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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it uses GTK it looks like the rest of your desktop (assuming your desktop is GNOME).

I always end up going back to Thunderbird, for a variety of reasons. But, I try a bunch of other stuff every now and then. Sylpheed is not bad, but it's not got anything I don't get from Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is more actively maintained and has more capabilities. (I keep trying Evolution, and hating it, every single time. It's huge and thinks really hard about every single action and continues to be buggy. I don't know how something has been in really active development for decades and still has weird quirks and misbehavior without any actionable error messages.)

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What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message.

Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier.

Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc.

Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

[1] http://www.claws-mail.org/

Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.

Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now.

I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).

> Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since.

The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up.

I may not be a typical e-mail user.

A N900 has 256 MB (plus 768MB 'swap') and as such is rather memory- (and CPU-) restrained. Still, looking at my current running instance of Claws (on a T42p, 2GB/1.8 GHz Pentium M) the process has a resident size of 32 MB. The currently opened mailbox contains 4417 messages (I need to archive a few of these...), the IMAP folder tree contains around 300.000 messages. In comparison, browsing the same folder in mutt takes 20 MB.

I just tested it on a folder containing 40.000 message (list archive), this increases the RSS to 82 MB. The same folder in mutt takes 64 MB. In other words, the 'penalty' paid for a GUI instead of a TUI is around 10MB + ~15%.

Hmm. I remember Claws from when I had an N810. It wasn't the greatest mail client at the time, but in part that was the lack of power / screen real-estate on the N810.

I should give it a try again sometime.

To edit the From address in outgoing email with Thunderbird, try the Virtual Identity extension.

The really nice thing about Virtual Identity is that it remembers which From address you use for each To address. Additionally, if you reply to someone that you've not written to before, VI uses the incoming mail's To address as the outgoing mail's From address.

I've tried Virtual Identity several times, several versions, but it always ended up making it impossible to read or send mail. When the extension was active I could not open messages (got empty windows), disabling the extension made everything right again. When it works Virtual Identity works well, but unfortunately it rarely works - at least for me.

I second that 100%. Using Sylpheed, Sylpheed Claws, then Claws Mail since early 2000s and never had any issues. It runs circles around Thunderbird and others speed wise because it was initially written when hardware limitations forced one to choose the right tool for the job and not simply pick the most famous language. At one time I had more than 10 email accounts and creating folders for each one plus filters to redirect incoming emails was straightforward; it's so fast that even today I keep in my Mail directory all mails since day one, including backups imported from other softwares. That means all mail since 1996, and it still loads instantly.

I also have made bad experiences with evolution. I wonder why major distributions still use it as their default client. Is there some good reason for that, or is it just neglect?

I'm forced at work to use an exchange account (so that implies using the calendar). Evolution was the only program I found that works on ubuntu and supports exchange somewhat (I didn't want at all to use the exchange web interface).

So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me

If you don't mind having jre on your system and running a daemon: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

Then you can use any client you want.

Have you managed to get davmail working with Office365/Outlook.com? It was unusably slow every time I tried (message fetching would take over a minute, inbox refresh would only happen once every ~30 minutes, etc...)

No, fortunately, never had to.

Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop.

The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail.

The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people.

Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones.

Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.

Not sure what you mean by "there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers."

Search is built into the IMAP protocol. [1]

Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. That said, "Sieve" is really powerful, and there are many SMTP and IMAP servers which support it.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-6.4.4

ok, 'search that does not suck' isn't a feature of IMAP.

> Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer.

Right, so users are forced to set up this stuff for each and every device they have. This is a big reason why the exodus to webmail and the proprietary internal-only protocols they use.

Seive is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard and is something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients. Unless you are a big email nerd that runs your own servers it's pretty much worthless.

What sucks about IMAP search? I linked to the protocol in my previous comment. It's pretty damn comprehensive in what it offers...

You can get desktop and web based and command line clients which talk the ManageSieve protocol so provide you with an interface to manage your server based sieve mail filters [1]

I'll agree that it's not common. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because companies like Google decided to roll their own for whatever reason.

[1] http://sieve.info/clients

IMAP Search support only ASCII and you cannot search non-English content. There is an extension for utf-8, but Some of the major emails services as Outlook/Ofiice365 doesn't support it. Also, you can search only a particular folder instead entire mailbox.

Fair points. I guess I've never had to search for non-ASCII text. Hopefully the UTF-8 extension will gain support over time.

I can see use cases for needing to search across multiple folders. I guess I've not felt the need to do that myself before. However, no reason your IMAP client couldn't search folders one after the other, or open multiple connections and search multiple folders simultaneously.

> Sieve is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard

It is, actually. https://wiki.tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5804

> something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients.

In that it is not part of IMAP, yes. However, webmail clients like Roundcube and desktop clients like Thunderbird and Claws/Sylpheed all offer plugins.

What do you mean major distributions use evolution as the default email client ? AFAIK almost all major distros give you the choice of the desktop environment you want if you want one.

When you choose the gnome flavor of said distros, I suppose that it comes with evolution because it is the official default email client for gnome until its replacement, geary, is ready. But last time I checked in 2015 it was still in early stages of development despite having started circa 2012.

I have tried Evolution off and on ever since Ximian released it back in the day. It always seemed buggy and bloated (even a year or two ago when I was just using it for Calendar integration I would find freak out and eat up 100% cpu randomly). I always went back to mutt or sup, or more recently I tried Geary. Recently (<6 months?) I tried evolution again and I am blown away with how reliable it is. The search is great, everything works. It's not a very exciting e-mail client, but it gets the job done better than any other (while integrating very nicely into gnome).

