4 ms·

Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client and Thunderbird is already a solid client so personally this message won't deter me from using it

jemka 14y ago
Completely agree. I'll admit I immediately starting worrying about alternatives, but so long as they keep pushing out security patches, I don't see any reason for an alternative.
flatline3 14y ago
I disagree -- nobody has of yet come close to matching Apple's Mail app. It does a simple job exceedingly well, with a minimally impeding user interface. The alternatives -- including Thunderbird -- are bulky and poorly designed. I believe the wide migration to gmail is in no small part due to the extremely poor showing of e-mail clients on Linux and Windows.
- morsch 14y ago
  I'd kill for a desktop client that was as good as Gmail. I'm surprised nobody has done a straight copy of the UI in a desktop deployment. Heck, you could do it in Javascript+HTML in an embedded gecko/webkit.
  - awfabian2 14y ago
    The last time I played with Opera's built-in mail client, it was pretty similar.
  - danneu 14y ago
    Agreed, that's why I use Mailplane (OSX). It's just a wrapper around Gmail giving me easy account management and OS-level notifications while still letting me use Gmail.
    - fromhet 14y ago
      But that is nothing more than a bookmark with extra features that you place in the Dock, not a desktop client.
  - vibrunazo 14y ago
    I don't get it, why do you want it to be native then? What's the advantage?
    - morsch 14y ago
      Not being tied to Google, or any other specific provider. No ads (and no need to try to avoid them). Nobody systematically reading all my mail to custom-tailer said ads. Easier integration with client-side encryption tools to facilitate end-to-end encryption. Better support for plugins and other modifications. I'm sure others have variations on this theme.
      - jtheory 14y ago
        Agreed, for many of the same reasons. I have several GMail addresses, and a Google Apps email address for work, and variously-hosted other email addresses, all managed from within Thunderbird (with several extensions found over the years). I don't want to merge personal stuff with my work email; I don't want to merge my work email into a personal gmail account; and above all I don't want to do either of those things then find that some robot in the system has locked me out of my account. I also really need to have full offline access, so I can work in spite of unreliable or infrequent net connections. I.e., in 20 minutes of internet access in a crowded coffeeshop, I can upload dozens of responses to yesterday's mail, and collect today's mail, and fit in a few rapid realtime messages, then go. I'm not often forced to work this way, but when I am this is a lifesaver.
  - thrownaway2424 14y ago
    Unfortunately copy of the skin of Gmail would not get you the gigantic honking datacenters that make Gmail so much faster than Mail.app. Would you pay for a client that looked like Gmail and performed like Mail.app?
    - morsch 14y ago
      The only thing I can think of where honking datacenters could conceivably help is searching for things. All other things should be mostly unaffected. And I'm not sure you need an entire datacenter to search through one person's email or address book. Spam protection is a more serious issue, I think. Both mail servers and desktop clients do it. Mail servers, especially if they get feedback from clients, have a huge advantage though in that they can learn from all their users. The desktop client has to work with a single user's input; unless you implemented some kind of p2p collaborative approach (which would be really cool).
      - sp332 14y ago
        The giant datacenters get you mail delivery pushed to your browser as fast as IM. You can't do that using POP and SMTP to a normal mail server.
        ibotty 14y ago
        no, but with imap and smtp. what's the point again?
      - thrownaway2424 14y ago
