11 ms·

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email,

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface. I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.

PopAlongKid 4y ago
> the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.
- boplicity 4y ago
  Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.
mauvehaus 4y ago
Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?
- anamexis 4y ago
  If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1]. It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean. [1] https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
  - metadaemon 4y ago
    I second Mimestream, never had a problem until their most recent bug yesterday. They are fast on fixes though.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.
    - anamexis 4y ago
      I agree, that is annoying. It seems as though they are preparing to release 1.0 soon, so we'll find out soon enough.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      This sounds like a great business model actually: release a killer software product, and make the beta free to get users addicted, with the caveat that when you get out of beta, there will be a "small" monthly fee. Then, when it's time to go mainstream, charge them $100/month to keep access to their data. And make sure there's no way to go back by locking the users' data behind encryption for "safety from hackers" or similar.
- mprovost 4y ago
  Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.
- kevincox 4y ago
  > The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I'm curious what gripes you have here. Compared to GMail linear threading based on subject I find the correct threading based on headers fantastic.
  - mauvehaus 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's strictly Thunderbird's fault, or if it's because people sometimes reply to a random message with a bunch of people one it, change the subject, and things go downhill from there. The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not helping my sanity.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?
  - mauvehaus 4y ago
    You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure) Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native. It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.
    - pantulis 4y ago
      I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete the destination folder when one moves a message, you have to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.
    - BoxOfSnoo 4y ago
      I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy. The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time... Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!
- themadturk 4y ago
  Apple Mail on Mac and iOS/iPadOS works great. I'm using pobox.com (Fastmail's sibling) for forwarding.
- nor-and-or-not 4y ago
  MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/)
- notpushkin 4y ago
  I love Mailspring, it's modern and open source: https://getmailspring.com/ https://getmailspring.com/ The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.
b112 4y ago
It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't make this better. Probably worse.
magnat 4y ago
> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?
- winrid 4y ago
  This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an interoperability thing. I can access folders created by thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail client or remotely through IMAP. It may be they don't want to break those external tools.
    - derefr 4y ago
      So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the internal, canonical store. FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music library "for interoperability", that you could enable to be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file; when enabled, it worked exactly like this.
      - capitainenemo 4y ago
        Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact. Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients. I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do understand that folders with large numbers of files is a problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the thunderbird indexing.
narag 4y ago
I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all. After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing. Suggestions very welcome.
- behringer 4y ago
  I would just wait for the inevitable fork.
- jraph 4y ago
  My suggestion would be to wait and see. They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options. I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state. Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery. If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all? As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now. [1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/ https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/
  - narag 4y ago
    Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago, nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning going back to Linux so it's a logical move. Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Compacting folders is something I hope that they fix. I tell Thunderbird to download/sync all accounts and immediately it prompts me to compact and if I let it, it will only fail with an error because it's still in the middle of doing what I just asked it to. A little more intelligence in when it prompts for compacting would be nice. Better yet, they could do a better job handling it automatically so I don't need it to ask me.
pja 4y ago
There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations complete immediately.
- oblib 4y ago
  I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.
- onli 4y ago
  70K here. The only thing a bit slow is search (but not slower than in other clients I tested).
qzw 4y ago
If you’re on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender, can absolutely kill Thunderbird’s performance. There seems to be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be automatically scanned.
freedsoftware 4y ago
Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance. Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.
- tguvot 4y ago
  kmail imap support was somewhat rough around 10 years ago, but it been totally stable for me ever since. i have push/idle enabled on server/client, it been working just fine. the only problem that i have it's when letsencrypt certificate rotated at night and at morning i get few hundreds popups asking to approve new certificate
bigbluedots 4y ago
Is it ported over to Rust yet?
- slondr 4y ago
  Yes, as it is based on Firefox, which Rust was invented for.

PopAlongKid 4y ago

> the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.

boplicity 4y ago
Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.

mauvehaus 4y ago

Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

anamexis 4y ago
If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1]. It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean. [1] https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
- metadaemon 4y ago
  I second Mimestream, never had a problem until their most recent bug yesterday. They are fast on fixes though.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.
  - anamexis 4y ago
    I agree, that is annoying. It seems as though they are preparing to release 1.0 soon, so we'll find out soon enough.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    This sounds like a great business model actually: release a killer software product, and make the beta free to get users addicted, with the caveat that when you get out of beta, there will be a "small" monthly fee. Then, when it's time to go mainstream, charge them $100/month to keep access to their data. And make sure there's no way to go back by locking the users' data behind encryption for "safety from hackers" or similar.
mprovost 4y ago
Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.
kevincox 4y ago
> The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I'm curious what gripes you have here. Compared to GMail linear threading based on subject I find the correct threading based on headers fantastic.
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's strictly Thunderbird's fault, or if it's because people sometimes reply to a random message with a bunch of people one it, change the subject, and things go downhill from there. The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not helping my sanity.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure) Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native. It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.
  - pantulis 4y ago
    I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete the destination folder when one moves a message, you have to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.
  - BoxOfSnoo 4y ago
    I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy. The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time... Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!
themadturk 4y ago
Apple Mail on Mac and iOS/iPadOS works great. I'm using pobox.com (Fastmail's sibling) for forwarding.
nor-and-or-not 4y ago
MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/)
notpushkin 4y ago
I love Mailspring, it's modern and open source: https://getmailspring.com/ https://getmailspring.com/ The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.

b112 4y ago

It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't make this better. Probably worse.

magnat 4y ago

> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

winrid 4y ago
This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an interoperability thing. I can access folders created by thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail client or remotely through IMAP. It may be they don't want to break those external tools.
  - derefr 4y ago
    So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the internal, canonical store. FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music library "for interoperability", that you could enable to be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file; when enabled, it worked exactly like this.
    - capitainenemo 4y ago
      Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact. Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients. I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do understand that folders with large numbers of files is a problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the thunderbird indexing.

narag 4y ago

I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all. After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing. Suggestions very welcome.

behringer 4y ago
I would just wait for the inevitable fork.
jraph 4y ago
My suggestion would be to wait and see. They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options. I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state. Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery. If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all? As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now. [1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/ https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/
- narag 4y ago
  Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago, nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning going back to Linux so it's a logical move. Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.

autoexec 4y ago
Compacting folders is something I hope that they fix. I tell Thunderbird to download/sync all accounts and immediately it prompts me to compact and if I let it, it will only fail with an error because it's still in the middle of doing what I just asked it to. A little more intelligence in when it prompts for compacting would be nice. Better yet, they could do a better job handling it automatically so I don't need it to ask me.

pja 4y ago

There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations complete immediately.

oblib 4y ago
I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.
onli 4y ago
70K here. The only thing a bit slow is search (but not slower than in other clients I tested).

qzw 4y ago

If you’re on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender, can absolutely kill Thunderbird’s performance. There seems to be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be automatically scanned.

freedsoftware 4y ago

Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance. Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.

tguvot 4y ago
kmail imap support was somewhat rough around 10 years ago, but it been totally stable for me ever since. i have push/idle enabled on server/client, it been working just fine. the only problem that i have it's when letsencrypt certificate rotated at night and at morning i get few hundreds popups asking to approve new certificate

bigbluedots 4y ago

Is it ported over to Rust yet?

slondr 4y ago
Yes, as it is based on Firefox, which Rust was invented for.