Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting to ask what mail clients people around here like to use. I use Thunderboard sort of by default, but imho it sucks. There are some amazing rants in the support forum about their repeatedly finding new ways to screw up user control over the font size. It's almost like reading about cartoon villains.

View on HN

My setup is probably a bit unusual, as I use four desktop apps and webmail

1) work emails (we use self hosted zimbra) - combination of zimbra desktop + outlook. I use outlook for usual email job - I do a lot of email exchange with corpos and Outlook is best when it comes to table support in emails (copy-paste to/from Excel). When I need to search for an email or clean up my inbox (not everything can be filtered with rules) I usually swtich to Zimbra desktop (unfortunately abandoned project) for its very compact UI (I hate a lot of spacing in modern apps), very fast searching and some UI features like "mark email", press "M" for a "move emails to folder" window with search field. If only zimbra desktop had decent table support, it would be ideal for me.

2) private emails - Thunderbird. With some plugins (currently use three: "Manually sort folders", "quick folders move" and "quick folders") I can achieve Zimbra's "move emails to folder" experience. Searching is good, but thunderbird lacks good table support so a "no-go" for me when it comes to work emails.

3) mutt - from time to time - pure nostalgia, I send maybe 5 emails / month here...

3) webmails (zimbra's web interface and roundcube) when in need and without access to my laptop/pc.

I used Thunderbird, then due to lack of office/outlook integration used Evolution. It worked OK but felt unpolished and mostly unused. That said, they were generally responsive to bug reports.

Now I just use webmail everywhere. It's good enough, and eliminates most the frustrations I've had over the years with third party clients.

Interesting, I sometimes feel the same way. I like fastmail's web client, but it is non-FOSS, and my mom doesn't use fastmail. I've been looking for a mail client primarily for her, that lets her set the fonts nice and large.

See I specifically pointed my mom away from mail clients. She had called telling me her computer died(in reality, hard drive died), and asked how to download all her email again(probably 8+ years of email). She was devastated when I told her the news. Back then at least, it was ISP ran POP, and clients by default of course delete on retrieve. Told her to just use gmail going forward.

Font size and multiple other layout parts. I am using Thunderbird on 3 operating systems and adding new account is done in different places in all three up-to-date Thunderbirds. For several months now, Thunderbird tends to ignore manually inputted IMAP host address and tries to use x part of y@x e-mail address format to connect to, even if there's no A/AAAA records for it (MX exists). e-mail-related SRV records seem to be ignored.

Regarding font size, it can be changed with mouse scroll even in windows like account configuration.

I've been using Claws-mail[0] for a couple of years now. It is ugly, but gets the job done. It is simple, can index tens of thousands of email, has native support for GPG, and, most importantly, it's super lightweight.

Downsides: bad support for HTML emails; calendar integration is not good; it is single-threaded, so you can't do a lot of things simultaneously (like fetching work e-mail and browsing personal mails), but this is not a huge problem IMO.

[0] https://www.claws-mail.org/

I've been bouncing between multiple email clients myself. My biggest gripe so far is that, as someone that owns their domain and likes to make lots of email addresses for each vendor, most clients expect you to setup an "identity" first and that's all it wants to send email from. That completely breaks the whole point of one-address-per vendor, and it's annoying.

I use Geary for email, and Thunderbird for RSS feeds.

Thunderbird at least since 2005. Default setup just wastes so much space on widescreen. I use "MoreLayouts" plugin to fix that a bit and "Manually sort folders" plugin to fix folders. And some eye candy like DKIM verifier and display user agent plugins.

Still no way to disable sync/turn off accounts while keeping the mail in place.

I used Evolution for the O365 compatibility. It worked fine , even if it sometimes struggled to sync my mailbox ( i presume due to the archiving done server-side but no idea). Funnily the search worked much better than Outlook Web did.

Thunderbird has the OWL plugin for O365 compatibility. It's not free, but not expensive. And it works terrific, I've been using it since last summer.

I’m a huge fan of Mailspring (https://getmailspring.com/)

> It's almost like reading about cartoon villains.

Doesn't that point to what comments like that are really about (anywhere on the Interet)?: They are about the rhetoric - the form, the Internet rant, with the hyperbole (we need a word for the form; we all recognize it) - and about not the reality. For example, they aren't there to inform - hyperbole and rants replace information and knoweldge with wild extremes and emotion; they do not contribute to building knowledge.

Ok, I think I found the post I was remembering, and it seemed to me like understandable frustration at bad software decisions:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361#answer-1...

Note that the css hack discussed in the thread helps by controlling some of the sizes, but not enough of them. You end up with a mishmash on the screen.

Hmm, this one further in the thread is more of a rant:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=2#a...

There are a few other responses to the original comment, and one of the mods deleted some naughty words from the rant, leading to this comment:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=2#a...

This one puts the blame where it belongs:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=3#a...

Finally, this sums up the wider situation:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=3#a... : "Unfortunately, this is typical with Mozilla: every "upgrade" is a downgrade in some important aspect of the program."

That rings true for Firefox as well.

Ok, I'll stop pasting links from that thread here but I found it to be worth scrolling through, to see the user frustration that Mozilla derps around so much with advanced features without managing to get something as basic as font sizes working properly. I can use Thunderbird with just some annoyance here and there, but for my mom (her vision isn't so good any more), Thunderbird is unusable and there seems to be no sane way to fix it. (One of the suggestions was to fork the source code: thanks a lot).

We're agreeing, possibly. I am saying those comments are only outlets of emotion, using a common form (Internet rants), telling us about the author (who is frustrated, etc.) and very little about the problem. You say, "it seemed to me like understandable frustration".

No, I would say that the comments (at least collectively) convey the information that Thunderbird really has a problem, and that the developers are concentrating on the wrong things. It is also really true that new versions introduced regressions by breaking the workarounds for font issues in older versions, and that the devs don't seem to care.

The purpose of a mail reader is to read mail. If the fonts are too small to read and can't be enlarged without a lot of hassle, then the mail reader has a serious usability issue no matter what other features it has.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com