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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Do people actually use Thunderbird still? Every single time I've tried it, it has been a terrible experience. For GUI mail clients I tend to swing between evolution and claws. Evolution does all the fancy stuff (html e-mail, seemless integration of calendar invites, outlook support) way better than Thunderbird and claws does all the workhorse stuff way better than Thunderbird (flexible mail fitering, organization, &c.).

Meanwhile Thunderbird has corrupted my inbox 3 times in a sum total of about 3 years of me using it spread out over a decade, crashes more than evolution, and does the core messaging features worse than claws.

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I use Thunderbird on three computers continuously, and manage three IMAP accounts.

I'm possibly using it more than 15 years as of today and it never corrupted a mailbox or lost any mail. Its filters are top notch and it has one of the best and fastest spam filtering as I've seen.

One of the same accounts on Thunderbird is also managed via KMail on my (personal) workstation and I love some features of KMail too but, it doesn't feel as fast and nimble. I keep KMail because of its KDE & Akonadi integration (it continues to process mail even if KMail is not running).

At the end of the day, Thunderbird is an awesome E-mail client. It does everything and doesn't crash even if I leave it open for weeks. 78 integrates lightning so, calendars are well integrated and works flawlessly for me too.

I've also did some enterprise integration work on Thunderbird and it has some nice flexibility options under the hood.

However I need to note that (in my case) all systems it communicates with are UNIX servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Dovecot, et. al).

Of course, YMMV.

I do, and on multiple machines! Never got any corruption, but that's of course anecdata - also, I don't use the global search/index.

I personally don't think it's so terrible - ultimately, the email medium itself hasn't evolved for... never.

Definitely the address book is garbage in any possible way (both in the UX, and in the legendary Mork backend) - one has to use addons in order to get a sane experience.

Additionally, AFAIK, it's so internally tangled that after years, they couldn't make a tabbed email writing window. Another indicative bit: "Plans existed for Mork to be replaced with MozStorage in Thunderbird 3.0."¹.

My biggest worry was actually the addons. There has been a major API change at some point, and several of my addons weren't compatible. Took years for equivalent ones to be developed. Now... another API change (sigh).

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)

I only use Thunderbird on all my devices for all my different email addresses. No other client. Happy with it. Also works nicely for dual-booting and sharing a config between Windows and Linux.

One feature I miss is sync. Something like Firefox Sync would be very useful.

> Do people actually use Thunderbird still?

Heavily for the past 13 years. Never corrupted a mailbox. I've had to reindex a mailbox once or twice to get search working, but that was many years ago.

I recalling having a problem with excessive CPU use after it's been running awhile (weeks to months.) That seems to have gotten solved at some point; I looked into the problem a bit (strace, etc.) and found the IO multiplexing (select, poll, epoll, whatever) code was spinning. Solution was to bounce it.

My only complaint now is that dark mode isn't fully hammered out. At least not in the non-snap version available in bionic beaver. Anyone know if newer versions have got this right yet?

I've been using Thunderbird for more than 15 years without experiencing inbox corruption. Granted, the first years the volume of mail was low compared to now.

About 5 years ago I tried other clients, including Evolution and Claws, and stayed with Thunderbird. Evolution's UI was significantly slower than Thunderbird's, Claws and the others were less functional.

I'm really happy Thunderbird development was rekindled, because it was getting noticeably behind. I manage six emails, two calendars and three USENET accounts with it, all in the same application, fast, and using less RAM than it takes GMail to display one inbox.

I use it on all (edit)applicable platforms available to me and also make tiny financial contributions to the project. Sure it has some imperfections but as a product that does "all of the things" (email, calendar (CalDAV), contacts (CardDAV), etc.) and open source - imo, it deserves support. I reported some bugs on the 68.x(edit: oops, 78.x) release and their response was prompt, professional, and helpful. I love Thunderbird.

I've been using Thunderbird exclusively for at least 15 years with no problems. Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, and Namecheap's hosted email service all work great via IMAP.

I've been using it for a decade, at home and at work. The only problem I had with it is that sometimes it keeps asking for the hotmail password.

Latest thunderbird even works seamlessly for my work's wonky office 365 + 3rd party sso/2fa setup.

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