regulator or your boss that was your reasoning.
Even if the bug can't be reproduced, on the basis of multiple user reports the first step absolutely should be to add some assertions and logging around email deletion.
The point is not to give it a "100% safe" label, the point is to start narrowing down possible root causes. If the problem recurs again, you'll have assertions ruling out certain possible culprit code paths as well as logs displaying the values of relevant variables.
The answer is that you keep working at it iteratively using a combination of logging, reporting, and defensive programming to systematically narrow down the possible causes. Sometimes you never arrive at a true root cause, but you get close enough that you can mitigate the problem and finally close the ticket out. At the end of the day, the customer/user doesn't care as long as it works.
However, what will really piss them off is telling them your hands are tied until they can reliably reproduce the issue for you. It's important they understand that you are working on it, and typically they will go out of their way to help solve the problem when they feel taken care of.
This happens more often, for example when many services work together in an asynchronous way, and in some very rare situation, unwanted behavior occurs. To fix that, it is often easier to reason through the entire process, and to identify weak spots. It might even be a good idea to switch to a different paradigm to avoid certain bugs altogether.
For this particular bug, I would start by reading a lot, and ensurong that the bug is indeed not easily reproducible (by trying to make it reproducible of course). If that fails, I would continue to think about root causes for the bug, and possible workarounds that would work in theory. Then I would try to estimate the amount of work required, and the risk of breaking other things, and report that to those who like to decide on further actions.
And of course, as I know very little about the inner workings of ThunderBird, I would simply ask ChatGPT o3 or similar for advice. It comes up with a plan that seems reasonable.
Sometimes, you can add some additional steps, logging, change behavior in corner case a bit, either to get more understanding next time it happens or even mitigate it. Sometimes, you have plenty of tools and ways to act. In my experience, that sometimes is basically always if one cares enough.
Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce, you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails around for some time so users have the option to restore them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk space management (your local drive is overloaded and you want to urgently free up space) or ux confusion (this is a de facto trash but Thunderbird already has such a feature)
Ultimately, what needs to be done is make the code robust, make sure there are no race conditions, etc.
Now even if we neglect the timeline, Rust only guarantees memory safety. If TB is deleting mails on the server too, then the corruption is happening over IMAP connections as well. Does that sound like a memory safety bug to you? Perhaps it is. But how do we eliminate the possibility of a logical bug that Rust won't protect you against, when nobody has any clue even now? And all that aside, if you're going to rewrite it in Rust, you might as well start a new project in Rust instead of porting an old design that may potentially contain a language-agnostic logical Heisenbug.
I'm not trying to be hostile here. I started using Rust in 2013 (I have 12 years of experience in a 10 year old language, and a bunch of repos that I can't compile anymore unless I compile the compiler from old commits somehow!). I wouldn't use C or C++ for any of these applications - I simply don't have enough competence to avoid the kind of bugs that Rust protects me from (despite being a hardware engineer with more knowledge about memory management than about type system theory). Despite all that, statements like this will only cause an unwanted backlash against Rust. Not that you're entirely wrong, but some people are so offended by such suggestions for reasons that are still under investigation, that they start a crusade against Rust [1].
My point wasn’t that this is a great solution, just that it is very easy and almost certainly better than doing nothing for almost two decades.
I don’t think LLMs are the answer to everything, but this would be a good test for newer generations of LLMs as they’re developed.
Worst case- it deletes all of your emails, but that would’ve happen anyway, right? =)
No, not at all. It's very easy.
This bug involves taking an inappropriate action under corrupted conditions. You don't need to know how those conditions arose. All you have to do is check whether they currently obtain, and - if so - refrain from taking the inappropriate action.
For this bug, that looks like this:
1. When we're executing a "move"...
2. Before deleting the original messages...
3. Check whether the copies are identical to the originals...
4. And if not, delete the copies instead of the originals.
At this point, the bug can't occur. The "root cause" bug, where your buggy logic says that you copied a bunch of messages even though you didn't, can still occur, but it can no longer delete any messages.
