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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor.

It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly.

But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market.

Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.

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I think Outlook itself is a big reason for why other email clients seem so behind. As a user, Outlook is great and I have absolutely no complaints about it. As a developer that occasionally has to work with the technical side of emails, Outlook is the biggest source of frustration due to its “proprietary” standard of content presentation, address book management, contacts etc. I have to write plenty of code specifically for emails to work with Outlook because they do not follow any open standard and they’ve created their own. And we can’t stay away from it because it’s definitelly the most used client in our field.

Seems like Microsoft is leveraging their position in the same way Google does with browsers and Apple does with hardware.

Yeah, this.

I'm on a Mac, and really prefer the native Mac mail client. It's fast, polished, and has insanely great search tools. But I keep Outlook running, too, because to properly and reliably deal with Exchange calendaring (esp with respect to coordinated online meeting setup), it's really the only good option.

Which means I have two copies of my work email corpus on my machine. And it's not small.

It’s great, but also super frustrating. Like how it will suddenly pop into focus every few hours (possibly showing your personal emails while screen sharing) or how message content sometimes just doesn’t display.

What app are you saying does these tings?

I experience neither issue on my Mac with Mail.app or Outlook, so I suspect local issues for you.

I don't know. My dad is an "average" user running Outlook as client, and he's currently complaining all the time because for some reason at least every second Windows 10 update wrecks the performance of Outlook so hard it sometimes takes minutes to start and upwards of 10 seconds to open an email. Not to mention the occasional crash.

I'm glad Claws mail exists; an ancient client but the only graphical one I could find that's actually fast and lightweight. Although Mailspring is pretty good as well and is not quite as slow as one might expect from an Electron app.

In the end I am really glad I have no need of more "enterprise" features in this area.

It's not that Microsoft is following in Googles footsteps, it's the other way around. Microsoft just gets to feel the other side of the stick for a change. Googles time will come too one day.

> I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections.

If you haven't already, check out how profiles and the profile manager work, and maybe put your Thunderbird profile in a location you backup, or even sync with other devices if needed [0]. The ability to install Thunderbird on a new machine, point it to the profile directory and have it exactly as you set it up is just wonderful. I guess by installing plugins and configuring it, but not adding email accounts, you could even make a profile for less technically savy people to use and add their email acount to.

[0] One pitfall is that a profile can only get opened by versions as new or newer than the last Thunderbird installation that used it -- for this purpose I made an empty profile I can switch to just to update Thunderbird before I use my actual profile. There's probably a dozen better ways of doing this, but even this duct-tape method works fine for me.

On the other Hand the way Thunderbird profiles work you might have to do this only once a decade and not once every new device. At least this was the case in for me

I've been carrying over my Thunderbird profile to new computers since the 00s. It's just restoring a folder from backup, no obscure settings in the registry or hidden folders.

> It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are.

It really is odd. I've tried a handful of clients, but the one I wanted to work the most was MailSpring. The UI was clean, it was supposed to be fast, and have great integration off the bat. I forget if it was my gmail, my student email (through gmail), or my hotmail account, but one of them would just refuse to connect. If I can only have 2/3 of my emails, I'm not going to bother. That was a few months ago, so maybe it's fixed, but damn.

Thunderbird works, but if they could have some easier customization, I think they could really take back some of the market.

I was a paid subscriber of Mailspring for a while, but it just completely grinds to a halt with large threads (>50 replies). It’s so unfortunate because the rest of the email client is very pleasant to use.

I’m still searching for a fast email client with great UX, but for now I assume they are mutually exclusive.

It's incredible how shitty ALL email clients for Windows are, except for Thunderbird. Of course, Mozilla had to abandon it...

Great to see a headline like this again. But even if you had frozen Thunderbird how it was, it would still beat other mail solutions. I can live with Outlook/Exchange in my corporate environment, but it still cannot compete.

>But even if you had frozen Thunderbird how it was, it would still beat other mail solutions.

Definitely. And that's sad. I guess everybody uses web mail these days.

Gnome's Evolution is quite good as well and the built-in exchange support for both email and calendar via EWS works better than the thunderbird plugin. I used to use thunderbird, but after several troubles with the exchange plugin (e.g. meetings on Fridays disappearing) and calendar not working properly I switched to Evolution where it just works.

But there's no Evolution for Windows, is there?

