Comment by y0ghur7_xxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by y0ghur7_xxx | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around. Everybody migrated to webmail, but for those old grumps of us who still have multiple email accounts, and maybe even follow some newsgroups, tb is still the best player in town.

Thanks tb team for your work! I love you all!

A proper mail client also seems essential for taking part in mailing lists. I used to use gnus but got too frustrated at people sending me email in stupid HTML formats that I couldn't read. Thunderbird is the easiest thing to use that behaves like a proper mail client but also deals with the garbage from bad clients like Outhouse etc.

At the moment I am using Wanderlust, to help with the html I have set it up so I can open them in firefox.

I've banished myself to mobile. I am trying out k9-mail and open keychain on Android. They are both available on f-droid and seem to work well. Open keychain is so much easier to deal with than what I remember of enigmail on the desktop.

OpenKeychain is currently the best way to manage PGP keys on any platform. I don't know why there's no good UI for the desktop, Enigmail is a distant second.

> OpenKeychain is currently the best way to manage PGP keys on any platform.

How is it the best on any platform? I thought it only existed on Android?

I mean it's the best of any GUI on any platform. It's Android-only, yes.

> I am trying out k9-mail

K9mail doesn't nest reply threads[1] which is must have feature for me. Otherwise yes k9mail is good.

[1] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/763

Opening HTML mail in a browser is risky due to all the scripting possibilities ... Thunderbird's HTML component allows no scripting and disables loading (remote) images (tracking when I hope the mail) how do you deal with that in such a setup? (Actually use evolution, but would like to switch to something smaller ...)

I have the "Message Body As" setting set to plain text. This either will display the text/plain part of the message or will render the HTML using plain text markers (* * for bold, / / for italics, _ _ for underscore).

IME, it works out rather well for most HTML emails I receive.

In which email client? I regularly get email that is almost impossible to read, unless I load remote images.

In Thunderbird. Most of the HTML email I receive is mostly formatted text which Thunderbird's plain text view works well on.

Are the problems you're describing due to content within the images themselves, or due to placement of the text relative to the image?

This may or may not help, but ex. mutt lets you read HTML mail by running it through lynx/elinks/w3m [0], and I've had great success with this in a mostly-Outlook environment. I expect you could do the same thing with other clients.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutt#Viewing_HTML

Mutt is terrible for imap on a laptop, it hangs and loses changes when the connection dies. Or has this been fixed?

I don't know if it's been fixed, but I recommend pointing mutt at an offline copy of your mail instead of directly at an IMAP server. Use isync or another program to sync your mail.

When your mailbox is many gigabytes and you have small SSD, this is out of questions. Using IMAP allows only mail headers to be locally preserved.

This doesn't really work if you have multiple systems you want to access your mail from. There's no way to keep those systems in sync with each other, some folks fake it with dropbox-like services, but that's honestly not much different than just pulling over imap each time you open the mta...

I use offlineimap[1] and it absolutely does work. It keeps everything on the IMAP server while giving me a local copy to work from. It's super simple to setup and use, and I'm really happy with it.

[1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/

Interesting, I might have to give this another go. For my work mail, I use mbsync to store it locally, but I only have one system doing that. Personal email is a different matter, especially since some systems accessing it (e.g. my phone via K-9) would like to know if a mail has been read on another system (e.g. one storing mails locally). Does offlineimap handle that situation?

I don't know anyone who uses Mutt directly for imap.

Every guide I've read recommends using imapsync and msmtp for sending.

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/#getting-e...

Yes about mail lists. It seems Research Software Engineers these days can't cope with periodic bursts of tens of messages a day on a list. Moving to Slack left behind sme long experience coping with hundreds a day for maintenance/support.

Anyhow, Gnus can render "html" articles; `mm-text-heml-renderer' defaults to the built-in `shr' in Emacs 24.

> Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around.

Have you tried Sylpheed? https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

Not the OP but yes, and Clawsmail. Still keep coming back to Thunderbird. There are so many useful add-ons it's hard to leave. And add-ons are easier to write.

What add-ons do you use regularly?

"Nostalgy" is the key one for me. Folder filling and navigation from the keyboard only. If you know emacs and helm, it has a bit of its feel.

You stay up-to-date with Thinderbird releases? I do and I think about 1 in 10 of the ads-ons I have installed still work.

> Everybody migrated to webmail

That is so far from the truth it isn’t even funny. Outlook reigns in corporate and phones have native clients. Hell, i am still waiting for POP3 to die.

Amusingly, I try to use Outlook through the web client (OWA), because using the thick client would require me to pull out a Windows machine and that's just a pain.

For some reason I equate Microsoft Outlook with corporate hellhole.

I really prefer Seamonkey's Mail cleint (it has the same roots as Thunderbird), especially since you can always switch back to an good old desktop-like theme. Has been rock-solid since 15 years.

I used that for a while between the time the Mozilla Application Suite was discontinued till when I started using Firefox and Thunderbird. IIRC, I switched because the browser was having problems rendering certain websites that Firefox did not.

How well does it work today? Does the mail client have the ability to sign up for RSS/Atom feeds? Does it have a calendar built in? What about chat? (I guess I'm one of the rare Thunderbird users who actually uses all of those features).

Mostly to avoid service vendor lockin, I'd like to switch back to Thunderbird -- after I have a solid plan for replicated local backups, under my physical control. Is this practical with IMAP, or would POP3 be the way?

I agree, I've been using it for more then 10 years now and migrated between multiple machines and os platforms, all while holding onto several email accounts for historical needs.

That said, I also feel it is one of the worst calendar clients around. I've used lightning, I've tried the calendar plugins for google, things just don't work.

I've been using Mailspring for a couple of months now on Linux and it's been a very good experience. I think it's better than Thunderbird if you are more used to webmail clients.

>if you are more used to webmail clients. If you want to use a "webmail" client, wouldn't it be more simple to just open the browser ? Instead of installing a separate copy of chrome to run some js deployed locally ?

no, not really

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