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Comment by josephwegner | Hacker News Reader

I agree wholeheartedly with the author.

I also find this to be true of email clients. GMail reigns supreme, but there is pretty much no email client out there that is:

- A good UI/UX

- Doesn't store your data in their cloud

- Is cross-platform (even just iOS/OSX, but certainly not iOS/OSX/Windows/Android).

Thunderbird is one of the only contenders here, and I find the UX of Thunderbird to be abysmal. I've started to kickoff a project to fill this space, but admittedly it's a big project and doomed for the shelf :/

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Outlook is the obvious (paid) contender not mentioned.

Great UI, you can connect to pretty much any email address (although works best with Exchange, but you don't have to host your mail on 365) and has native Windows, OSX, Android and iOS clients, all bundled in for about $6 per month. Plus if the company you work for has 365 you can usually use those licences for home too (5 device licence is standard per seat).

Plus, for that $6 a month you also get Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote and 1TB of OneDrive space. I don't want to sound like a Microsoft shill, but 365 is a steal considering what you get for the cost. But it's not free.

The experience on Linux is beyond terrible, all the MS webapps are hot garbage.

Compared to the desktop version Outlook for web is pure heaven.

Totally opposite for me, outlook desktop is so slow, regularly crashes and has horrible patchwork of UI and the web client has been great, super fast and feels like a streamlined and unified evolution. Adding ics events is bizarre and annoying but other than that, i'll never go back.

Wait until you have to deal with the admin web apps.

To enable mail forwarding to another domain I had to install powershell and a plugin to install a plugin to allow forwarding in my org.

Then there are times when it says : „To change this setting please enable the legacy UI“

And everything of this convoluted UX hell is documented in a dizzying but highly accurate documentation. I have to give them that!

Switched to protonmail and not looking back.

Since you mentioned this could you please give some hints on how to enable external forwarding at all? Spent hours on the issue last month before finally giving up deciphering the maze of the legacy UI. Thanks in advance.

I also lost many hours and nerves until I figured it out. But it let me get a glimpse on the true and frightening nature of Microsoft.

Okay so step 1: you try to enable forwarding, but the UI gives you an error about some policy that has to be set

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exch...

Step 2: you have to find the anti spam settings in a UI called „defender something“ and turn the automatic forwarding polic on.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/offi...

Again the UI doesn‘t allow this because some setting in your organisation is disabled.

Step 3: the hard part. This setting can only be disabled through powershell. Google the name of it and you will find some docs about it.

There might be other ways to achieve forwarding. At least it sounds like that in the docs, but then they must be buried deep below the legacy UIs.

Good luck!

> Great UI

This is very subjective; I hate it ;). I consider Apple's Mail.app/Calendar.app/etc much better UI-wise.

> Android

Note that Outlook for Android (not sure about iOS version) is rebranded Acompli client, which sucked all your email into the cloud. This was instant no-go when it originally came out, so I ended up with Nine (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ninefolder...), which has an additional advantage, that the device admin rules enforced by Exchange can be applied to app only, not to the entire device.

> This is very subjective; I hate it ;). I consider Apple's Mail.app/Calendar.app/etc much better UI-wise.

Agree it is completely subjective - and I actually think that the Apple apps look better and are simpler to use, but personally I spend a lot of time in emails and arranging meetings, and I can get what I need to get done faster in Outlook (although I have tried to get along with Mail/Calendar in OSX, it's just slower for me).

For instance, let's say someone writes an email to me with 10 people on copy and says that we need to organise a teams/zoom call (which is a pretty common thing), the workflow for this in Outlook would be 5 clicks and can be done entirely within the application (including creating the Teams/Zoom call link). In Mail.app/Calendar.app it's way more involved and you get lots less control.

But if you just want a casual email client, then Mail.app probably does what lots of people need it to do. So when I talk about good-UI for me personally, I'm not necessarily talking about it being beautiful, but I think Outlook is more functional specifically for a power-user.

I'm a big fan of outlook as well, but it should be noted that it doesn't have write access to google calendars which can be frustrating. As a mail client, it is great.

Unfortunately you can't open iCal calendars in the Outlook clients anymore.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/calend...

That’s not what that doc says at all.

The problem with a lot of these applications today is that they work with the kind of information you want might want immediate access to from many devices. That means cloud-hosted options have a compelling advantage in convenience, which for many users will inevitably outweigh any security and privacy concerns.

I would love for the FOSS community to come up with a simple, SOHO-friendly server/appliance to act as the central repository for information like messages and calendars and be accessible to all devices on the local network (or via VPN from outside). Then we could have some competition for favourable UIs without every application having to reinvent the wheel for all the back end protocols and formats. Sadly the experience of applications like Thunderbird suggests there isn't currently a critical mass of interest in working that way and most of the market is willing to tolerate the downsides of the cloud applications in exchange for better UIs and more convenience.

Hypothetically, aggregating your email to a specific client hosted on your server then using JMAP (not IMAP!) would be what we are all waiting for. However, interest in JMAP isn't really there.

I don't find Thunderbird's UI too bad except the nonsensical search/filter dichotomy, but have you tried Evolution?

The search 2 filter thing is useful in some circumstance, like when you’re not sure exactly what keywords you’re looking for. You use the main, fast search as a broad phase and then rapidly try a few filters to narrow it down. Of course, if there was a way to just reuse your search window instead of opening a new one that would also work…

What really gets my goat is that there’s no way to make search go directly to the ‘show as email list’ view. I used to have an add on to do it but it’s no longer compatible.

> I used to have an add on to do it but it’s no longer compatible.

Pretty much the problem with anything Mozilla.

I think mailspring is decent (definitely not perfect but at least the UI is prettier than thunderbird)

But it's desktop only

IIUC, Mailspring (Nylas?) inserted their own cloud layer in between your device and a cloud email provider, to store email and provide "value added" features; so it's not cloud-free and requires trusting one more entity.

I think they removed this but I'm not 100% sure

The Mailspring ID was made optional at the end of March. You do still need it if you want to use Mailspring Pro features that require their server.

Nylas did, yeah. Mailspring stores all email locally. Recently the requirement to sign in with a mailspring ID was removed entirely.

Interesting! Does it support CalDAV?

Nope. It does have a plug-in api, though.

For which there is almost nothing available for at present.

I'm probably mad but i like claws mail. I also use it for caldav meeting mails and as an rss feed reader.

Apparently half the issue is that IMAP sucks so much that any email client is bogged down in dealing with an ancient and bad API that they waste resources before getting to making it good. All the proprietary clients use a custom API which doesn't have to deal with legacy garbage.

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