4 ms·

This might sound glib, but as someone who has used both Thunderbird and Outlook extensively, I don't recommend any desktop email client. Email clients were desi

This might sound glib, but as someone who has used both Thunderbird and Outlook extensively, I don't recommend any desktop email client. Email clients were designed for a whole different era, and only work well in that context. Gmail, Outlook.com/O365/etc, are designed for you to "keep everything." Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email that they can index and constantly have in memory. When these two worlds converge desktop clients choke and choke hard. Outlook is so terrible that it almost needs to be completely retired. They've barely updated it in ten years. Best case scenario right now is full webmail (with anyone) and browser notifications for new email etc if you need that.

jcelerier 8y ago
> Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email that they can index and constantly have in memory. with large amounts of mail (~90k in one of my inboxes - and if someone asks just yesterday I had to go and fetch some info from a 2007 mail), GMail chokes much more than thunderbird, e.g. it takes 2/3 minutes and sometimes does not work to mark a large set of email as read/archived/whatever while this is almost instant with TB.
modzu 8y ago
clients still make sense for users with multiple accounts. and modern clients only sync a subset of the db but still permit online search and retrieval. also for certain tasks the web clients aren't much better (gmails interface is garbage for working with multiple messages for example) the default answer to op's question in enterprise land (where windows is still treading for relevancy) is Outlook. thunderbird suffers the issues the comment mentions above -- barfs with large dbs, no support for exchange, not sure if it even supports push notifications, etc it should be noted that mail on mac works well and the win 10 mail app this article is all about works pretty well too, which is why its a travesty MS is going to ruin it.
SyneRyder 8y ago
> Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email.... I have over 20 years of email stored locally in Postbox. I've kept every non-spam email since I first got online in 1997. I regularly use it to search for things people sent me (or I sent them) months or even years ago. It's really not a problem at all. I've got Postbox open right now and it's using 625MB RAM. (That's a lot compared to the Eudora days, but I have 16GB RAM now.) A desktop client on your laptop also means you can write emails & be able to search your email history while in flight mode, and queue the messages to be sent when you land & have WiFi again.
bad_user 8y ago
You have this opinion because you haven’t used a good desktop client yet. I use Mailmate. It’s everything I wanted Thunderbird to be.

jcelerier 8y ago

> Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email that they can index and constantly have in memory. with large amounts of mail (~90k in one of my inboxes - and if someone asks just yesterday I had to go and fetch some info from a 2007 mail), GMail chokes much more than thunderbird, e.g. it takes 2/3 minutes and sometimes does not work to mark a large set of email as read/archived/whatever while this is almost instant with TB.

modzu 8y ago

clients still make sense for users with multiple accounts. and modern clients only sync a subset of the db but still permit online search and retrieval. also for certain tasks the web clients aren't much better (gmails interface is garbage for working with multiple messages for example) the default answer to op's question in enterprise land (where windows is still treading for relevancy) is Outlook. thunderbird suffers the issues the comment mentions above -- barfs with large dbs, no support for exchange, not sure if it even supports push notifications, etc it should be noted that mail on mac works well and the win 10 mail app this article is all about works pretty well too, which is why its a travesty MS is going to ruin it.

SyneRyder 8y ago

> Problem is that all desktop email clients aren't designed that way, they want you to have a very small limited subset of email.... I have over 20 years of email stored locally in Postbox. I've kept every non-spam email since I first got online in 1997. I regularly use it to search for things people sent me (or I sent them) months or even years ago. It's really not a problem at all. I've got Postbox open right now and it's using 625MB RAM. (That's a lot compared to the Eudora days, but I have 16GB RAM now.) A desktop client on your laptop also means you can write emails & be able to search your email history while in flight mode, and queue the messages to be sent when you land & have WiFi again.

bad_user 8y ago

You have this opinion because you haven’t used a good desktop client yet. I use Mailmate. It’s everything I wanted Thunderbird to be.