As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?
As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?
I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles, but without any alternative.
Thunderbird of now is more annoying and less convenient to use than when I last time used it in 2010's, before I moved to claws-mail.
And only reason using it now is cos of MS fucked up oauth2 method that is PITA to setup for any other OSS client as it requires the app to be added to their catalog and only thunderbird was big enough to get that
So I can understand the annoyance
To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.
The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.
My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.
Lol, no.
So thunderbird have 2 search bars, one on top, other in directory itself. The top one does what I'd expect browser search bar do, opens new tab and search everywhere, the bottom, again, inside a directory listing, I expect to search within directory.
If you type text, it does that, filtering messages in current view
If you type text and press enter, it does exact same thing the top one does, searchs everywhere, instead of the fucking directory I explicitly clicked and navigated to the other search bar
But fine, that's a quirk, you can get used to it... if not for how bad the opened search window is.
You get a list of messages where there is just enough text to not know whether you care about content of the message and whole thing fits like 4 mails (I get hundreds a day from various system stuff of hundreds of servers) and the ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE is empty and unused, and as it defaults to showing all mail, not mail in directory I was in, it's mostly useless. It also only shows last part of the path, not the whole dir mail is so instead of <A>/<B> dir you just get B
BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE. THEY MADE BETTER VIEW!
Just click on "Show results as list". Its just a list with a browser, same you get with normal directory browsing. It still wasted space, but it's at least usable
Let me just use the search to narrow down the list.... oh, it for some reason stopped searching in message bodies despise "body" option being selected and the same setting working in "main" directory search... and guess what enter does ? Of course, contrary to all good UI/UX design, it will run another tab with search that forgot your original query so when you might think you could narrow it down, nope
I just use geary, it's less annoying and does the job
team geary needs more love. geary works well for most day to day tasks with no showstopping bugs.
> I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles
Please don’t assume bad faith when the reality is that you don’t know.
Please provide an alternative then.
I’m not the one criticizing Thunderbird. I personally don’t use any email client on Linux; I just use whatever web interface the hosting provider has.
I've tried so many while doing a bit of research into MUAs and I can't say there are any alternatives that could replace it properly. But depending on your usage or if you're not a demanding user, there might be something out there.
For Windows the pickings are unfortunately slim. On Apple platforms I use Mail.app which has done its job quite well for decades but as of yet haven't found analogues for Windows and Linux.
Under Linux, Geary once held promise but has long since stagnated and is too basic.
As far as I know there isn't one. Maybe Evolution if they have managed to fix all the bugs it used to have. it is a sad state of affairs that we have so few useful email clients.
I still use Thunderbird but on my Linux system that I just set up I would like to try something else.
Some options appear in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/17r3twi/best_wind...
If you’re doing a new install and are generally fine with Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get implemented/fixed.
What I don’t like about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren’t portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own unique mess. I’d love to find something that allowed me to move the same configuration around between computers and platforms. I’m not sure if that exists.
I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for calendar leaves a lot to be desired.
My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their simplicity and being local-first clients but I’m using macOS less and less these days.
The “new outlook” that’s offered by Microsoft to consumers for free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft servers even if you’re using a third party client.
I’d also say you only need a truly local client if you have multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let’s say you’re with FastMail or something, their web mail and mobile/desktop apps are great.
Thank you. Am moving away from Outlook and Thunderbird is my default option. Betterbird looks promising, so I'll give it a try (or some of the ones in the thread)
Outlook Express
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