> But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again

Thunderbird's problem is and always has been a lack of resources. Mozilla infamously bungled, underfunded, and then abandoned it (as a result of narrowing their focus from "the Internet" from their original charter and trying to redefine "Internet" to mean "the Web"). But even after the spin-off and independence, Thunderbird's lack of resources isn't helped by Thunderbird development being more difficult than it needs to be (read: seemingly unapproachable for many potential contributors).

"How to keep contributors when they are not even contributors yet" by Soledad Penades is incredibly relevant (moreso for its title than the actual specifics of the post content, but there are good lessons there, too):

https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributo...

Ten years ago, you could get folks who were willing to get dirty with XPCOM/XBL/XUL because they already existed in the wider Mozilla community, and the biggest problem was Thunderbird's build process and compile times. Nowadays, you have the same barrier wrt annoying build processes, but the pool of knowledgeable people is smaller since the XUL add-ons ecosystem has been decimated. Ultimately, Thunderbird will need to address its legacy use of XUL, but they already know that and seem to be working on it.

More importantly, though, the problem Thunderbird needs work on is the same old problem from before: the headache of setting up a development environment that can actually perform a successful build, and how long it takes for that build to complete. The way that Zotero is built is currently pretty hacky, but nonetheless an example of how easy it should be to get a development environment set up. (In fact, it can and should be made easier than that, but just getting Thunderbird's build process to where Zotero is right now would be a huge boon to making Thunderbird something that potential contributors actually start considering as "approachable".)

https://github.com/zotero/zotero-standalone-build/blob/maste...

What hurts Thunderbird extremely hard is Mozilla's inability to keep any embedding story live for more than a year or so.

Originally, Thunderbird and Firefox lived in the same CVS codebase, and the only difference to build Thunderbird was changing one line in your config file. When Mozilla moved to Mercurial, the Thunderbird code was left out of the repository on purpose, and so gained the annoying split-repository. Then Mozilla removed the ability to build the C++ code in anything other than a link-everything-into-libxul configuration. (Well, you could choose to have binary components live elsewhere, but the string APIs turn out to be completely different for pretty much no good reason--and mail code is obviously very string-heavy)

There was a plan to build Thunderbird on top of a vanilla XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off. Webrunner was next (I think), and that was then killed off again. Now I believe there's yet another thing, but of course Firefox has also shut off access to binary (C/C++) extensions, so if Thunderbird wanted to use it, it would have to rewrite ~1M lines of code.

> Then XULRunner was killed off [...] Webrunner [...] killed off

Yeah, and just to point out: in a profoundly stupid move. I mean, it was stupid then, too, it's just that now we have the evidence for it.

The constant refrain was that niche being a dead end. But the rise and proliferation of Electron (to the point that people bring it up to complain about it in places where it's not even on topic) and the success of Chromebooks (compared the failure of FirefoxOS for mobile; which itself was a leadership/execution error) both mean exactly one thing: those calling the shots on that decision and their supporters were flat out wrong. And so where is that crowd now? Mostly with their legacy and influence still being felt in every decision—and where those decisions contribute to Firefox being more marginal every passing year. Even if you forgive the original mistake, how is this not outright embarrassing for Mozilla Corp leadership?

Can I ask what it is you don't like about Outlook?

I've been a regular Outlook user for many years, and honestly I'm pretty happy with it. My only real pain is the lack of ability to easily export/import my mail accounts between machines, but that's something I do only every few years.

I did run Thunderbird on a low-power laptop some years ago, and did like it, but at the time it was nowhere near feature parity with Outlook.

Not the OP, not I've disliked mostly the slowness, modality and UI. It also never seemed to be capable to find the mails I was looking for... unlike other mail clients.

Compared to Apple Mail + Calendar + Contacts, it is a night-and-day.

I do use Outlook and it works pretty well, but:

- No proper conversation view on desktop.

- Filters (e.g unread) get disabled on every view change (including switching between mail and calendar)

- The mobile client has no setting to stop it from marking messages as read upon changing focus to another message.

- The message editor isn't really WYSIWYG. I often insert paragraph breaks that are gone in the sent message.

- It's generally buggy, like everything Microsoft makes lately.

> Can I ask what it is you don't like about Outlook?

The simple fact that it does not mark lines starting with '> ' as quoting is really off-putting.

At work, my co-workers are getting convinced that in-line replies are much better, but if the author (me!) uses plain-text only, all the other Outlook users will have a hard time reading my emails.

Actually, all about plain-text email is a pain in Outlook. I took more time to configure it (as good as it can) to send plain-text email, but now I read all my incoming emails as plain-text.

And to make it quote with '> ' in the beginning and make it properly work was a hell.

