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Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a major issue on one occasion.

I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.

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I think a lot of people are forgetting that there is still a community developing it since Mozilla stopped "updating" it, beyond maintenance, in 2012. The product isn't dying, just will no longer be Mozilla backed. I assume that maintenance, like ongoing updates, will be passed to the community and hopefully another company steps up to back the project.

Repo for Thunderbird: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central

Thanks for highlighting the repo!

I too had heard development had stopped and misconstrued that to mean all development.

Now I'm wondering if there are any issues I might be able to help fix. I still use Thunderbird so if I can help keep it alive, I'd like to.

As parent pointed out, most of the alternatives are worse.

No problem. I think everyone got out their pitchforks without reading Mozilla's announcement and looking at the repo.

There are always issues to help out on. Here's a bit more info on contributing [0]. I imagine it won't change much as the project is officially handed off to the community. It's largely led by the community anyways at this point.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

Thunderbird usage continues to grow, almost reaching 10M users:

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...

Is that more than Firefox OS?

Yes, I think so. There might be a mention of it in the article.

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

It may be open source, but it's a thin client-side with your data being handled by the servers of a third party. No thanks, as trusting Google or FastMail with my email is a tough pill to swallow already, trusting an intermediary as well is way too much.

You can actually host the Nylas Sync Engine yourself so if you're seriously considering it, it's still an option.

Interesting. Will take a look.

yes, but why not just use a client that doesn't need a server-side component

Looking through their API docs, one of the things that I noticed is that they added a transaction log ("delta" field), which IMAP doesn't have: https://www.nylas.com/docs/#deltas

Having a server communicate with IMAP (which is slow), cache the results, and export a more efficient/log-structured alternative probably makes syncing client computers much faster.

Nylas N1 requires a custom server (Nylas Sync Engine) to do notifications. Why? Their FAQ is extremely vague about it. Apparently it suffers the same performance issues as plain IMAP for search. It seems this might be to support their Electron based UI, which seems... bloated to say the least.

The Electron UI is all local.

I believe the sync engine translates between IMAP and a custom JSON protocol they've created. I'm not sure what the performance difference is, but looking at the API docs, it looks a lot nicer to work with than IMAP: https://www.nylas.com/docs/

It also seems to more accurately represent modern semantics for working with email. For example, it allows using OAuth for authentication, and it has separate fields for folders and labels, depending on the backing email service. (And unlike IMAP, the labels field is actually useful.) You can also download a transaction log to make sync faster, which I don't think has an analog in IMAP.

Subjectively, I've found the performance to be rather snappy in most cases.

(You can also run a local client of the sync engine, if you don't want to trust their hosted copy: https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine)

Hi-- I work at Nylas. Happy to jump in here :)

The sync engine handles all the compatibility or dozens of IMAP and Exchange servers, and uses a variety of heuristics for real-time notifications. It also does the heavy-lifting for the huge amount of data in most people's mailbox. The N1 app can cache your entire archive in about 10% of the disk space required if you also download all unprocessed headers+attachments.

Right now our search implementation just sends a proxy request to the IMAP search, so you'll get the same performance as Gmail web, Mac Mail, etc. It's not ideal. We're working on our own faster search system, but it's tough to build a huge distributed search cluster that handles tens of terabytes. (And is growing quickly!) If anyone here wants to work on that, we're also hiring. ;)

N1 is built on Electron, which under the hood is Chromium+NodeJS so that comes with a bit of weight. But the app itself is pretty manageable. You can check out the source here: https://github.com/nylas/n1

Nylas is a beautiful app and, by design, easily extensible. As a result, I think that it has a better chance than other open source mail clients of providing an experience that's as polished and complete as Gmail. Doing that requires a bunch of affordances like calendar integration, Youtube previews, warning if you forgot to add an attachment, 10-second "undo send", and so on. Letting the community write those as add-ons seems smart.

To really make Nylas compelling over Gmail, and also to replace Thunderbird, here's what I think needs to happen:

1. Bundle Sync Engine and N1 into a single program.

2. Implement local search. Faster than IMAP search and doesn't rely on a network connection.

(As it stands, Nylas requires an internet connection to work. As long as that's the case it's no Thunderbird replacement at all, and will have a v hard time winning over Gmail users.)