I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.

That was the last I heard too, but it seems to be actively updated. For example,

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/

Does anyone know the story?

There have been a couple of discussions here and elsewhere about it. My understanding is that Thunderbird is no longer a priority project for Mozilla Foundation and has no full-time developers paid by Mozilla, but it still uses Mozilla resources, and a number of volunteers continue to maintain it.

So, it's kinda in the category of Sylpheed or Claws, in that it no longer has major corporate sponsors, I guess. I think Evolution has a bit more corporate sponsorship (Red Hat, which has developers working full-time on it, while SuSE stopped funding its development a while back; I don't think Canonical contributes in any significant way, either), so if having a corporate developer behind the mail client is necessary, I guess Evolution is the only choice for Linux users.

Frankly, I wish Red Hat, and everybody else, would put its people on Thunderbird. It's far from perfect, but it's farther from awful than Evolution. But, I don't need Exchange integration, so I may be missing the big picture for corporate users.

The Thunderbird community is quite active, as can be seen by the activity in the tb-planning mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/).

They know they have to pivot to a more modern codebase, and have been discussing modernizing TB on a regular basis. Most of the traffic in April is about a "Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies". Go read it!

A rewrite with a skeleton crew sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Mozilla got a ground up rewrite, and even with big resources and a big team, it nearly killed Mozilla.

Then again, the tools are much better than ever. Building desktop apps can move very fast with Electron (or similar) and the like. Nonetheless, I think I'm on the pessimistic side of the argument about a total rewrite. I wish them well, but I suspect it'll fizzle out, as previous similar efforts have.

I'm not sure which Mozilla rewrite you're talking about, but in any case I feel that rewriting TB is doable. As you say there are better tools/frameworks, and the work done by asuth on the FirefoxOS mail client and glodastrophe (https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe) are good starting points.

Oh, you're in a for a treat! Jamie Zawinski wrote wonderfully on the topic of the rewrite of Netscape Navigator (e.g. Mozilla): https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

There have been other posts about it, but that's a reasonable place to start. Spolsky has also written about the dangers of rewrites, including Mozilla as one very public case study.

Interestingly, jwz also had a lot of things to say about the mail client that became Thunderbird, back when it was part of the Netscape suite.

There's a really long history with the Mozilla projects, and many lessons have had to be learned multiple times. I wonder if perhaps this is one of those occasions. Then again, the best thing that ever happened to Mozilla was Firefox, and that was one lone programmer deciding to (kinda) rewrite the damned thing to be lean and mean and scuttle all of the ancillary crap that Mozilla had accrued over the years. Maybe Thunderbird needs the same treatment...but, where's the Blake Ross to do it?

jwz isn't exactly a fan of "Hacker" "News". You may want to open that link in incognito mode.

Are you worried he can come through the internet to reap holy vengeance on all who click through to an article on his site?

Yes.

Additionally, you'll be treated to some specially prepared, uh, eggs if you click through to his site from HN.

Well, that's disappointing.

A rewrite with web technologies... please no.

Why? TB UI is currently in XUL which is a markup language like... the web. A lot of the TB backend is in js, like... the web.

well I guess the UI is alright. But I wouldn't like to see the core rewritten in JS.

IIRC 5 years ago mozilla announced that thunderbird was not a priority anymore and considered dropping it.

Then 1 or 2 years ago mozilla announced that thunderbird sharing the firefox codebase was unnecessarily taxing firefox and the remaining thunderbird developers were struggling to follow the pace of firefox. Moreover that they believed thunderbird had little potential to have an impact as firefox has. So they proposed to separate thunderbird from firefox and cut the ties entirely.

Last news I heard was that Thunderbird could join seamonkey and become a community effort with some backing from mozilla[1].

[1]: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/03/10/seamonkey-thunderbird-to-jo...

Those screenshots should really be updated.

Assuming the desktop is GNOME is a bold assumption, AFAIK there's no gnome under OSX nor windows, and personally GNOME has displayed so much bad faith and disdain for the need of its users that even if it were the best desktop available I would not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Also GTK applications usually do not look bad under KDE or LXDE or cinnamon, etc.

That being said the official screenshots are horribly dated, maybe more than 10 years. They feature version 2.2 while current version is 3.5.1 better than words here a screenshot of sylpheed 3.5.1 under a plasma 5 desktop: https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png

I tried a variety of email client and none have been fully satisfying, evolution was really painful to use and half-broken most of the time, it's been a while since I've used thunderbird and though it tends to work I have no plan to go back until it offers the possibility to prevent access with a password as the mozilla suite offered. Mutt was nice but I moved away for personal preferences. Right now I use kmail which I recommend you do NOT use, far from being the pain evolution was, it mostly work most of the time but when it does not you're in for a ride, the main drawback is the akonadi backend that offers nothing I want or need and gives me headache. every other day I have stop and restart akonadi so the new mails would show in my inbox, once in a while it fails silently to send email, the documentation is sparse and the bug reports are scary[1] and the fix you may finally find are not obvious[2]. I had hopes in trojita but last time I checked it was still not ready for daily use after years of development. I had even better hopes for caliopen[3] but current roadmap says late 2018.

The good news is KDE has been working on replacing akonadi by Sink which is supposed to have learned from their mistakes and address the weak points of akonadi , and replacing kmail with kube which will leverage Sink and be consistent with roundcube next. Bad news is they've been at it for a couple years now and it's not done yet.

Next in line for me to give a try are elementary OS' mail[4] and notmuch in emacs (also exists for vim).

[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=cha...

[2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate...

[3]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/

[4]: https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail

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