All in all, Outlook, to me, is the symbol of the Microsoft of the 1990s.

Bonus: with External Editor [1], I can use Vim (or any other editor) to edit my emails in Thunderbird. No way I could ever do so on Outlook.

[1]: https://github.com/exteditor/exteditor

Ha, yes, that is annoying actually! Instead it adds a kind of arrow-shaped bullet point. I always wondered why.

It should be declarative. Apply the settings like in Kubernetes/Terraform/Kustomize. Done.

A little naive I know. I don't see any other way to scale though.

Out of interest are you hooked up to an Exchange account or IMAP? Exchange email accounts are the bane of my email set up at the moment.

I use http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ running locally and connect Thunderbird to it for Exchange email and calendar. I used to use the TB add-ons for this directly but they broke a couple of years ago with the XUL addons removals. The davmail solution means I just use lightning for calendar and the rest is all standard TB.

I was full time on linux at a previous job where the company used Exchange. I tried davmail (for email, calendar, contacts), a combination of exchange imap + tbsync for contacts, calendar etc, but they all seemed a little flaky at best. The solution i settled on was Gnome's evolution. It was really seamless and everything worked just as well as using the Outlook app on windows/app. I went through the Gnome Online Accounts integration but you can add the account from within evolution as well.

I really like Thunderbird, but if you need to use exchange and are on linux I think there isn't a nicer option than Evolution at the moment. It plays nice with all MS services and integrates with the OS for contacts, calendar etc.

Ofcourse all of this only applies if you are using Linux and its possible evolution is annoying on non gnome systems (i haven't tried it outside of gnome). I think kmail also has exchange support but i haven't tried it.

Why are you sending emails with tables in them? If you really need that much formatting maybe you should link or attach your document.

It depends on the field you're in I suppose. I use tables all the time in email, they're a very organised and quick way of presentning infomation, wth the benefit of colour coding. Someone can respond to the table by adding a column with their own thoughts on each item, etc. - very good for formal approval/discussion on a list of points. Why should someone be forced to use a separate file for simple HTML formatting?

Collaborating on documents over email feels like a hack. I definitely don’t share your experience but that seems like something which belongs on a wiki or at least in a git repo.

The point is to keep things as lightweight and transferrable as possible. I can send an HTML-formatted email to someone, and they can see it right away. Also, an email chain on a topic shows the development of the discussion over time. I'm in consulting so when dealing with clients there is a need to keep things lightweight.

Email is more of a 'record' than a 'document' - these are different things. Wiki and Git repos are more for building up a permanent body of work which will be referred to and built on (i.e. documents), rather than transitory discissions and a log of daily events (i.e. records).

Not the OP. Several east coast-style execs I've worked with won't open attachments, but rather forward correspondence with attachments to their team. So for them to ever see the info, it has to be in an email body.

...because they're useful for communication?

Honestly, I'd rather get a mail with tables in it than a mail that references a companion attachment. It's not even close.

Alternatively, don't send HTML email and use plain, monospaced text to send tables padded with spaces.

I'd be interested to know which bits of gmail are slow for you. My personal experience is that it's so fast as to be unnoticeable in the things I do day to day (writing, searching, labeling, moving emails around etc.)

On macOS I use Mailmate.

It's what Thunderbird should have been imo.

Thanks for the recommendation. When looking for screenshots I found Tyler Roland’s review and follow up and am intrigued.

https://tyler.io/mailmate/ https://tyler.io/additional-mailmate-tips/

MailMate’s correspondence viewer looks great. The conversations add-on for Thunderbird keeps locking up for me, even when I’m in the middle of writing an email. Maddening.

How did you get gmail style search?

I know of expression-search(https://github.com/wangvisual/expression-search) but it is not supported in recent versions of Thunderbird. I'd be interested as well as I've been longing for a proper keyboard UI. For quickly switching folders there is Nostalgy(https://github.com/nostalgy/nostalgy).

Yes, expression search. It works with TB > 68 with a little bit of tweaking. The details are in the top issues

Gmail has great keyboard support. Just press ? And see for yourself. Used with https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier I find it to be a great client

I like the Gmail keybindings. Only scrolling the message by lines is not available. (Scrolling the message by page is available.) Somehow, I like to scroll by lines...

I was following along until the electron part. Why spin up a whole new browser instance instead of, say tearing off a tab for mail from your existing browser?

You don’t need electron app. Chrome has built in support for creating apps from webpages. Tools->more tools->create shortcut and it will save the shortcut into your apps folder.

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