The good news is that both Sync Engine and N1 are GPLv3, so it's totally possible. The bad news is complexity:

* Sync Engine is written in Python and uses MySQL for persistence

* N1 is built with Coffeescript + React + Electron, and uses SQLite for persistence

So we need to simplify. We can't just bundle all that into an app, it would be a monstrosity. Here's how I think we could do it instead:

* Use Sync Engine as the basis for a Node library for IMAP sync

* Use the SQLite full-text feature (fts4) for search

That way you'd have a single Electron app with all persistence in SQLite.

I'm prototyping this now. Thoughts? Let me know if you have ideas or want to help!

N1 actually works offline. Obviously it won't fetch new mail, but you can read, archive, compose, and search for local messages. When you reconnect, those tasks will persist to the backend and Gmail/iCloud/Exchange.

Search is definitely an area we can make dramatic improvements, and we're working on it.

I've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways:

- FAST. Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) in a few days of on-and-off cleanup.

- Plays well with others. Uses a bog standard Maildir format that anything sane can read (including Thunderbird, so migration should be easy), provides a very powerful hooking system which can do anything from verifying PGP signatures to checking your spelling before sending to displaying attachments.

- Sane defaults. Doesn't require a lot of in-depth customization to provide the basics, and the bells and whistles are hardly out of reach.

- You have a backup of your mail for free (by using OfflineIMAP)

- Not hard to learn (at least for the crowd here). If you can use Vim, you can be using Mutt at full speed in less than a week.

- Search capabilities that blow nearly every other project out of the water (regexes with some very cool niceties)[1]

- Secure by design. Mails are rendered as plaintext, HTML is decoded by piping messages through a program like w3m. Tracking bugs can't do their job, spammers can't see that you've looked at their stuff, and you're immune to whatever image decoding bugs crop up. (Though you can still view images, it's an explicit process). Also, builtin GPG support.

I followed Steve Losh's guide[2] on setting it up.

[1]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html

[2]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/

I setup something along the lines of Homely Mutt, the setup time is obscene but it's very quick and reliable

How well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed more cumbersome than Alpine for that.

That I'm not 100% sure of. I know for receiving, you'd just configure OfflineIMAP to deliver each account's messages into a different folder, and just switch between them in Mutt, but I don't know how it would work for distinct from-addresses, contact lists, etc.

Some quick googling[1] makes it look like you indeed do that first thing, and then set up a hook to load a different configuration file when you enter the folder for a different mailbox.

[1]: https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_...

I stopped using mutt a while ago, but I just used separate config files for every mail account and a bash alias to launch mutt for each one.

Unless you actually need to do things like move entire e-mail threads between accounts, it works well enough.

Works fine. You can switch between IMAP accounts like switching between folders.

Is there a version of Mutt with a GUI yet?

While I like command line apps, and am a die hard vim user, there are just some applications that I really want to use a mouse for, and email is one of them. I've tried mutt a few times before and it's just never clicked with me. It's not that I can't learn how to drive it --- it's that I don't want to have to. Finding little-used commands is so much easier if there's an actual menu.

That's funny, because every time I use an MUA other than mutt I'm frustrated by how janky it feels to process email with a mouse. :)

The little-used commands can be found by pressing "?" in any mode. You get a nice list including any custom macros you've set up (I don't use many, but a few are essential). It's far simpler than clicking all over menus and dropdowns and hovering inscrutable icons...

I used to use offlineimap. Now I use isync. Much more efficient and simple.

I also recommend an indexer like notmuch or mu to gain Gmail-like search and agenda capabilities.

For Webmail or IMAP mail, look no further than Fastmail. These guys know exactly what they are doing with IMAP and they can easily accomodate your multiple accounts.

I've been a Fastmail user for almost a decade. I've never been happier with any email provider (or any provider, to be honest). You pay for the service, but it's worth the money and more. You are treated like a valued customer and the support, if needed, is rapid and professional. I cannot recommend Fastmail enough.

ultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser.

(Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.)

EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.

I'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts.

If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.

I understand, but send these guys an email. One of the founders will likely respond to you.

I used to run all my own stuff, but when my children came along, I didn't want to spend all my time chasing issues with servers.

Look the Fastmail guys up. If anyone is doing email correctly, it's Rob, Bron, and the guys at Fastmail. They actually write some of the code for the Cyrus IMAP server, so if you were in doubt as to how talented these guys are, don't fear. I would now NOT trust my email to anyone else. They are that good. Yes, I know, I'm some random guy on the Internet, but I'm an IT guy, which in itself says nothing, but I'm nothing if not extremely picky about my own IT. These guys can fix any issues you may have and probably give you some awesome suggestions. They are approachable, something you will never get from any other company. They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US. Worth a call if you value good service and top-notch know-how from guys who know email better than anyone else I'm aware of. They routinely post in the Email Discussions Web site forum.

