17 ms·
I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was
by ultramancool 11y ago
I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a major issue on one occasion.
I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.
- rndmind 11y agoI second that. It's hard to find a functional and usable mail client. I may switch to claws for personal use, but I am still using thunderbird for work.
- shmerl 11y agoKMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.
- ultramancool 11y agoHow's the support for it on Windows and OS X?
- lmm 11y agoI don't know about support, but my experience is it works fine on Windows.
- ultramancool 11y agoWell, that's what I meant by support. Sorry for not being more clear.
- zanny 11y agoThey already released 5.0, and didn't change anything. What is more likely to happen is the development of a Plasma Mobile QML UI built on top of Kontact and the new Akonadi that you can switch between, and that the desktop version might just use a reactive designed mobile UI as default with the current UI being available as a toggle option.
- shmerl 11y agoThat's a pity. I didn't get KF5 one yet since it's still in experimental in Debian[1] and I assumed it's not usable enough. Settings UI in KMail really needs some serious streamlining. [1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kdepim https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kdepim
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI feel the same way, I love KMail but it feels like a mess whenever I have to configure it.
- triclops200 11y agoI personally use mu4e. If you've tried it a year or so ago, it has made many improvements since then. It is terminal based, but I find I can't use thunderbird any more after switching.
- jansc 11y agoSo do I. offlineimap for syncing mails with my IMAP server at fastmail and mu4e for reading mails. Search is superfast, but I miss a better handling of spam mails. Thunderbird is really good at sorting out spam once you've trained the spam filter.
- islandtech 11y agoFor Webmail or IMAP mail, look no further than Fastmail. These guys know exactly what they are doing with IMAP and they can easily accomodate your multiple accounts. I've been a Fastmail user for almost a decade. I've never been happier with any email provider (or any provider, to be honest). You pay for the service, but it's worth the money and more. You are treated like a valued customer and the support, if needed, is rapid and professional. I cannot recommend Fastmail enough.
- jccc 11y agoultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser. (Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.) EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.
- ultramancool 11y agoI'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts. If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.
- islandtech 11y agoI understand, but send these guys an email. One of the founders will likely respond to you. I used to run all my own stuff, but when my children came along, I didn't want to spend all my time chasing issues with servers. Look the Fastmail guys up. If anyone is doing email correctly, it's Rob, Bron, and the guys at Fastmail. They actually write some of the code for the Cyrus IMAP server, so if you were in doubt as to how talented these guys are, don't fear. I would now NOT trust my email to anyone else. They are that good. Yes, I know, I'm some random guy on the Internet, but I'm an IT guy, which in itself says nothing, but I'm nothing if not extremely picky about my own IT. These guys can fix any issues you may have and probably give you some awesome suggestions. They are approachable, something you will never get from any other company. They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US. Worth a call if you value good service and top-notch know-how from guys who know email better than anyone else I'm aware of. They routinely post in the Email Discussions Web site forum.
- codelitt 11y agoI think a lot of people are forgetting that there is still a community developing it since Mozilla stopped "updating" it, beyond maintenance, in 2012. The product isn't dying, just will no longer be Mozilla backed. I assume that maintenance, like ongoing updates, will be passed to the community and hopefully another company steps up to back the project. Repo for Thunderbird: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central
- click170 11y agoThanks for highlighting the repo! I too had heard development had stopped and misconstrued that to mean all development. Now I'm wondering if there are any issues I might be able to help fix. I still use Thunderbird so if I can help keep it alive, I'd like to. As parent pointed out, most of the alternatives are worse.
- codelitt 11y agoNo problem. I think everyone got out their pitchforks without reading Mozilla's announcement and looking at the repo. There are always issues to help out on. Here's a bit more info on contributing [0]. I imagine it won't change much as the project is officially handed off to the community. It's largely led by the community anyways at this point. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction
- Karunamon 11y agoI've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways: - FAST. Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) in a few days of on-and-off cleanup. - Plays well with others. Uses a bog standard Maildir format that anything sane can read (including Thunderbird, so migration should be easy), provides a very powerful hooking system which can do anything from verifying PGP signatures to checking your spelling before sending to displaying attachments. - Sane defaults. Doesn't require a lot of in-depth customization to provide the basics, and the bells and whistles are hardly out of reach. - You have a backup of your mail for free (by using OfflineIMAP) - Not hard to learn (at least for the crowd here). If you can use Vim, you can be using Mutt at full speed in less than a week. - Search capabilities that blow nearly every other project out of the water (regexes with some very cool niceties)[1] - Secure by design. Mails are rendered as plaintext, HTML is decoded by piping messages through a program like w3m. Tracking bugs can't do their job, spammers can't see that you've looked at their stuff, and you're immune to whatever image decoding bugs crop up. (Though you can still view images, it's an explicit process). Also, builtin GPG support. I followed Steve Losh's guide[2] on setting it up. [1]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html [2]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/
- jrcii 11y agoI setup something along the lines of Homely Mutt, the setup time is obscene but it's very quick and reliable
- ultramancool 11y agoHow well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed more cumbersome than Alpine for that.
- Karunamon 11y agoThat I'm not 100% sure of. I know for receiving, you'd just configure OfflineIMAP to deliver each account's messages into a different folder, and just switch between them in Mutt, but I don't know how it would work for distinct from-addresses, contact lists, etc. Some quick googling[1] makes it look like you indeed do that first thing, and then set up a hook to load a different configuration file when you enter the folder for a different mailbox. [1]: https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_with_Mutt.html https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_...
