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Comment by tony | Hacker News Reader

(I have not tried Thunderbird 68 yet, but have tried a fairly recent one last month, unknown version though)

Favorite interface for mail clients are Airmail (macOS), Mailbird (Windows), geary (Linux).

The thing they have in common is unified inbox, merging of threads, controlling signal-noise.

If thunderbird took that UX approach, had undo send, it'd be indispensable.

There are also small things, like google apps 2FA working out of the box, searching email, that for some reason haven't worked as well for me w/ thunderbird yet. I'm not sure if searching gmail is doing it through their API, or by downloading all mail, but I've had issues with that.

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Undo send? That always struck me as a silly feature. It just sends another email, one politely requesting the removal of the first.

Also, TBird does have a unified inbox. I've been using it that way for years.

As for search, I have 20+ years worth of mail in thunderbird. Search works. I mostly rely on the quick filter (which filters sender/subject), and occasionally switch to the full-fledged search feature, which can take a while depending on the complexity of my searches and how far back I want to search.

> Undo send? That always struck me as a silly feature. It just sends another email, one politely requesting the removal of the first.

No, it delays sending by, say, 20 seconds so you can cancel sending it. It’s useful if you accidentally hit send. I think you’re referring to the “recall” option on Exchange, and you’re right that it never really worked.

Ah thanks for clarifying that. That does seem like a useful feature.

If there isn't an option or plugin for this already, it sounds like relatively low hanging fruit. Might even be a good first project for someone who's interested in contributing to tbird.

As an aside, back in the days of dialup, I would compose a batch of mails offline, give them all a read-through, and then connect and send. My mails contained significantly fewer errors back then.

That's what Outlook's "Recall" feature does (at least outside your organization), but "Undo send" can be set to delay email sending and give you a chance to say "Wait I didn't mean to hit that" before it actually leaves your computer.

Gmail's web interface also does this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2819488?co=GENIE.Plat...

In the top right, click Settings.

Next to "Undo Send," select a Send cancellation period of 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds.

> before it actually leaves your computer

Well, it leaves your computer as soon as you type on the keyboard; that's how it saves drafts. The Undo feature works by telling Gmail servers to send the email in X seconds. That timeout gets canceled if you hit Undo. Or at least I assume that's how it works. I'm sure it doesn't wait to send data to the Gmail server until timeout is over. If that were the case, your email would never be sent if you closed the tab during the timeout.

Good point. "Leaves your outbox" would be a better way to put it.

Quick filter is a power user way to clean out email like a hot knife through butter. GMail is a good product but for this particular use case Thunderbird blows it out of the water. I felt, and still feel, that Thunderbird is for 'serious' email users.

Airmail is a fine client, and MailButler adds the missing features for me.

Thunderbird has Send Later ( https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-... for ) which the same as undo send.

Unified folders have been around for a while. 2FA has been around for a while. I think search is local, but it works well enough.

I haven't yet found an email client to replace Thunderbird/Airmail. All the new-fangled ones like Mailbird, Postbox simply leave out too many features to be useful.

As usual, I came here to look for recommendations :) I have been enjoying Mailspring[0], an OSS fork of Nylas Mail (RIP). I came across it while looking for the closest thing to Google Inbox (RIP also). Mailspring is cross-platform.

[0]:https://getmailspring.com/

It's free, but not open source.

I thought this was the source? https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring

Or are you referring to the cloud aspects of Mailspring, like read receipts etc?

The UI is open source, but the mailsync engine it uses is distributed as a proprietary, closed-source binary.

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