Literally nothing stopping anyone in this thread from opening a PR with this reportedly “very easy” fix that’s eluded developers for nearly two decades, and is so terrible folks swear off Thunderbird forever because I guess for email very basic rules for backing up data don’t apply (or something?) and/or Gmail and Outlook are implicitly trustworthy?
Hell, what if the offending commit was 2 decades ago by someone who's cut off all contact regarding code since?
the fact that they choose not to, makes me perfectly OK with them being held criminally liable.
And I know its not criminal, im saying it SHOULD be criminal not to warn people about this. its more than a decade
It's a genuine question because I'm puzzled here.
A very small number of users have this bug (and tbf, it's a really bad bug), and are unable to consistently reproduce it and it seems none of the developers have been able to (the seemingly random nature of the bug occurring is not helping). How is it supposed to be fixed?
Said another way - If they can't reproduce it, they can't close it.
They may well have fixed it already, but without a way to reproduce it the only prudent behavior is to leave it open and wait for the next diagnostic file to be uploaded.
You strangle it from the edges.
An acquaintance of mine were twice hit with a bug that corrupted Word documents stored on iCloud if editing on her iPad. Searching online yielded others with the same problem from more than one year ago...
> you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
I think you've just made an assumption about a bug that was reported 17 years ago. Assuming nothing has been done since. It looks like they can't reproduce it, *making it impossible to mark as fixed* even if it was. But I wouldn't assume nothing was done.
Also remember that Gmail, Outlook, and others are in play here. They also maintain trashed items for 30 days, making it easy to recover. As the provider, they shouldn't make it easy to mass delete things either, right? TB is just the interface, frankly, I'm not sure I know how to permanently delete emails with it. I'm not sure I can. But the interaction here should result in multiple lines of defense.
> How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.
I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.
As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably), but that would have significant performance impacts in the 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem is preferable.
The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that you are probably the prime person to gather more data on this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.
Same but I never move my emails to local folders.
But OP said it also deletes the message in the server, so it may be a different bug, right?
Even if the software doesn't have known bugs, I do it if the data is important enough and especially if I were to not have a backup (for example, because the storage provider takes care of backups and redundancy. I personally like to have another copy that I manage myself, but how many people have their IMAP emails or Spotify playlist data backed up for example? I do, but not many people I think)
But this does seem to be a different issue from the one OP mentioned. Seems to be actually this one: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/thunderbird-searc... (with suggested solution)
Emails to email client is an engine to the car. It is pointless without one and it is THE purpose of it. All the rest of functionality like fancy UI, filter, notifications, editor is meaningless if your emails were deleted without recovery. Even car without engine is more useful than email client with empty DB.
That said, even if the bug is impossible to isolate, it sounds like the chain of events that leads to it is known. They probably should disable the feature until someone is motivated to fix or replace the code. I'm sure that would anger a lot of people, but someone angry about the loss of a feature is probably better than someone who is angry at the loss of data. Especially given that the feature seems to be something someone would use to archive their mail.
I wont be using any email client that can break and delete all my emails from local and the server. Why would i? It may be a lottery but it isnt one i want to play.
The fact that they see this as low priority shows theyre morons.
Who would say 'yes please' to an email client that might permanently destroy some of your most important data at random?
Far too focused on the engineering POV than the optics and trust/reputation damage. My kind of moronic, but still moronic.
When I updated the configuration in K-9, it contacted the fastmail server, found that the mail it had locally wasn't also present there, and immediately deleted all my local copies.
That's not a "bug" in the sense of unintended behavior of the software, but it certainly seems like the software designer's goal is to hurt the user. I obviously didn't want that to happen. There is no scenario where I would want that to happen.
Email clients make some strange assumptions about what kind of actions make sense under what conditions.