        The day-to-day performance of Mail.app is orders of magnitude slower than Gmail. Loading a thread with 100 replies in Mail will take several seconds. The same thread in Gmail will load in milliseconds.
        morsch 14y ago
        Yes, but that's just evidence that Mail.app is badly optimized, for that use case anyway. You don't need a server farm to get a couple of hundred replies to display quickly.
  - TimJRobinson 14y ago
    I just want something that works as smoothly as gmail with threaded conversations and a usable search and can manage multiple email accounts easily, is that too much to ask?
  - jsz0 14y ago
    If you're on OSX you can use Fluid.app to just make a little web-app out of it. I don't use GMail's web UI but it should work fine in Fluid.
- oz 14y ago
  I've been loving Postbox. It's based on TB, but with a better UI and great Gmail/Google Apps integration. It has a free 30-day trial, and will import your accounts from TB seamlessly.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    its not open source, and it doesn't work on all platforms. if Mozilla wanted to do "good things" and not "lets try to be another corporate company!", they' buy off postbox and release that open source, and keep the devs working on it. They're abandoning TB because it sucks. Frankly. It's buggy, leaky, etc. No one really cared for it, for too long.
    - jaylevitt 14y ago
      Seems unlikely; Scott MacGregor left Mozilla to launch Postbox.
  - damm 14y ago
    Wonder how Postbox is going to react about TB not being developed any longer. It totally impacts you.
- crymer11 14y ago
  I'd argue Mail falls short of Sparrow, especially if you use Gmail. The UI is significantly less impeding.
  - flatline3 14y ago
    I believe that's true for some use cases, especially personal use with a single account, especially where integration with Facebook, DropBox/CloudApp, etc, might be valuable. However -- at least for my primarily work and OSS-focused e-mail usage -- Sparrow's simplicity and focus is misaligned with my requirements and preferences.
- kstrauser 14y ago
  Since you mention OS X: I've been using Sparrow and I'm growing to really like it. It's the exact opposed of "bulky and poorly designed".
yaix 14y ago
Whenever you start a sentence with "Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in [tech field]" you already know you are probably wrong about it.
a3_nm 14y ago
> Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client There is interesting innovation going on, for instance <http://notmuchmail.org/&#62 http://notmuchmail.org/> (and satellite projects such as <https://github.com/teythoon/afew&#62 https://github.com/teythoon/afew> and <https://github.com/pazz/alot> https://github.com/pazz/alot>.
- ibotty 14y ago
  thanks for the pointer to alot. as a vi guy i could not really get used to notmuch (too much emacs :D) so nice that you pointed me to them.
  - a3_nm 14y ago
    You're welcome! However, keep in mind that alot is still a pretty young project. I use it to read my mail (and use mutt to compose mail, ie. 'r' in alot spawns mutt), but there are still a lot of rough edges. The nice thing is that the codebase is very hackable (very readable Python, not much cruft yet) and that the lead developper (pazz) is actively working on it and very receptive to bug reports and pull requests. :-)
gkoberger 14y ago
I agree with you, with the caveat that you include "given its current trajectory." Is, say, Sparrow better? Maybe. Will someone release an awesome new email client in the future that's better than Sparrow and Thunderbird combined? Definitely. But with infinite time, Thunderbird will never become Sparrow (or Gmail or the next big email client). Any further features for Thunderbird can be developed as an extension or as a fork (like, say, Postbox -- which is actually really more of an extension rather than a fork, as far as I know).
dfc 14y ago
Enigmail should not exist! I never understood why GPG support was an addon, but smime was baked in...

