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> all of the email clients on Linux were awful Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers oth

> all of the email clients on Linux were awful Thunderbird is pretty good and in my experience, less buggy than Apple Mail, especially when using providers other than iCloud. My wife absolutely hated Apple Mail, primarily because it would forget passwords and stop syncing/sending. So I moved her to Thunderbird and now she's happy.

input_sh 6y ago
I've been using Thunderbird for like a decade, but I've been spoiled by Fastmail's web interface so much that I now consider Thunderbird to be one giant mess from a UX perspective. Half the time I miss-click the first email and sort by subject. In what world would I want to sort my emails by subject!? Search vs. filter messages, I really don't need two search bars, one is fine. I'm annoyed that the default sort is oldest to newest, and that I have to change it for each individual folder. Tabs really don't fit into how I consume my email. Flagging important ones is good enough. I'd take Geary (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) over Thunderbird any day, but lack of GPG integration is what's forcing me to stick to Thunderbird.
- willtim 6y ago
  Yes I agree, the UI is a mess and they have made some bad design decisions. One time I was on train with my network connection dropping constantly and Thunderbird was giving me a model pop-up dialogue each time! It still gives pop-ups for updates. But it's open-source, relatively stable and reliable, and that counts for a lot. The sad fact is that there is simply no money in building email clients. Email is a legacy technology and arguably no longer fit for purpose. We need a new standard and that's not something that BigTech has delivered yet.
randomsearch 5y ago
agree that Thunderbird is the second best mail client I've used. But the gap is huge, and the bugs in Thunderbird were significant enough to cause me real problems in my work.

input_sh 6y ago

I've been using Thunderbird for like a decade, but I've been spoiled by Fastmail's web interface so much that I now consider Thunderbird to be one giant mess from a UX perspective. Half the time I miss-click the first email and sort by subject. In what world would I want to sort my emails by subject!? Search vs. filter messages, I really don't need two search bars, one is fine. I'm annoyed that the default sort is oldest to newest, and that I have to change it for each individual folder. Tabs really don't fit into how I consume my email. Flagging important ones is good enough. I'd take Geary (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) over Thunderbird any day, but lack of GPG integration is what's forcing me to stick to Thunderbird.

willtim 6y ago
Yes I agree, the UI is a mess and they have made some bad design decisions. One time I was on train with my network connection dropping constantly and Thunderbird was giving me a model pop-up dialogue each time! It still gives pop-ups for updates. But it's open-source, relatively stable and reliable, and that counts for a lot. The sad fact is that there is simply no money in building email clients. Email is a legacy technology and arguably no longer fit for purpose. We need a new standard and that's not something that BigTech has delivered yet.

randomsearch 5y ago

agree that Thunderbird is the second best mail client I've used. But the gap is huge, and the bugs in Thunderbird were significant enough to cause me real problems in my work.