1. Copy from source to destination
2. Verify copy has completed without issue
3. Delete from source
but... some other way? So when you try to move from a server folder to a local client folder by an innocent looking drag an drop, combine this with a poor network connection, a garbage tier legacy protocol like IMAP and decade old C++ spaghetti code, and you get this textbook 17 year old severity 1 bug that will never get fixed.
(see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c69 )
Of course, it isn't; they're relying on an unstable proxy for "copy has completed without issue" in preference to just checking whether that happened or not. Several rather angry users have pointed this out. It doesn't seem to have sunk in.
I've so often had debates and threads in issues where a developer entrenched in a domain has so much domain-knowledge (ie. tunnel vision) that "technically correct" or "by the spec" is the only correct way. I've been that developer in many cases too, in hindsight.
It really is just bad rep and like the severity of this is pretty bad.
Email is a really critical protocol so even if this is happening to only some people, it should still be fixed asap.
I have a similar bug at my job: Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database, or otherwise corrupt it. It's been an issue for years, but no one has been able to reproduce it. It's probably a 1 in 10 million bug.
I think it's a hardware bug. My "fix" was to backup a small, but key, part of the database to a separate storage mechanism browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to detect the missing data and restore part of the db.
BUT! If this is actually a hardware bug, there is a chance that this additional database write will cause this big to occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice as often!
Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders.
[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...
I'll keep using TB. I'll also make sure to look both ways when crossing streets and won't assume that cars are going to stop for red lights because my chance of getting hit crossing a street is more likely than getting hit by this bug.
Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track down. There years of comments without people including system information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes." It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would you solve this use?
FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not being able to connect to the server and having to resend an email.
On the other hand, when using Apple Mail:
- messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB.
- Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through or ends up double sending.
- Searching will pull up emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching foo@bar.com).
- I can't even tag emails!?!?
- Do filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses you can't block because emails you need come from the same addresses?
- It straight up renders PDFs inline with no warning, helping spammers.
- There's no folders and everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does anyone find anything?
I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at email?
My Thunderbird installation tends a 20 year old work mailbox with tens of thousands of messages, and the search works the way I want even though I don't download the messages themselves to save some disk space.
If you are using your installation for a very long time, your local caches might have broken at some point, because Thunderbird was bad at that kind of thing, but now it's not.
For folder order, I can't tell anything about it, but 13 years of folders are just a wrist-flick distance on a 2K display, and shouldn't be much worse at an 1080p one, either. So, it might be fair criticism, but it's nitpicking.
I never experienced "lost messages" for a very long time, and my progress bar is currently sitting empty, despite that installation is handling 5 busy mailboxes.
You may need to delete some cache and local MBOX files and restart your Thunderbird, it seems.
I'm in the inbox, I see an email with 'word' in the Subject in some of the most recent emails.
I type 'word' in the search box and TB finds some emails from the years ago.
It's even worse if it is 'word and some another word', in this case it doesn't even find anything.
It's like the developers... aren't dogfooding their own product?
Oh, yeah, we do now have TWO search boxes. Because that makes sense. And if you disable the topmost one, there is now 30px of wasted space you cannot reclaim. Because you definitely NEED that hamburger menu on the RIGHT side. On the desktop. On the 4k+ monitor. Riiight.
Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.
Setting up server-side Xapian full-text search and disabling the crap client-side one in Thunderbird was one of the best improvements I made to my email usability. What makes your client-side search better? It's usually not speed I'm looking for, but rather precision, such as double quoted phrases (sorely missing from Thunderbird's client-side search), filtering by a mixture of things, etc.
I wish more clients had an option for server-side-only search (looking at you, iOS Mail.app) and/or had a nice UI for it (ctrl+shift+f dialog in Thunderbird is janky but gets results)
It is able to use BM25, QPS, or PT15.
We're still playing around with various weights/settings, but have seen fantastic results so far.
What do you mean by "double quoted phrases"? Do you mean the ability to search for an _exact_ term?
>web-tech
Pick one.
I couldn't find any info on whether this is FOSS or what license it uses.
