7 ms·

I've been using Thunderbird for almost 10 years now and I literally never had a crash or unexpected behaviour. Once the e-mail accounts are created, everything

by Kenji 12y ago

I've been using Thunderbird for almost 10 years now and I literally never had a crash or unexpected behaviour. Once the e-mail accounts are created, everything just works. Software that is this pleasant to use is very rare. It is the only reasonable free e-mail client that I know of. Why I use thunderbird and not a web based client? I have multiple e-mail addresses and it's nice to have everything in one place, also it's accessible if you're offline. My only nitpick about Thunderbird: If you want to search for a message, you have to go through the menus "Edit->Find". I don't like that for two reasons, a search is not an operation that edits anything so that's really a wrong classification. And searching is not equal to finding. Maybe my search has no results. "Find" is the wrong word here (the equality of searching and finding is a very widespread misconception in software).

w1ntermute 12y ago
> Why I use thunderbird and not a web based client? I have multiple e-mail addresses and it's nice to have everything in one place, also it's accessible if you're offline. This is quite easy to do in Gmail (and presumably other webmail clients) with forwarding.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  It's really much harder to do this with other webmail clients than it is with a proper offline client.
- hamhamed 12y ago
  nobody wants forwarding if you want to use the 'replay as' feature. Plus it can get cluttered but with a mail client you got them all separated
- detaro 12y ago
  Which doesn't keep mail on the original server, so you always have to use Gmail. (and might not be allowed if it comes to corporate mail)
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Yeah? Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out from who the email was To if possible. That's why I still use it.
  - nilved 12y ago
    You can add POP/IMAP and SMTP accounts and read, write and send emails directly in Gmail with the proper headers (i.e. no the "delivered by gmail.com" message on your emails.) I can't use my domain with Google Apps now, so I use my domain registrar's mailboxes and SMTP servers from my Gmail account for the same effect.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    > Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out from who the email was To if possible. The Gmail web app can do the exact same thing: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      Fair enough. I wonder when they added this, it definitely didn't used to be able to do that.
      - w1ntermute 12y ago
        It's 5+ years old. I've been using it since at least the late 2000s.
e15ctr0n 12y ago
I think you will find the Quick Filter toolbar much easier to use. Make it visible from View -> Toolbars -> Quick Filter Bar and then follow the tips here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/quick-filter-toolbar https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/quick-filter-toolbar
Mahn 12y ago
I'm not sure if I'm alone here, but while I've been loyal to Thunderbird for many years, nowadays I find its speed atrocious: 3-4 seconds to load the application and connect to the google apps email servers, 3-4 seconds until "inbox" or another folder downloads, and another 3-4 seconds to download and read a specific email. I've seen this behaviour in multiple PCs, and meanwhile Chrome flies in these machines. It's come to a point where I just don't bother with TB and check email directly on the phone even if I'm in front of the computer.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- asutherland 12y ago
  There's several things you could be running into: * Auto-compaction isn't working and so the .msf files are growing larger than they need to be. Thunderbird's per-folder metadata indices are stored in a weird texty append-only database format known as "mork" that you may have heard of, usually preceded or followed by some cursing. The file must be read completely into memory, and in many cases this ends up synchronously happening on the main thread. The upside to this is that the thread-pane is very fast and allows sorting on all columns, etc. Right-clicking on a folder and choosing "compact" will trigger compaction of the mork database as well as the offline cache (a per-folder mbox-style file where the downloaded messages are stored). * Not leveraging Thunderbird's offline storage and proactive syncing of messages. If you bring up the account settings for the account, and look at the "Synchronization & Settings" tab, you want "Keep messages for this account on this computer" checked. You also want checkboxes by folders you care about in the list that pops up when you click the "Advanced..." button. With these enabled, Thunderbird will proactively download the message bodies to your computer, making them available for both offline access and rapid message display. Note that if you only launch Thunderbird when you want to read your mail and immediately close it when done reading, you won't be getting much benefit from this and things may even go slower as you fight Thunderbird playing catch-up with your mail. * You have a lot of of messages in the folders in question. The message file loading is O(messages) and so is sync without CONDSTORE enabled. (Thunderbird's CONDSTORE implementation regrettably has some bugs and was turned off recently. See https://bugzil.la/912216 https://bugzil.la/912216) Additionally, gmail's IMAP implementation can take some time to open an IMAP folder with a lot of messages because it needs to build a sequence number mapping and do other stuff.
nsgi 12y ago
Edit -> Find is pretty standard. Chrome has Edit -> Find -> Find.
Silhouette 12y ago
I've been using Thunderbird for almost 10 years now and I literally never had a crash or unexpected behaviour. I'm also a long time user, for much the same reasons as others here, and for a long time I would have agreed that Thunderbird is generally stable and has few serious bugs. However, I have noticed a serious degradation in quality in the past few months. Basic stuff like looking up names from address books when composing a message just doesn't work properly any more, and worse, sometimes it shows one address it's found as you start typing but then changes it after you've moved your focus elsewhere to be someone else. I don't have a reproducible case or a theory about what triggers this behaviour so far, which makes it hard to file any sort of useful bug report. However, I run into problems in this area many times per week now and have only been doing so for the past few months, far too often for it to just be some sort of user error. I wish I could remember exactly which update I'd just done when it started. Also, it is more than a little creepy that Thunderbird is apparently phoning home every day to tell them I'm using it. Not cool, Mozilla. (Edit: Remove more general comment that unintentionally read as if targeted at Mozilla specifically.)
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  > sometimes it shows one address it's found as you start typing but then changes it after you've moved your focus elsewhere to be someone else. The problem may be due to a new feature in auto-complete that searches for matches that include the entered string, not just ones that match the beginning of address book fields, which was the old method. When auto-complete shows multiple options, arrow down till you come to the correct one and then hit the Tab key. This will make sure you have the correct email address in your recipients list. > it is more than a little creepy that Thunderbird is apparently phoning home every day to tell them I'm using it. Not cool, Mozilla. You can opt-out if you like: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automatically-making-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automa...
  - Silhouette 12y ago
    The problem may be due to a new feature in auto-complete that searches for matches that include the entered string, not just ones that match the beginning of address book fields, which was the old method. Yes, I'm quite sure it is. At the same time, Thunderbird developed an infuriating habit of matching apparently arbitrary entries in my address book that had the letters I'm typing in there somewhere, with no logical priority order that I have been able to determine, and certainly not prioritising an address that exactly matches what I'm typing over half a dozen others that don't really look much like what I'm typing but apparently match according to whatever heuristics they are now using. When auto-complete shows multiple options, arrow down till you come to the correct one and then hit the Tab key. This will make sure you have the correct email address in your recipients list. No, it won't. Clearly that was the intention, but it doesn't work properly if you type/move too quickly. I suspect there is some sort of race condition where some autocomplete-related process is still searching for things if you hit tab too quickly and/or without moving down the list so you just get the default shown, and can then override what you thought you were explicitly selecting. (Again, if this had happened once or twice and I couldn't reproduce it I'd assume it was human error, but I've seen this way too many times to believe that by now.) You can opt-out if you like: I appreciate the link, but I'm not sure referring to a page that describes how to opt out of 14 different phone-home mechanisms for a different piece of Mozilla software is a great counter to concern over whether Thunderbird is doing creepy things behind its users' backs (however useful and/or well-intentioned those things may have been when some developer added them). If you're going to claim to promote privacy, as Mozilla make a point of doing, then I believe you should start from a default policy of full disclosure and requiring opt-in. Anything less on either count and you damage your credibility, even if in reality you thought what you were doing was innocent and users wouldn't mind.
samuell 12y ago
I would recommend always using Ctrl+F when trying to search in a mail/page/document, in any software. Have ran over few places where that didn't work.

