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Having looked at it again today after about 8 years: * The onboarding experience is horrible; tries to sell me a gandi email account, then the setup wizard fai

by moe 12y ago

Having looked at it again today after about 8 years: * The onboarding experience is horrible; tries to sell me a gandi email account, then the setup wizard fails with an opaque error. Had to abort and configure manually. * Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin and results in the GUI getting garbled bad; overlapping items, truncated labels, unusable dialogs etc. Sorry but 12px is not a reasonable font-size in 2015. * The default conversation view seems to be some kind of in-joke, it only shows the first few hundred chars of each message. A semi-reasonable conversation view can be bolted on with another 3rd party plugin but it feels rough (flickering redraws, ugh). * Forwarding multiple messages inline is still not possible. * Search has improved a lot. * Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration. * A whole bunch of "wtf" was enabled by default (Silverlight plugin, Flash plugin) * During setup it tried to connect to about 8 different domains (mozilla.org, CDNs, whatever other crap), none of which was my mailserver. It should not do that. All that said. It's still one of the best (if not the best) GUI mail clients available. That's how bad the competition is...

yawaramin 12y ago
The default conversation view is not a view, it's a preview.
hellodpi 12y ago
> Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin... Thunderbird can handle high DPIs natively, at least on Linux. Hopefully OS X is similar. All fonts and UI elements are scaled up. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Config editor. Set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2, or whatever looks good to you. It's the same procedure as Firefox.
favadi 12y ago
This is exactly my experience with thunderbird as well. I'm using claws-mail at this moment. The only thing to complain is, fetch mail in claws-mail is slower than thunderbird
wodenokoto 12y ago
it checks for plugin blocklist (as mentioned in the article) it probably also downloads a list of malware websites (called "reported attack site" and "reported webforgeries"in firefox)
jcranmer 12y ago
> * Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration. Shouldn't View > Message Body As > Simple Text do that for you?
- ddebernardy 12y ago
  Doubtful. If the parent poster is worried about privacy and security, he wants to configure it so as to always read emails as plain text without ever loading images.
  - 1wd 12y ago
    Options -> Privacy -> Uncheck Allow remote content in messages
  - jcranmer 12y ago
    Um... that's what the option does: it refuses to display HTML; if no plain text part is given, the HTML parts are converted to plain text for display. If you're only worried about http image bugs, TB disables all remote content loading by default.
moe 12y ago
So, a day later I'm back to Postbox now. Here's what broke it for me this time. It's hard to believe but these things are indeed still unfixed: * The message list can not scroll to bottom. Neither on startup, nor on arrival of new messages. That bug[1] is open since 2010(!). * The unread count and new message notification can not be disabled for specific IMAP-folders. Since my spam folder is a regular IMAP-folder (managed by spam assassin) Thunderbird insists on notifying me about every new Spam mail I get. Uhm, no thanks. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539468 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539468

by moe 12y ago

yawaramin 12y ago

The default conversation view is not a view, it's a preview.

hellodpi 12y ago

> Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin... Thunderbird can handle high DPIs natively, at least on Linux. Hopefully OS X is similar. All fonts and UI elements are scaled up. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Config editor. Set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2, or whatever looks good to you. It's the same procedure as Firefox.

favadi 12y ago

This is exactly my experience with thunderbird as well. I'm using claws-mail at this moment. The only thing to complain is, fetch mail in claws-mail is slower than thunderbird

wodenokoto 12y ago

it checks for plugin blocklist (as mentioned in the article) it probably also downloads a list of malware websites (called "reported attack site" and "reported webforgeries"in firefox)

jcranmer 12y ago

> * Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration. Shouldn't View > Message Body As > Simple Text do that for you?

ddebernardy 12y ago
Doubtful. If the parent poster is worried about privacy and security, he wants to configure it so as to always read emails as plain text without ever loading images.
- 1wd 12y ago
  Options -> Privacy -> Uncheck Allow remote content in messages
- jcranmer 12y ago
  Um... that's what the option does: it refuses to display HTML; if no plain text part is given, the HTML parts are converted to plain text for display. If you're only worried about http image bugs, TB disables all remote content loading by default.

moe 12y ago

So, a day later I'm back to Postbox now. Here's what broke it for me this time. It's hard to believe but these things are indeed still unfixed: * The message list can not scroll to bottom. Neither on startup, nor on arrival of new messages. That bug[1] is open since 2010(!). * The unread count and new message notification can not be disabled for specific IMAP-folders. Since my spam folder is a regular IMAP-folder (managed by spam assassin) Thunderbird insists on notifying me about every new Spam mail I get. Uhm, no thanks. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539468 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539468