Its cool that we don't need a third-party plugin for that anymore.
He ought to practice what he preaches. Due to a combo of shitty eyes and dyslexia, I cannot read his site's dark theme without getting a headache.
You can also read the site in reader mode.
(Of course I critically evaluate the measurement, like one time I actually couldn't read faraway text with what they were proposing whereas I could with my old glasses. But I don't know the exact values or terms for the different defects, I think my eyes have at least three different issues including something about rotation as astigmatism apparently means)
I guess what I'm asking is why you don't have glasses. Are they too expensive in your area, or the defect only very minor so it doesn't impede safety when driving even on highways? (Then I'm surprised you get nauseous though, since I don't when I read anything without glasses, regardless of dark or light mode.) Or if you do have glasses, is this still an issue while wearing them? If so, any idea why?
Also I generally don’t wear the glasses unless I’m working (with a computer of course) or driving. I also have myopia, but both my astigmatism and my myopia are mild. The problem is much more severe when it’s dark, so I always wear my glasses when it’s dark and I very rarely wear them during the day. I must always wear them if I intend to use the computer for a long time, though. Especially if I’m staring at a terminal or whatever else with white letters on a black background. But I don’t need them to read (black on white, not too far away) or to use my mobile (always closer to my face than my monitor).
Judging the distance/speed of other cars during the night without glasses is simply impossible despite my mild prescription.
Another comment I saw in the meantime, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520306, proposes a mechanism for why one might have what I'd call ghosting if it were a computer screen (apparently it's called halation for eyes). That that can lead to nausea or generally feeling like things swim together and you can't see as well makes sense, this might explain a lot
I'll mention this to the friend and maybe we can do some tests in the dark with moving objects rather than just "can you see that thing there". Maybe after all these years we can get to the bottom of this issue they've had all these years :D
If I see a white LED in the dark, the LED shows some sort of smear at a certain angle and with a certain length. The length of the smear decreases the closer I get to the LED. It doesn’t change ever, even if days pass, because it’s a static deformation inside my eye. It does not leave a trail if I look around or if I move the object with the LED.
This also applies to white letters on a black screen. They are smeared at an angle. If I’m far away enough and/or the letters are small enough the smear is so large that they make it hard to read and make me nauseous. That’s why I ended up buying the glasses.
https://pixelbuddha.net/storage/51621/how-to-create-a-motion...
This is an example. The trail is not as long but it’s brighter. (Just googled “motion blur letters” - the effect is similar)
It seems pretty hypocritical that they're claiming a lack of dark mode is an accessibility problem while lacking a light mode.
I think it’s also notable that websites being accessible isn’t really about being tied to a specific theme, it’s about being compatible with accessibility tooling and standards (screen readers as an example). There are plenty of CSS manipulation tools that can make a website look whatever way you want.
This is worse in people with astigmatism, which is about 35-50% of the population. Dark mode defaults, as on that website, need to die. Most of the time they're used because people use their digital devices like goblins in a cave and don't light their rooms properly, or configure their brightness settings correctly.
My goal was to get rid of the 2pm eye twitch and I've mostly got it.
[0] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&from=0&size=...
[1] Should be this one https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205
???
https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/commits/ma...
Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS.
That's... not a bad thing, though? Terry was an extremely competent engineer and programmer who designed his software to be as user-friendly, well-documented, and performant as possible.
I have conversed with Jörg, and he is blunt and fair in a good way (code itself is emotionless, after all). And, of course, he is highly competent. I have also conversed with several Mozilla teams, including Thunderbird, and the experiences were universally horrible, as in they lacked core competency. Naturally, YMMV.
I'm waiting for this feature since when I used Thunderbird in Windows XP. At the time I used the MinimizeToTray addon...
I am currently on google for my private email, and for other reasons tied into MS / Office365 anyway for my business so decided after having my business email at my internet provider initially, it all was just not worth the hassle.
