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Can we just agree to throw wads of cash at Thunderbird so that we can have an e-mail client that isn't dependent on Google's whims (both for good and for ill)?

Can we just agree to throw wads of cash at Thunderbird so that we can have an e-mail client that isn't dependent on Google's whims (both for good and for ill)? I like some of the features of Gmail (i.e., labels), but I'd prefer that we as a society try to move back to a more provider-agnostic internet.

awalton 9y ago
Feel free to put your money wherever you want. We're not stopping you from funding Thunderbird development. ...we're just gmail users because, however sadly, it's still the best damned mail client on the planet. Nobody's even come close since 2004. Everyone's had plenty of time to write a replacement - nobody has because email is a terrible technology and it's a thankless chore to work on/with.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  FastMail's client is way zippier than Gmail's (seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments without waiting for things to load, you wonder what black magic they're using to make it appear so seamless). Of course, it isn't free. Gmail's interface hasn't significantly improved since... maybe smart labels, several years ago? I'd argue it's been surpassed, and most of it's features are par for the course today. A much larger reason people are Gmail users is because it's incredibly hard to move providers if you have an (at)mailprovider.com email address.
  - shazow 9y ago
    Also Gmail's spam filtering is still unparalleled. I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh. Kinda wish they released their spam filtering service as a stand-alone service.
    - jon_adler 9y ago
      You can customise your Fastmail spam filtering if needed, however after 15 years of Fastmail email, I still get virtual zero spam.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      I barely get any spam at all on FastMail. The spam I do get is classified fairly well, but I haven't even gotten enough spam in the 18 months since I switched to FastMail to get personalized filtering enabled! (200 spam messages) Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit. I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.
      - shazow 9y ago
        I'm very happy to share to and benefit from the collective emails of other users, because it yields noticeably better results for me. With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important. Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.
        ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        The ideal case would be if the default options for spam filtering worked really well, and you could also still go tweak the levers if you wanted. It's not that Gmail doesn't have levers for adjusting spam filtering, it's just that Google has decided you shouldn't be allowed to adjust them yourself. I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.
        shazow 9y ago
        Yea, my goes-to-gmail email is my "public" email that has been around since forever and is in plaintext on a bunch of websites and every commit etc.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      The only reason Gmail's spam filtering is so good is because they have market dominance, and have much more data than anyone else. If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.
    - getpost 9y ago
      Huh? Incorrect spam filtering is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from gmail. I routinely have to check my spam 'folder' to restore messages that aren't spam.
  - awalton 9y ago
    > seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments Err, no. Scrolling through 10k emails is a UX disaster. There's a reason why Search exists, and it's this use case. If your email is properly categorized, you rarely end up with folders that large anyway. I've yet to see anyone handle email categorization and filtering anywhere close to as sanely as Gmail, and I seem to try everything about once a year, get pissed that nobody else can figure it out, and go right back to Gmail. It's especially important to someone like me who's on dozens of open source mailing lists and needs to cross-correlate conversations between lists ("[List Y] Hey I need to update X to