> They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US.

Mhm, 2 of the "Five Eyes" countries. Yeah, you're really selling me on this one.

I'll admit I'm being a bit ridiculously paranoid, but it's cheap paranoia for me, Thunderbird works well as a client and I spend maybe 5 minutes per month doing mail server admin stuff. I'm really not willing to switch to any hosted solution for this.

Just looking for another mail client option if/when Thunderbird goes down hill, not a mail server.

Well, for Webmail, then, I would say Tutanota or ProtonMail, both of which are good.

Have you looked at Mailpile[1]? I haven't used it, but their idea was basically "self-hosted Gmail".

https://www.mailpile.is

Yeah, definitely looks interesting, but the issue I have is again the multi-account issue. Thunderbird has very nice handling of many different email accounts.

How does it compare to, say, Gmail enterprise? Well, apart from the whole Google Apps.

I'm curious because we'll have to migrate to a better email provider in a month or two, and Gmail enterprise seemed to be the best fit for us (price, storage, good iOS app to leverage push notifications, etc).

Google's rendition of IMAP isn't following any standard but their own. Fastmail uses Cyrus IMAP server, which most certainly follows standards.

I've been a Fastmail user for almost 10 years. Never an issue that was not solved in very short order and most professionally. Fastmail offer a modern product with old world service and charm. A win-win.

We use either Postbox, Thunderbird or Apple Mail and all of them should work with Gmail like every most common mail client. So the point about IMAP doesn't have a practical impact for us. Am I missing something? Good to know about their strong reliability though

I would simply add that whilst Google have their fingers in so many different things, Fastmail does one thing very well: email and email-related.

Google's apps for iOS are subpar compared to its Android counterparts, or even to other iOS apps. I'm a heavy Android user, but on my new iPhone I actually prefer the native email app, because it is simple, effective, more standards complaint than Gmail and has quick swipe actions for both delete and archive, which is all I need.

On push, Google Apps gives you ActiveSync as a protocol, as an alternative to IMAP. But the integration with iOS Mail is weird and I could not use it.

But FastMail on the other hand, in a twisted turn of events supports push through Apple's own APN, getting the same treatment as iCloud: https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-availabl...

FastMail also has a native app that does push notifications, but it's just the packaged web interacts with push notifications added. This is both good and bad. It's good because the mobile web interface is very decent, compared to Gmail, and this means you always have a decent UI on whatever OS you have. It's bad because it doesn't feel native, but then there's nothing more native than the iOS Mail app.

Thunderbird user for years here. I now use Postbox, which is (I believe) a commercial fork of Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com/

Additionally, the Postbox search feature is way better than Thunderbird's.

Interesting, I'll definitely take a look at this. I don't mind paying for it, but I'd be a bit iffy on going from a nice open source solution to a proprietary one.

EDIT: Nevermind, no Linux build, that's out for me unfortunately.

Postbox is pretty good, and would have been the solution to my mail client woes, except that:

* even after you've paid for the product, the only way to get support is to pay $10 for every question you want to ask, however basic or advanced it is - and you'll need support, because...

* there's erratic unpredictable behaviour at many places; is it some subtle bug in the software? or is it some weird about:config option that you have to set to get things working as expected? Who knows! If you're lucky, you'll find a solution in the Thunderbird forums that works. Often though, that dialog option has been removed from Postbox or that about:config option no longer does anything, and...

* the documentation is no help. It's no worse than the average startup's help pages, except in this case, as mentioned above, there's no support - so you'd expect that to be compensated with exhaustive documentation, but no such luck. The docs cover just the most basic cases and leave all the complex interactions of emailing to your own guesswork. Also...

* the devs avoid users like the plague. The only-paid-support thing is (explicitly stated as) a consequence of this, but this even extends to bug reports and feature requests - which are free of cost to submit, but the two bug reports (and one or two feature reqs) I submitted were met with only gaping silence. The interaction on Facebook and Twitter too seems limited to version announcements and rare one sentence replies.

I really wanted to like Postbox, for it to be the solution, because it was quite a good product with advanced capabilities and a quite reasonable cost. But it didn't seem like a reliable option for the long run given these limitations.

> the devs avoid users like the plague

A recipe for a terrible product. I tried Postbox when it came out and found it to be unbearably buggy (like they had released an alpha version). I couldn't even get Gmail to work, which should have been user story #1 for them: set up Gmail account.