95% of my business dealings is with companies that are on office 365, and especially the calendaring and RSVP'ing just kind of works in outlook.
I am still keeping an eye out and hope to be able to move to some solution which unifies it all, preferably on a nice open standards, open source solution for email, calendaring, and contacts.. but the fact is that customers pay my bills, and I grew tired of all the account issues, syncing issues etc with trying to have it all in Thunderbird.
I find it a sad state of affairs though, the amount of engineering time, energy, and money spent on building semi-walled gardens and at the same time building ladders to climb those same walls, all while never achieving an actually smooth experience between my various email accounts, my calendars, on my laptop and phone alike.
Maybe some day.
Thunderbird does at bit to much for my liking. The UI is a little messy.
If not, I guess I'll be keeping birdtray installed for now.
> Don’t like the order for your custom folders? Just click and drag to arrange them exactly how you want.
At last. Thank you.
I've been using an add on for that for a long time. It stopped working about one year ago because of some change in TB. I managed to survive but I really look forward to the update to 140.
Have you heard of Epyrus?
Homepage: http://www.epyrus.org/index.html
(The download link is easily found there, as well as git repository and forum links.)
It's based on UXP (the Unified XUL Platform) and is thus related to the Pale Moon browser (which doesn't bother me). I've been using it on Linux as a way to have an "older Thunderbird" look and feel, e.g., I have real scrollbars, and the "Send" button didn't mysteriously vanish from the Compose window with no way to get it back upon some "from the ground up redesign" upgrade.
EDIT: Typographical error, phrasing.
I only use the browser portion, so I can't say how good the email is.
Every time I've ever tried it (spanning around 30 installs over the last 15 years), I've uninstalled within a week to a month, due to sluggish UI, phantom unread emails, crashes, and text formatting issues.
I do it because I believe that one day Thunderbird could be good. Today could be the day - I've installed it, added my accounts, and it looks like the developers have made some significant improvements. I'm not talking about fancy new features, instead I'm talking about the small nitpicky problems I've had whenever I've tried to use it.
For example, this time I installed, I didn't have to go into a hidden settings menu (here be dragons) to make new emails default to the top of lists. My replies are now made above the original message. Fastmail doesn't throw a wobbly when trying to add email, calendar and contacts with the same password.
Maybe today is the last time I install Thunderbird?
You still see all the latest correspondence, but also immediately all previous correspondence from the same sender (if you expand the group) whether or not it’s a reply thread.
Now they highlight it as big deal in new release without mention volunteer author of this BASIC feature which should be in mail client FROM VERSION 0.0.1!
It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Thunderbird is best what we have (Cross-platform), but still very bad, and after killing off XUL plugins cannot be easily modified.
They exists for 21 year and now announce manual folder sorting! There is no support for Sieve (3rd party plugin? Dead after removing XUL)! There is no way to store folder settings as IMAP properties, and if I have two installations (on laptop and desktop, for example) I need repeat same setting or folders again and again — including selection of identity per-folder (again, not native functionality but 3rd party plugin, thanks, it is alive now!). No true message templates (per-folder, per-action, per-identity), only lousy "signature", broken in-line quoting in plain text messages, etc, etc, etc.
And it is best what I can use cross-platform :-(
21 years of progress and now we are here.
You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.
It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address).
It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB).
Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded the emails locally to that desktop computer).
And more.
So it wasn’t so much that Gmail is “good enough”. It was more like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn’t think they could compete - also given that Google provided the hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration - something a desktop app alone could ever do.
Note: I'm not saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the sails of desktop mail app creators.
It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filtering is still much more cumbersome than even Thunderbird one, not to say Sieve, and can be done only from web, but not from Android client. It doesn't support any crypto natively, both PGP or S/MIME.
Their are all features which I'm using daily (maybe, crypto is not daily, but still use sometimes).
Only good thing is labels, which is more flexible than tree folder structure. And, yes, full text search, obviously, as it is Google product.