make Y work again." "Go talk to someone on list X and file a bug on X's tracker..." "[Bugtracker X] Bug for making Y work again" is an incredibly common email workflow in OSS-land). My biggest pain in email these days is that Gmail hasn't implemented any kind of smart filter for idiots that can't figure out their own email address - (namely, people signing up for email lists and using services thinking they have my email address... I keep getting incredibly absurd why-the-hell-are-you-even-emailing-this email including medical records, police reports, travel documents, confidential legal communications, etc. from people who share my particular first-letter-last-name pair).
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      I certainly don't scroll through a 10,000 email folder while looking for something, but my point is that the UI can handle it, and does so with incredible speed. I more or less feel Gmail's filtering thinks it's smarter than it is, it doesn't value my opinion much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203
- fredsted 9y ago
  I’ve always used Mail.app with almost no issues, what makes Gmails web app superior?
  - riobard 9y ago
    Search.
  - 0xCMP 9y ago
    Mail.app works fine, but doesn't provide the underlying service and quality Gmail does. It's just a client (which I guess is the current topic). I'd say the Mail.app is better than Gmail because of it's design and UX, but it often freaks out on "large" actions like bulk deletes or moves. Gmail the app only reads what it needs, allows easily selecting many emails (>50 at a time), and filtering. You can obviously search, filter, and do bulk actions in Mail.app too, but I find the versions in Gmail to be way better because they're either faster or more reliable. Mail.app also doesn't totally understand Gmail's tags and that an email appears in multiple folders. I'm always afraid of moving emails around in Mail.app.
  - awalton 9y ago
    1) I'm not always on a Mac. In fact, I'm most frequently not on a Mac. And even on my Mac laptop, I spend my day in Linux VMs and interact with few pieces of Apple-native software. An email client I use must be portable, and web software is preferred since, well, nobody wants to write Linux client software anymore (or if they do, it's just an Electron app, which at that point I'm better off using a web version anyway). 2) Filtering and categories are still unparalleled, a decade on. Nobody's even come close to the power of Gmail's tagging and filtering. (Seriously, if you want to see just how bad the competition is, fire up Outlook Web Access and try to create some, even really basic, filters. You'll commonly end up with multiple copies of emails or broken read-state tracking, broken threading, etc. I'm forced to use OWA at work and it's excruciating to the point where I simply don't use their filters at all and deal with Inbox Hell by searching alone.) 3) Searching. Gmail's search engine doesn't seem to have suffered as badly as Google's main search has over the years, and as so it still remains incredibly powerful for "power users" like myself. By comparison, OWA's searching feels like something a CS student would implement in class to check a box on a requirement list.
- spike021 9y ago
  Sparrow was neat. And then Google bought it. Now it's gone forever.
  - jiveturkey 9y ago
    i cried that day
- CSMastermind 9y ago
  If they make me switch to inbox full time I'm done. It's a genuinely terrible design.
- briandear 9y ago
  ..web client. With Apple Mail, I can’t remember the last time I went to an actual webpage to check email.
- DrScump 9y ago
  the best damned mail client ... that still doesn't let you save selected emails to flat files for external use. I have to label with Imap / import into Thunderbird to do what I could do with Agent 20 years ago... or with mail(1) or mailx on SunOS 30 years ago.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Can we just agree to throw wads of cash at Thunderbird No, but go ahead and throw wads of your cash at Thunderbird.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  I can't. I converted all my cash to a proof-of-work based altcoin called TBirdCoin, development stagnated, and now I'm broke.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    At least it scales well.
dllthomas 9y ago
I like nmh, FWIW.

