Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

There are still multiple bugs involving loss or corruption of email. (the one I've got open in another tab is 13 years old) Why does anyone actually use this program?

View on HN

Do you know of an email program without bugs? TB has been working well for me for many years, and apparently for a good number of other people as well.

I'm sure it has issues - heck, I've even filed bugs against it personally - but your comment doesn't at all resonate with my experience as a user.

I haven't used TB for a while, but it has corrupted my local inbox once, and on two other occasions deleted e-mail from the server before confirming it was on disk, causing recent e-mails to be lost. This was all over 10 years ago, so perhaps it's better now.

they moved from mbox to Maildir files, so corruption is less likely imho as mbox files could get large in size.

Oh that probably fixed most of the problems then; mbox is a terrible, no good, very-bad format.

Did they move? When I installed Thunderbird on my Windows 10 machine recently, I noted that Maildir was available as an option, and switched to it. But it seemed like mbox was still the default, and certain behavior seems to be glitchy on Maildir. (I get frequent notifications about compaction of mailboxes, despite the fact that Maildir cannot be, and does not need to be, compacted.)

you're right, it's a work-in-progress. It was introduced in v60 in 2018 as experimental feature and enabling it in v78 still holds a warning to it.

I didn't think maildir worked on windows at all due to the colons in the filename (or does TB use a different character for that on windows?)

Currently using it with maildir on Windows 10.

> This was all over 10 years ago, so perhaps it's better now.

The open bug I linked above is 13 years old, so maybe it isn't.

> Do you know of an email program without bugs?

I know of some that I trust not to lose my mail. I know of some whose bugs don't worry me as much as stuff like this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156

> your comment doesn't at all resonate with my experience as a user.

Okay? I just assume that you don't believe nobody loses data to this program simply because you have not lost data to this program.

I've used Thunderbird with IMAP for literally at least a decade and have email back to 1998-ish. Haven't lost anything, occasionally had to rebuild Thunderbird's local cache.

Much easier to backup if your email is in one place and running even a local IMAP server is better than storing it in an email client.

> Much easier to backup if your email is in one place and running even a local IMAP server is better than storing it in an email client.

The 13-year old bug I linked to involves IMAP mail handling, I believe. I haven't dug too deeply into these bugs because, honestly... I'd like to be able to use Thunderbird for a couple of things, but mail handling doesn't need to be very screwed up for me to avoid the program. A 13 year old bug involving data loss is enough to make me avoid the program, even if it would not appear to effect my use case.

> Haven't lost anything

I guess I can understand how others might view it as "just email." I won't argue with the implied "I've never lost data to this program so it must never happen" argument, but I wonder how you know you've never lost anything. I feel like I'm capable of not noticing a data loss bug involving email, or not noticing until I need something and it is not there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com