As far as I remember, Thunderbird was not much worse than it is now, and it is supports most of this (though, quoting was and still is very weak, problem solved in FIDONet in 1990s!).
To be honest, I don't remember what was situation with address book and address autocompletion from it in Thundrbird before GMail, maybe there was none (but I will surprised, as, again, it worked in old TUI-based FIDONet client for DOS and OS/2), but this feature is trivial to implement in desktop app, and it could use LDAP or another centralized directory, not only addresses collected from your mail.
It was better than any web-mail, for sure, but better than desktop client? It is debatable.
1GB of storage is question of hosting, not client.
Update: Add to it modern gmail hate to self-hosting mail domains, and I could say that Google kills email as federated, free, non-vendor-dependent system. It is not surprise to me, of course, but still.
Gmail:
- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive
I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.
I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.
I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people where different people answer to different messages, gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads, only messenger-like conversations.
Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for threads is wrong.
You can put answers to same folder that message your answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not exclusion.
Update:
> smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting quirks more than once. It is solution in search of problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.
There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.
Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"
Microsoft Outlook has a very large market share in the business world. There is an old and a new GUI design version, and you can run the app, or use it online.
I don't like the presentation of the individual emails especially, I find the thread-view hard to understand, especially on mobile, but it works. Personally, I would have preferred the older folder presentation designs of 20+ years ago, for me this app is trying to be too clever - in both the old and the new GUI version. However, it is just so very widespread. I have to use it because everybody else in the company uses it.
They support a huge amount of scenarios and edge cases that many businesses now depend on, combined with all the Microsoft server side and infrastructure stuff they have of which the emails are just a very small part now.
Also, when I was forced to use it (to be honest, about 10 years ago) it works terrible with IMAP (as opposite to Exchange) servers.
I hadn't really used Gmail or Google products much, until I started at my last job, which was balls deep in the ecosystem. I loathed Gmail. One of the worst email "clients" I've used. After toggling a load of stuff in its settings it was usable, but dealing with email was a low point of my work day.
New job is Microsoft based, so Outlook, and I haven't used that in 20 years, so it will be interesting to see how enshittified it has become. I will have to run Windows on my work pc, which I'm not looking forward to.
I have switched to Thunderbird full-time since I switched to Linux. Can confirm it supports unified inbox.
100% multi-thread download and synch of folder contents, instantaneous display of messages, super-responsive.
I've tried a lot of clients on Windows and Linux and none of them get near the experience I had 20 years ago.
Does this mean anything or is it some sort of marketing gobbledygook? We can now get features faster by using the latest release rather than the ESR – but surely non-ESR releases have always been available, so this was always the case, not only now suddenly?
Also, the "dependable stability" we enjoy with the ESR release comes precisely from the software not constantly changing underneath us, i.e. from not getting new features every month.
From the Inbox screen on Thunderbird, hit Ctrl+Shift+F for a powerful search function
I then used Claws for a while, but came to really dislike it - lots of small UI issues.
Then I wrote my own email client in Python, Postgres for store, Apache/HTML front-end. That's been fantastic. Python does all the heavy lifting, you need to design a decent database.
Now I add features as I need them - few days I added the ability to specify how many times an email should be sent, when you need to spam the recipient for some reason (say, a company which is spamming you and is not responding in a reasonable or timely manner to GDPR requests).
The basic client design I've not seen elsewhere - but I've not used many clients so it may very well exist. There's a single inbox of email, and you define sets, and a set defines what is shown. So you don't move emails around between folders, you define what's shown, and you can have multiple sets concurrently - so for example, "inbound", "last 24 hours".
There are also a bunch of other small features which I've had in time for a long time but have never seen. For example, the from/to addresses have the localpart and domain separately, so you can order by domain. There's immediate in-page filtering, too, for each column, so you can just enter a few letters of what you know is the origin domain and bingo, there you go.
yakattak•3d ago
If you haven’t given Thunderbird a shot yet, you should.