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Comment by ulrikrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

I've used Thunderbird for many years, but recently switched to KMail because that has proper search functionality. In KMail, I can instantly search for a keyword in all my emails from the last one and a half decade, whereas this takes several minutes in Thunderbird, and during the search the UI is unusable because the result list is incrementally populated which makes it impossible to actually click on results reliably, or even just scroll.

Other than that, Thunderbird works great. I'm just puzzled why search has not received more attention, as it seems like a pretty important feature to many people.

edit: I know about NotMuch by the way, and actually used that to search and then navigated to the result in Thunderbird afterwards by sorting by date. But that got annoying in the long run.

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Other than that, Thunderbird works great.

I've used it for decades and still recommend it to others (mainly becauce I never invested in trying enough other cross-platform alternatives), but 'great' wouldn't be a word I'd use to describe it, there are just so many little quirks and annoyances, to the point I often have the feeling using it is constantly working around and/or ignoring those.

Yes, by "great" I guess I meant "great in comparison to other desktop email clients". KMail for example comes with its own set of quirks and annoyances, many that are similar to Thunderbird's with regards to general UX.

To me there is not a single client which isn't off somehow, missing something. I feel like nobody really loves mail client development, because email kinda sucks. Mail just needs to die IMO. You wouldn't design something like email today. I wouldn't want to support all the legacy "features" either. It's a wonder someone is caring about these clients at all.

It's not like mail is going anywhere soon. Look at the fax. There is many decades of infuriating mail client dependecy ahead.

This is interesting to hear.

When I was implementing it in KMail, I was looking at Thunderbird, and envious of their fancy search UI. I had plans of implementing something similar, but it never panned out.

Well, I like your implementation :).

This is the so-called "quick search" by the way, which works as a filter and displays results in the inbox. There is also another search feature in Thunderbird which renders results differently. I never got used to that, and never used it, as I found its semantics unpredictable.

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