- Semiapies 11y agoI'm certainly at a loss for amother decent mail client that works on OS X and with Exchange.
- cuonic 11y agoFor a good IMAP webmail client I recommend Rainloop: http://www.rainloop.net/ http://www.rainloop.net/
- ultramancool 11y agoYeah I use it in some places actually but unless I'm missing something, you can't connect to multiple accounts, see them simultaneously and get notifications on all of them.
- jancborchardt 11y agoWhile we’re still at a pretty early pre-release version, we already do multiple accounts and unified inbox with ownCloud Mail: https://github.com/owncloud/mail https://github.com/owncloud/mail If you do try it, please let us know of your feedback in the issue tracker! :) (And that is, you can also run ownCloud with the Mail app locally. We’re working on improved caching.)
- jcurbo 11y agoThunderbird user for years here. I now use Postbox, which is (I believe) a commercial fork of Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com/ https://www.postbox-inc.com/
- mildweed 11y agoAdditionally, the Postbox search feature is way better than Thunderbird's.
- ultramancool 11y agoInteresting, I'll definitely take a look at this. I don't mind paying for it, but I'd be a bit iffy on going from a nice open source solution to a proprietary one. EDIT: Nevermind, no Linux build, that's out for me unfortunately.
- sundarurfriend 11y agoPostbox is pretty good, and would have been the solution to my mail client woes, except that: * even after you've paid for the product, the only way to get support is to pay $10 for every question you want to ask, however basic or advanced it is - and you'll need support, because... * there's erratic unpredictable behaviour at many places; is it some subtle bug in the software? or is it some weird about:config option that you have to set to get things working as expected? Who knows! If you're lucky, you'll find a solution in the Thunderbird forums that works. Often though, that dialog option has been removed from Postbox or that about:config option no longer does anything, and... * the documentation is no help. It's no worse than the average startup's help pages, except in this case, as mentioned above, there's no support - so you'd expect that to be compensated with exhaustive documentation, but no such luck. The docs cover just the most basic cases and leave all the complex interactions of emailing to your own guesswork. Also... * the devs avoid users like the plague. The only-paid-support thing is (explicitly stated as) a consequence of this, but this even extends to bug reports and feature requests - which are free of cost to submit, but the two bug reports (and one or two feature reqs) I submitted were met with only gaping silence. The interaction on Facebook and Twitter too seems limited to version announcements and rare one sentence replies. I really wanted to like Postbox, for it to be the solution, because it was quite a good product with advanced capabilities and a quite reasonable cost. But it didn't seem like a reliable option for the long run given these limitations.
- cpeterso 11y agoThunderbird usage continues to grow, almost reaching 10M users: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
- bkeroack 11y ago"didn't DPI scale properly", "strange behavior with my IMAP server", "consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system", "handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages". If you have enough rigid requirements nothing will ever be a good fit.
- ajross 11y agoThis is true, but sort of specious. The point is that for the grandparent (and me) Thunderbird meets all these requirements, and other stuff doesn't. Could we adjust our decades-mature workflow to accomodate other tools? Sure. But it would suck. So we use the tool we have that does what we want until something unambiguously better comes along.
- ultramancool 11y agoOf course! But Thunderbird does a pretty good job of all these requirements, it's the only reason I feel like I can be so stringent with them. Only reason I've been trying to leave is everyone else telling me it's bad or it's going to stop being maintained properly.
- radialbrain 11y agoI run Zimbra, and their webmail UI is the best I've seen - much more functional than GMail.
- chei0aiV 11y agoThunderbird has been forked. http://www.fossamail.org/ http://www.fossamail.org/
- johnsonjo 11y agoI saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1 https://www.nylas.com/n1
- bad_user 11y agoIt may be open source, but it's a thin client-side with your data being handled by the servers of a third party. No thanks, as trusting Google or FastMail with my email is a tough pill to swallow already, trusting an intermediary as well is way too much.
- ultramancool 11y agoYou can actually host the Nylas Sync Engine yourself so if you're seriously considering it, it's still an option.
- bad_user 11y agoInteresting. Will take a look.
- masukomi 11y agoyes, but why not just use a client that doesn't need a server-side component
- tjohns 11y agoLooking through their API docs, one of the things that I noticed is that they added a transaction log ("delta" field), which IMAP doesn't have: https://www.nylas.com/docs/#deltas https://www.nylas.com/docs/#deltas Having a server communicate with IMAP (which is slow), cache the results, and export a more efficient/log-structured alternative probably makes syncing client computers much faster.
- ultramancool 11y ago
- JupiterMoon 11y ago> probably Alpine, a CLI based client I think that Mutt might be a better option in that I think it is still maintained.
- ultramancool 11y agoI believe alpine is still maintained and it has much better multi account support than mutt.
- yunesj 11y agoCheck out MailMate! It's great! It's a robust IMAP client that has cross account message rules, smart filters, blocking external images, OpenPGP, Google's wonky IMAP implementation, great support, and a lot more. http://freron.com/ http://freron.com/
- grahamjperrin 11y agoIt's great, but not the fastest client in/on OS X. For me, Mail is faster. YMMV.