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I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvello

by berkes 6y ago

I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere). The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily. I've been comparing it with each and every option for the Ubuntu desktop and even webmail. Clients like Geary[1] or Roundcube [2]. Those are often unfinished; I guess mail clients are like many other software-challenges in that regard: it's easy to make the basics, the 90% that 90% of the people need. It's doable to make those basics really good (see all the webmail, electron mail and other mail clients). But it is really hard to do the last 10%, because each of the individual users has a different 10%. And so, I find I love the UX of Geary and use Roundcube often for its simplicity and "Getting Stuff Done". But I also find that I keep going back to Thunderbird, because <insert some feature I use once a week> is only there. But, boy, it annoys me how cludgy and convoluted thunderbird then feels. Edit: forgot to mention that a lot of the 10% things in Thunderbird are severely in my way, daily. I have an RSS reader - why is there one in Thunderbird taking up mental (and memory) space, I don't ever use the built-in IM (is it jabber?), the calendar and todo-tasks feature I don't use, but they attempt to manage my agenda/invites anyway, making me miss an occasional meeting even. I'm sure other people find the GPG being severely in the way (part of the 10% that I use often) or that archiving and offline features are clumsy, confusing and making people miss emails (another feature I often use). -- [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary [2] https://roundcube.net/ https://roundcube.net/

pmlnr 6y ago
There's a webmail out there called Rainloop. It's probably one of the best email interfaces I used. Sadly, it's not a desktop client. My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.
- berkes 6y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker. My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Have you tried kmail, it's pretty mature. I use TB,YMMV.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  I recently jumped from linux mint to Fedora...just to play because i haven't lived in anything related to redhat for many years (no offense to fedora or red hat, just formed a habit of ubuntu-derived distros like Mint)...anyway, i've always been a tunderbird user, but now that i am trying fedora i set it up with KDE...so figured I'd try kmail - which i had heard good things about. Well, my experience was ok/so-so as compared to thunderbird. Please don't interpret this as some start of a flamewar...i don't hate kmail by any means...it just felt like it was a similar to thunderbird but i don;t know less polished or with fewer features that were exposed. I'm sure that i have to give it more time to be fair, but so far kmail has disappointed be a little bit. I'm going to continue using it to see how things go. (Obviously my experience is not based on any evidence, nor is a formal review or anything like that...just early usage feelings.) EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!
- kevincox 6y ago
  One feature that I can't live without that is surprisingly rare is the ability to view full threads. In Thunderbird you can Right Click -> View Conversation (or something like that) and it will show you the entire tree of messages. This is invaluable for trying to understand messages in a long discussion. But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.
- berkes 6y ago
  KDE-1 was my first DE, (SuSE 6.x) and I used that for years, so I really know and used KMail. KDE-PIM was my favorite and long time the only piece of K- software on my otherwise gnome en (back during the kde3 drama, I threw it out and went full-gnome). I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird. It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.
Krasnol 6y ago
I guess it's a taste thing. I love the UI and I hope they never make any significant changes to it. It does have many features and therefore you have to operate them if you need them. If you don't, you don't. I don't understand how they "hurt" you when you can't even see them.
miedpo 6y ago
Just curious, how does Archiving get in the way? I've always found it a million times better than basically any of the other email clients archiving processes. Hope your having a great day!
- berkes 6y ago
  It works well, and I like it. But it interferes with search. I have two ways of archiving: * Manuall mail older than 2 years off my server into a local storage. The process is somwhat clumsy, but works. * Conssitently archive anything that is done, keeping inbox(0) using the "archive" feature in TB - hotkey 'a'. I did find that often archiving in other mailclients, or in thunderbird itself (all using IMAP, no shared storage on my machine) makes thunderbird's search index break. about 20% of the mails in my archive are not searchable. Only after hunting down the "rebuild search index feature" can it be fixed. The fact that such a feature exists, alone is worrying in several ways.
robertlagrant 6y ago
I think it'd take some serious investment, probably using something like Electron, to make a combined Webmail and desktop mail client that's good and modern. But if someone did that, it'd be really interesting. I sort of think Google should do it with GMail, in fact.

by berkes 6y ago

pmlnr 6y ago

There's a webmail out there called Rainloop. It's probably one of the best email interfaces I used. Sadly, it's not a desktop client. My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.

berkes 6y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker. My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Have you tried kmail, it's pretty mature. I use TB,YMMV.

mxuribe 6y ago
I recently jumped from linux mint to Fedora...just to play because i haven't lived in anything related to redhat for many years (no offense to fedora or red hat, just formed a habit of ubuntu-derived distros like Mint)...anyway, i've always been a tunderbird user, but now that i am trying fedora i set it up with KDE...so figured I'd try kmail - which i had heard good things about. Well, my experience was ok/so-so as compared to thunderbird. Please don't interpret this as some start of a flamewar...i don't hate kmail by any means...it just felt like it was a similar to thunderbird but i don;t know less polished or with fewer features that were exposed. I'm sure that i have to give it more time to be fair, but so far kmail has disappointed be a little bit. I'm going to continue using it to see how things go. (Obviously my experience is not based on any evidence, nor is a formal review or anything like that...just early usage feelings.) EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!
kevincox 6y ago
One feature that I can't live without that is surprisingly rare is the ability to view full threads. In Thunderbird you can Right Click -> View Conversation (or something like that) and it will show you the entire tree of messages. This is invaluable for trying to understand messages in a long discussion. But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.
berkes 6y ago
KDE-1 was my first DE, (SuSE 6.x) and I used that for years, so I really know and used KMail. KDE-PIM was my favorite and long time the only piece of K- software on my otherwise gnome en (back during the kde3 drama, I threw it out and went full-gnome). I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird. It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.

Krasnol 6y ago

I guess it's a taste thing. I love the UI and I hope they never make any significant changes to it. It does have many features and therefore you have to operate them if you need them. If you don't, you don't. I don't understand how they "hurt" you when you can't even see them.

miedpo 6y ago

Just curious, how does Archiving get in the way? I've always found it a million times better than basically any of the other email clients archiving processes. Hope your having a great day!

berkes 6y ago
It works well, and I like it. But it interferes with search. I have two ways of archiving: * Manuall mail older than 2 years off my server into a local storage. The process is somwhat clumsy, but works. * Conssitently archive anything that is done, keeping inbox(0) using the "archive" feature in TB - hotkey 'a'. I did find that often archiving in other mailclients, or in thunderbird itself (all using IMAP, no shared storage on my machine) makes thunderbird's search index break. about 20% of the mails in my archive are not searchable. Only after hunting down the "rebuild search index feature" can it be fixed. The fact that such a feature exists, alone is worrying in several ways.

robertlagrant 6y ago

I think it'd take some serious investment, probably using something like Electron, to make a combined Webmail and desktop mail client that's good and modern. But if someone did that, it'd be really interesting. I sort of think Google should do it with GMail, in fact.