Now I understand the culture that made it such a piece of garbage and will continue to avoid it like the plague.

"4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)" Wow why does it need so much RAM.

Not sure, but it's currently using just over 200 MB of RAM here (on Windows 10).

Interesting story tangentially related to this question. I just finished building my new gaming rig - the only thing left is a GPU which should be coming in the mail pretty soon. The CPU I have, a core i7 4790K, has a pretty decent GPU so I was testing it out the last couple of days. The first game I tried was GTA 5. It ran smoothly (albeit at the lowest possible settings and 720p resolution). I was pretty impressed with the integrated graphics' performance. Yesterday I tried GTAV out again for a little bit and I observed that it was ... way too choppy and basically unplayable. I couldn't figure out the reason why. Then I saw that Thunderbird was the only application that was open aside from Steam and GTAV. I closed it down again and boom, back to consistently high framerates.

What is the catch here? Granted I'm using the integrated graphics that came with the CPU but I have 32 GBs of RAM. What gives!??

How long was Thunderbird open before this happened? It could have been a memory leak, which can be really expensive when working with web-rendering software.

It was open for a bit. This experience has made me start to question all those times I had slow-ish response times and Thunderbird was open. Slowness or game choppiness should be unacceptable given that I have a 4.0 Ghz CPU and 32 GB RAM. I guess it is time to look for a new email client :/

"didn't DPI scale properly", "strange behavior with my IMAP server", "consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system", "handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages".

If you have enough rigid requirements nothing will ever be a good fit.

This is true, but sort of specious. The point is that for the grandparent (and me) Thunderbird meets all these requirements, and other stuff doesn't. Could we adjust our decades-mature workflow to accomodate other tools? Sure. But it would suck. So we use the tool we have that does what we want until something unambiguously better comes along.

Of course! But Thunderbird does a pretty good job of all these requirements, it's the only reason I feel like I can be so stringent with them. Only reason I've been trying to leave is everyone else telling me it's bad or it's going to stop being maintained properly.

I second that. It's hard to find a functional and usable mail client. I may switch to claws for personal use, but I am still using thunderbird for work.

KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.

How's the support for it on Windows and OS X?

I don't know about support, but my experience is it works fine on Windows.

Well, that's what I meant by support. Sorry for not being more clear.

They already released 5.0, and didn't change anything. What is more likely to happen is the development of a Plasma Mobile QML UI built on top of Kontact and the new Akonadi that you can switch between, and that the desktop version might just use a reactive designed mobile UI as default with the current UI being available as a toggle option.

That's a pity. I didn't get KF5 one yet since it's still in experimental in Debian[1] and I assumed it's not usable enough. Settings UI in KMail really needs some serious streamlining.

[1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kdepim

I feel the same way, I love KMail but it feels like a mess whenever I have to configure it.

For a good IMAP webmail client I recommend Rainloop: http://www.rainloop.net/

Yeah I use it in some places actually but unless I'm missing something, you can't connect to multiple accounts, see them simultaneously and get notifications on all of them.

While we’re still at a pretty early pre-release version, we already do multiple accounts and unified inbox with ownCloud Mail: https://github.com/owncloud/mail

If you do try it, please let us know of your feedback in the issue tracker! :)

(And that is, you can also run ownCloud with the Mail app locally. We’re working on improved caching.)

I personally use mu4e. If you've tried it a year or so ago, it has made many improvements since then. It is terminal based, but I find I can't use thunderbird any more after switching.

So do I. offlineimap for syncing mails with my IMAP server at fastmail and mu4e for reading mails. Search is superfast, but I miss a better handling of spam mails. Thunderbird is really good at sorting out spam once you've trained the spam filter.

Check out MailMate! It's great!

It's a robust IMAP client that has cross account message rules, smart filters, blocking external images, OpenPGP, Google's wonky IMAP implementation, great support, and a lot more.

http://freron.com/

It's great, but not the fastest client in/on OS X. For me, Mail is faster. YMMV.

> probably Alpine, a CLI based client

I think that Mutt might be a better option in that I think it is still maintained.

I believe alpine is still maintained and it has much better multi account support than mutt.

I'm certainly at a loss for amother decent mail client that works on OS X and with Exchange.

I've been using Mail.app with Exchange for 3 years, never had a problem. Is there anything in particular missing?

I'll take another look, thanks.

I run Zimbra, and their webmail UI is the best I've seen - much more functional than GMail.

Thunderbird has been forked. http://www.fossamail.org/

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