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Having tried out a bunch of different clients as well, I unfortunately agree with the conclusion. I did not even limit myself to FOSS (or GUI) ones though. Excl

Having tried out a bunch of different clients as well, I unfortunately agree with the conclusion. I did not even limit myself to FOSS (or GUI) ones though. Excluding some of the ones you've already mentioned, I've tried macOS/OSX Mail, Windows' Mail and Calendar, Mailspring, aerc and maybe some more I've forgotten. Most of them lack something relatively basic I couldn't without. I said "unfortunately" because Thunderbird has stagnated, has a bunch of long-standing bugs and annoyances. Like limiting the number of e-mail addresses one contact can have, the low quality of search, the lack of notification configuration and terrible architecture that causes freezes both foreground and background. It freezes entirely when opening "large" letters, moving or syncing a "large" amount of e-mail, when encrypting a few megabytes, when your (totally unrelated) smartcard is in use and so on and on, can't keep track of it all myself but those tickets have sat open for decades. (No, this is not a suggestion to use a stale bot, that's a cheap disrespectful feel-good way out) From nice-to-have aspects, it sucks that I can't both S/MIME and GPG sign a single letter. Sometimes it's good to bridge the two systems and it should be technically doable.

lproven 5y ago
Agreed. It's kinda old and warty. None of the stuff you mention affects me personally, but it's the Pareto principle: we all only want or need 20% of the functionality, but a different functionality... so in the end, the pool of all users need 80% of the functionality. The other 20% or so is either there to support that 80% or it is something that is absolutely essential for a tiny number of people. Which is what leads to OSes like Linux, which are huge and vastly complicated, but every obscure function that 80% of us will never use is crucial to someone somewhere... because Linux is a desktop and a laptop and a server and a router and a hypervisor, etc. Tens of thousands of organisations agree on the usefulness of Linux, so it gets a lot of investment and R&D and development. Only 1 company owns Thunderbird and it thinks that it's not important, so it gets very little: just a bit of bugfixing and maintenance. :-( While actually, it is in its way a jewel of vital functionality that really should be celebrated and polished. I'd love to work out what it _needs_ to get more airtime and investment.

lproven 5y ago

Agreed. It's kinda old and warty. None of the stuff you mention affects me personally, but it's the Pareto principle: we all only want or need 20% of the functionality, but a different functionality... so in the end, the pool of all users need 80% of the functionality. The other 20% or so is either there to support that 80% or it is something that is absolutely essential for a tiny number of people. Which is what leads to OSes like Linux, which are huge and vastly complicated, but every obscure function that 80% of us will never use is crucial to someone somewhere... because Linux is a desktop and a laptop and a server and a router and a hypervisor, etc. Tens of thousands of organisations agree on the usefulness of Linux, so it gets a lot of investment and R&D and development. Only 1 company owns Thunderbird and it thinks that it's not important, so it gets very little: just a bit of bugfixing and maintenance. :-( While actually, it is in its way a jewel of vital functionality that really should be celebrated and polished. I'd love to work out what it _needs_ to get more airtime and investment.