by Kenji 12y ago

w1ntermute 12y ago

> Why I use thunderbird and not a web based client? I have multiple e-mail addresses and it's nice to have everything in one place, also it's accessible if you're offline. This is quite easy to do in Gmail (and presumably other webmail clients) with forwarding.

matthewmacleod 12y ago
It's really much harder to do this with other webmail clients than it is with a proper offline client.
hamhamed 12y ago
nobody wants forwarding if you want to use the 'replay as' feature. Plus it can get cluttered but with a mail client you got them all separated
detaro 12y ago
Which doesn't keep mail on the original server, so you always have to use Gmail. (and might not be allowed if it comes to corporate mail)
stormbrew 12y ago
Yeah? Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out from who the email was To if possible. That's why I still use it.
- nilved 12y ago
  You can add POP/IMAP and SMTP accounts and read, write and send emails directly in Gmail with the proper headers (i.e. no the "delivered by gmail.com" message on your emails.) I can't use my domain with Google Apps now, so I use my domain registrar's mailboxes and SMTP servers from my Gmail account for the same effect.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  > Now reply to someone with the appropriate From/Reply-To addresses from that mashed up gmail account. Thunderbird does this seamlessly, figuring it out from who the email was To if possible. The Gmail web app can do the exact same thing: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22377?hl=en
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    Fair enough. I wonder when they added this, it definitely didn't used to be able to do that.
    - w1ntermute 12y ago
      It's 5+ years old. I've been using it since at least the late 2000s.

e15ctr0n 12y ago

I think you will find the Quick Filter toolbar much easier to use. Make it visible from View -> Toolbars -> Quick Filter Bar and then follow the tips here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/quick-filter-toolbar https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/quick-filter-toolbar