awalton 9y ago

Feel free to put your money wherever you want. We're not stopping you from funding Thunderbird development. ...we're just gmail users because, however sadly, it's still the best damned mail client on the planet. Nobody's even come close since 2004. Everyone's had plenty of time to write a replacement - nobody has because email is a terrible technology and it's a thankless chore to work on/with.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
FastMail's client is way zippier than Gmail's (seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments without waiting for things to load, you wonder what black magic they're using to make it appear so seamless). Of course, it isn't free. Gmail's interface hasn't significantly improved since... maybe smart labels, several years ago? I'd argue it's been surpassed, and most of it's features are par for the course today. A much larger reason people are Gmail users is because it's incredibly hard to move providers if you have an (at)mailprovider.com email address.
- shazow 9y ago
  Also Gmail's spam filtering is still unparalleled. I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh. Kinda wish they released their spam filtering service as a stand-alone service.
  - jon_adler 9y ago
    You can customise your Fastmail spam filtering if needed, however after 15 years of Fastmail email, I still get virtual zero spam.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I barely get any spam at all on FastMail. The spam I do get is classified fairly well, but I haven't even gotten enough spam in the 18 months since I switched to FastMail to get personalized filtering enabled! (200 spam messages) Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit. I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.
    - shazow 9y ago
      I'm very happy to share to and benefit from the collective emails of other users, because it yields noticeably better results for me. With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important. Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        The ideal case would be if the default options for spam filtering worked really well, and you could also still go tweak the levers if you wanted. It's not that Gmail doesn't have levers for adjusting spam filtering, it's just that Google has decided you shouldn't be allowed to adjust them yourself. I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.
        shazow 9y ago
        Yea, my goes-to-gmail email is my "public" email that has been around since forever and is in plaintext on a bunch of websites and every commit etc.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    The only reason Gmail's spam filtering is so good is because they have market dominance, and have much more data than anyone else. If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.
  - getpost 9y ago
    Huh? Incorrect spam filtering is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from gmail. I routinely have to check my spam 'folder' to restore messages that aren't spam.
- awalton 9y ago
  > seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments Err, no. Scrolling through 10k emails is a UX disaster. There's a reason why Search exists, and it's this use case. If your email is properly categorized, you rarely end up with folders that large anyway. I've yet to see anyone handle email categorization and filtering anywhere close to as sanely as Gmail, and I seem to try everything about once a year, get pissed that nobody else can figure it out, and go right back to Gmail. It's especially important to someone like me who's on dozens of open source mailing lists and needs to cross-correlate conversations between lists ("[List Y] Hey I need to update X to make Y work again." "Go talk to someone on list X and file a bug on X's tracker..." "[Bugtracker X] Bug for making Y work again" is an incredibly common email workflow in OSS-land). My biggest pain in email these days is that Gmail hasn't implemented any kind of smart filter for idiots that can't figure out their own email address - (namely, people signing up for email lists and using services thinking they have my email address... I keep getting incredibly absurd why-the-hell-are-you-even-emailing-this email including medical records, police reports, travel documents, confidential legal communications, etc. from people who share my particular first-letter-last-name pair).
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I certainly don't scroll through a 10,000 email folder while looking for something, but my point is that the UI can handle it, and does so with incredible speed. I more or less feel Gmail's filtering thinks it's smarter than it is, it doesn't value my opinion much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203
fredsted 9y ago
I’ve always used Mail.app with almost no issues, what makes Gmails web app superior?
- riobard 9y ago
  Search.
- 0xCMP 9y ago
  Mail.app works fine, but doesn't provide the underlying service and quality Gmail does. It's just a client (which I guess is the current topic). I'd say the Mail.app is better than Gmail because of it's design and UX, but it often freaks out on "large" actions like bulk deletes or moves. Gmail the app only reads what it needs, allows easily selecting many emails (>50 at a time), and filtering. You can obviously search, filter, and do bulk actions in Mail.app too, but I find the versions in Gmail to be way better because they're either faster or more reliable. Mail.app also doesn't totally understand Gmail's tags and that an email appears in multiple folders. I'm always afraid of moving emails around in Mail.app.
- awalton 9y ago
  1) I'm not always on a Mac. In fact, I'm most frequently not on a Mac. And even on my Mac laptop, I spend my day in Linux VMs and interact with few pieces of Apple-native software. An email client I use must be portable, and web software is preferred since, well, nobody wants to write Linux client software anymore (or if they do, it's just an Electron app, which at that point I'm better off using a web version anyway). 2) Filtering and categories are still unparalleled, a decade on. Nobody's even come close to the power of Gmail's tagging and filtering. (Seriously, if you want to see just how bad the competition is, fire up Outlook Web Access and try to create some, even really basic, filters. You'll commonly end up with multiple copies of emails or broken read-state tracking, broken threading, etc. I'm forced to use OWA at work and it's excruciating to the point where I simply don't use their filters at all and deal with Inbox Hell by searching alone.) 3) Searching. Gmail's search engine doesn't seem to have suffered as badly as Google's main search has over the years, and as so it still remains incredibly powerful for "power users" like myself. By comparison, OWA's searching feels like something a CS student would implement in class to check a box on a requirement list.
spike021 9y ago
Sparrow was neat. And then Google bought it. Now it's gone forever.
- jiveturkey 9y ago
  i cried that day
CSMastermind 9y ago
If they make me switch to inbox full time I'm done. It's a genuinely terrible design.
briandear 9y ago
..web client. With Apple Mail, I can’t remember the last time I went to an actual webpage to check email.
DrScump 9y ago
the best damned mail client ... that still doesn't let you save selected emails to flat files for external use. I have to label with Imap / import into Thunderbird to do what I could do with Agent 20 years ago... or with mail(1) or mailx on SunOS 30 years ago.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Can we just agree to throw wads of cash at Thunderbird No, but go ahead and throw wads of your cash at Thunderbird.

neuromantik8086 9y ago
I can't. I converted all my cash to a proof-of-work based altcoin called TBirdCoin, development stagnated, and now I'm broke.
- DrScump 9y ago
  At least it scales well.

dllthomas 9y ago

I like nmh, FWIW.