jemka 14y ago

Completely agree. I'll admit I immediately starting worrying about alternatives, but so long as they keep pushing out security patches, I don't see any reason for an alternative.

flatline3 14y ago

I disagree -- nobody has of yet come close to matching Apple's Mail app. It does a simple job exceedingly well, with a minimally impeding user interface. The alternatives -- including Thunderbird -- are bulky and poorly designed. I believe the wide migration to gmail is in no small part due to the extremely poor showing of e-mail clients on Linux and Windows.

morsch 14y ago
I'd kill for a desktop client that was as good as Gmail. I'm surprised nobody has done a straight copy of the UI in a desktop deployment. Heck, you could do it in Javascript+HTML in an embedded gecko/webkit.
- awfabian2 14y ago
  The last time I played with Opera's built-in mail client, it was pretty similar.
- danneu 14y ago
  Agreed, that's why I use Mailplane (OSX). It's just a wrapper around Gmail giving me easy account management and OS-level notifications while still letting me use Gmail.
  - fromhet 14y ago
    But that is nothing more than a bookmark with extra features that you place in the Dock, not a desktop client.
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  I don't get it, why do you want it to be native then? What's the advantage?
  - morsch 14y ago
    Not being tied to Google, or any other specific provider. No ads (and no need to try to avoid them). Nobody systematically reading all my mail to custom-tailer said ads. Easier integration with client-side encryption tools to facilitate end-to-end encryption. Better support for plugins and other modifications. I'm sure others have variations on this theme.
    - jtheory 14y ago
      Agreed, for many of the same reasons. I have several GMail addresses, and a Google Apps email address for work, and variously-hosted other email addresses, all managed from within Thunderbird (with several extensions found over the years). I don't want to merge personal stuff with my work email; I don't want to merge my work email into a personal gmail account; and above all I don't want to do either of those things then find that some robot in the system has locked me out of my account. I also really need to have full offline access, so I can work in spite of unreliable or infrequent net connections. I.e., in 20 minutes of internet access in a crowded coffeeshop, I can upload dozens of responses to yesterday's mail, and collect today's mail, and fit in a few rapid realtime messages, then go. I'm not often forced to work this way, but when I am this is a lifesaver.
- thrownaway2424 14y ago
  Unfortunately copy of the skin of Gmail would not get you the gigantic honking datacenters that make Gmail so much faster than Mail.app. Would you pay for a client that looked like Gmail and performed like Mail.app?
  - morsch 14y ago
    The only thing I can think of where honking datacenters could conceivably help is searching for things. All other things should be mostly unaffected. And I'm not sure you need an entire datacenter to search through one person's email or address book. Spam protection is a more serious issue, I think. Both mail servers and desktop clients do it. Mail servers, especially if they get feedback from clients, have a huge advantage though in that they can learn from all their users. The desktop client has to work with a single user's input; unless you implemented some kind of p2p collaborative approach (which would be really cool).
    - sp332 14y ago
      The giant datacenters get you mail delivery pushed to your browser as fast as IM. You can't do that using POP and SMTP to a normal mail server.
      - ibotty 14y ago
        no, but with imap and smtp. what's the point again?
    - thrownaway2424 14y ago
      The day-to-day performance of Mail.app is orders of magnitude slower than Gmail. Loading a thread with 100 replies in Mail will take several seconds. The same thread in Gmail will load in milliseconds.
      - morsch 14y ago
        Yes, but that's just evidence that Mail.app is badly optimized, for that use case anyway. You don't need a server farm to get a couple of hundred replies to display quickly.
- TimJRobinson 14y ago
  I just want something that works as smoothly as gmail with threaded conversations and a usable search and can manage multiple email accounts easily, is that too much to ask?
- jsz0 14y ago
  If you're on OSX you can use Fluid.app to just make a little web-app out of it. I don't use GMail's web UI but it should work fine in Fluid.
oz 14y ago
I've been loving Postbox. It's based on TB, but with a better UI and great Gmail/Google Apps integration. It has a free 30-day trial, and will import your accounts from TB seamlessly.
- zobzu 14y ago
  its not open source, and it doesn't work on all platforms. if Mozilla wanted to do "good things" and not "lets try to be another corporate company!", they' buy off postbox and release that open source, and keep the devs working on it. They're abandoning TB because it sucks. Frankly. It's buggy, leaky, etc. No one really cared for it, for too long.
  - jaylevitt 14y ago
    Seems unlikely; Scott MacGregor left Mozilla to launch Postbox.
- damm 14y ago
  Wonder how Postbox is going to react about TB not being developed any longer. It totally impacts you.
crymer11 14y ago
I'd argue Mail falls short of Sparrow, especially if you use Gmail. The UI is significantly less impeding.
- flatline3 14y ago
  I believe that's true for some use cases, especially personal use with a single account, especially where integration with Facebook, DropBox/CloudApp, etc, might be valuable. However -- at least for my primarily work and OSS-focused e-mail usage -- Sparrow's simplicity and focus is misaligned with my requirements and preferences.
kstrauser 14y ago
Since you mention OS X: I've been using Sparrow and I'm growing to really like it. It's the exact opposed of "bulky and poorly designed".

yaix 14y ago

Whenever you start a sentence with "Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in [tech field]" you already know you are probably wrong about it.

a3_nm 14y ago

> Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client There is interesting innovation going on, for instance <http://notmuchmail.org/&#62 http://notmuchmail.org/> (and satellite projects such as <https://github.com/teythoon/afew&#62 https://github.com/teythoon/afew> and <https://github.com/pazz/alot> https://github.com/pazz/alot>.

ibotty 14y ago
thanks for the pointer to alot. as a vi guy i could not really get used to notmuch (too much emacs :D) so nice that you pointed me to them.
- a3_nm 14y ago
  You're welcome! However, keep in mind that alot is still a pretty young project. I use it to read my mail (and use mutt to compose mail, ie. 'r' in alot spawns mutt), but there are still a lot of rough edges. The nice thing is that the codebase is very hackable (very readable Python, not much cruft yet) and that the lead developper (pazz) is actively working on it and very receptive to bug reports and pull requests. :-)

gkoberger 14y ago

I agree with you, with the caveat that you include "given its current trajectory." Is, say, Sparrow better? Maybe. Will someone release an awesome new email client in the future that's better than Sparrow and Thunderbird combined? Definitely. But with infinite time, Thunderbird will never become Sparrow (or Gmail or the next big email client). Any further features for Thunderbird can be developed as an extension or as a fork (like, say, Postbox -- which is actually really more of an extension rather than a fork, as far as I know).

dfc 14y ago

Enigmail should not exist! I never understood why GPG support was an addon, but smime was baked in...