3 ms·

I don't understand what the vision is of thunderbird? where in the market do they see themselves? managing emails on local disk is a nightmare I abandoned as so

by cpill 3y ago

I don't understand what the vision is of thunderbird? where in the market do they see themselves? managing emails on local disk is a nightmare I abandoned as soon as Gmail came out as I could access my mail from any machine and upgrading laptops didn't mean shuffling gigs of emails across. the only thing I've used TB for in the last 10years was to delete all the large attachments in my Gmail. I also dabbled in trying to get secure end-to-end encryption going but it was a struggle and I quickly forgot how it worked, just started using protonmail instead.

bradrn 3y ago
Thunderbird is a mail client, just like the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Emails don’t have to be stored locally — I use Thunderbird with two Gmail accounts and it works great.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
As bradrn already mentioned, Thunderbird is an email client. It integrates well with many online email offerings. I use it with Fastmail. Works great. Also many like the ability to access an maintain offline copies. I’m not a gmail user, but I know one can download a backup of 90 days easily, but I have over 25 years of emails and attachments from various accounts through the years which runs over 100GB. Thunderbird handles this. My major complaint is Thunderbird search is poor.
thesuitonym 3y ago
Thunderbird is free software made by volunteers, as such, it doesn't need to fit anywhere in any market. People like it. You don't have to, and that's fine. For me, I like it because browsers are a huge mess of surveillance and ad targeting--even Firefox. Not to mention the speed. Even on a fast computer, loading a browser, then opening Gmail is not a quick process. By contrast, Thunderbird opens fairly quickly (Not like notepad on a Windows NT device, but for a modern application, it's pretty fast). Finally, IMAP has been around since 1986, why would you shuffle gigabytes of email across multiple devices? Inb4 you still need to download with imap. I know, but a good IMAP client only downloads the folder you're currently looking at, then syncs it back to the server, no "shuffling" required.

by cpill 3y ago

bradrn 3y ago

Thunderbird is a mail client, just like the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Emails don’t have to be stored locally — I use Thunderbird with two Gmail accounts and it works great.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

As bradrn already mentioned, Thunderbird is an email client. It integrates well with many online email offerings. I use it with Fastmail. Works great. Also many like the ability to access an maintain offline copies. I’m not a gmail user, but I know one can download a backup of 90 days easily, but I have over 25 years of emails and attachments from various accounts through the years which runs over 100GB. Thunderbird handles this. My major complaint is Thunderbird search is poor.

thesuitonym 3y ago

Thunderbird is free software made by volunteers, as such, it doesn't need to fit anywhere in any market. People like it. You don't have to, and that's fine. For me, I like it because browsers are a huge mess of surveillance and ad targeting--even Firefox. Not to mention the speed. Even on a fast computer, loading a browser, then opening Gmail is not a quick process. By contrast, Thunderbird opens fairly quickly (Not like notepad on a Windows NT device, but for a modern application, it's pretty fast). Finally, IMAP has been around since 1986, why would you shuffle gigabytes of email across multiple devices? Inb4 you still need to download with imap. I know, but a good IMAP client only downloads the folder you're currently looking at, then syncs it back to the server, no "shuffling" required.