Mahn 12y ago

I'm not sure if I'm alone here, but while I've been loyal to Thunderbird for many years, nowadays I find its speed atrocious: 3-4 seconds to load the application and connect to the google apps email servers, 3-4 seconds until "inbox" or another folder downloads, and another 3-4 seconds to download and read a specific email. I've seen this behaviour in multiple PCs, and meanwhile Chrome flies in these machines. It's come to a point where I just don't bother with TB and check email directly on the phone even if I'm in front of the computer.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
asutherland 12y ago
There's several things you could be running into: * Auto-compaction isn't working and so the .msf files are growing larger than they need to be. Thunderbird's per-folder metadata indices are stored in a weird texty append-only database format known as "mork" that you may have heard of, usually preceded or followed by some cursing. The file must be read completely into memory, and in many cases this ends up synchronously happening on the main thread. The upside to this is that the thread-pane is very fast and allows sorting on all columns, etc. Right-clicking on a folder and choosing "compact" will trigger compaction of the mork database as well as the offline cache (a per-folder mbox-style file where the downloaded messages are stored). * Not leveraging Thunderbird's offline storage and proactive syncing of messages. If you bring up the account settings for the account, and look at the "Synchronization & Settings" tab, you want "Keep messages for this account on this computer" checked. You also want checkboxes by folders you care about in the list that pops up when you click the "Advanced..." button. With these enabled, Thunderbird will proactively download the message bodies to your computer, making them available for both offline access and rapid message display. Note that if you only launch Thunderbird when you want to read your mail and immediately close it when done reading, you won't be getting much benefit from this and things may even go slower as you fight Thunderbird playing catch-up with your mail. * You have a lot of of messages in the folders in question. The message file loading is O(messages) and so is sync without CONDSTORE enabled. (Thunderbird's CONDSTORE implementation regrettably has some bugs and was turned off recently. See https://bugzil.la/912216 https://bugzil.la/912216) Additionally, gmail's IMAP implementation can take some time to open an IMAP folder with a lot of messages because it needs to build a sequence number mapping and do other stuff.

nsgi 12y ago

Edit -> Find is pretty standard. Chrome has Edit -> Find -> Find.

Silhouette 12y ago

I've been using Thunderbird for almost 10 years now and I literally never had a crash or unexpected behaviour. I'm also a long time user, for much the same reasons as others here, and for a long time I would have agreed that Thunderbird is generally stable and has few serious bugs. However, I have noticed a serious degradation in quality in the past few months. Basic stuff like looking up names from address books when composing a message just doesn't work properly any more, and worse, sometimes it shows one address it's found as you start typing but then changes it after you've moved your focus elsewhere to be someone else. I don't have a reproducible case or a theory about what triggers this behaviour so far, which makes it hard to file any sort of useful bug report. However, I run into problems in this area many times per week now and have only been doing so for the past few months, far too often for it to just be some sort of user error. I wish I could remember exactly which update I'd just done when it started. Also, it is more than a little creepy that Thunderbird is apparently phoning home every day to tell them I'm using it. Not cool, Mozilla. (Edit: Remove more general comment that unintentionally read as if targeted at Mozilla specifically.)

e15ctr0n 12y ago
> sometimes it shows one address it's found as you start typing but then changes it after you've moved your focus elsewhere to be someone else. The problem may be due to a new feature in auto-complete that searches for matches that include the entered string, not just ones that match the beginning of address book fields, which was the old method. When auto-complete shows multiple options, arrow down till you come to the correct one and then hit the Tab key. This will make sure you have the correct email address in your recipients list. > it is more than a little creepy that Thunderbird is apparently phoning home every day to tell them I'm using it. Not cool, Mozilla. You can opt-out if you like: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automatically-making-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automa...
- Silhouette 12y ago
  The problem may be due to a new feature in auto-complete that searches for matches that include the entered string, not just ones that match the beginning of address book fields, which was the old method. Yes, I'm quite sure it is. At the same time, Thunderbird developed an infuriating habit of matching apparently arbitrary entries in my address book that had the letters I'm typing in there somewhere, with no logical priority order that I have been able to determine, and certainly not prioritising an address that exactly matches what I'm typing over half a dozen others that don't really look much like what I'm typing but apparently match according to whatever heuristics they are now using. When auto-complete shows multiple options, arrow down till you come to the correct one and then hit the Tab key. This will make sure you have the correct email address in your recipients list. No, it won't. Clearly that was the intention, but it doesn't work properly if you type/move too quickly. I suspect there is some sort of race condition where some autocomplete-related process is still searching for things if you hit tab too quickly and/or without moving down the list so you just get the default shown, and can then override what you thought you were explicitly selecting. (Again, if this had happened once or twice and I couldn't reproduce it I'd assume it was human error, but I've seen this way too many times to believe that by now.) You can opt-out if you like: I appreciate the link, but I'm not sure referring to a page that describes how to opt out of 14 different phone-home mechanisms for a different piece of Mozilla software is a great counter to concern over whether Thunderbird is doing creepy things behind its users' backs (however useful and/or well-intentioned those things may have been when some developer added them). If you're going to claim to promote privacy, as Mozilla make a point of doing, then I believe you should start from a default policy of full disclosure and requiring opt-in. Anything less on either count and you damage your credibility, even if in reality you thought what you were doing was innocent and users wouldn't mind.

samuell 12y ago

I would recommend always using Ctrl+F when trying to search in a mail/page/document, in any software. Have ran over few places where that didn't work.