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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I've been using it since 2005. Its UI is stable and efficient. Gets the job done and does not get in the way. And it's free software.

You are not actually saying what you don't like about Thunderbird so it's hard to oppose anything to your comment. Why Thunderbird should change its UI if it works okay? Gratuitously different from what by the way?

And to me, the UIs of Evolution and KMail don't seem that much different from Thunderbird's and from what I've seem from Outlook, same thing. There's a pane listing inboxes and folders, there's a pane showing the content of the selected folder and there's a pane showing the selected email's content. ?

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People do not appreciate good UIs enough. I think many software engineers might be UI-blind, actually.

Thunderbird is ugly, atrocious on 4K screens, does not group messages by conversation like mail client have in the past 20 years, and insists on listing emails in side-by-side columns instead of using a more compact and space-effective layout like many mail clients in the past 20 years. It's got a menubar, 3 level of toolbars and a burger menu; unnecessary tabs, cramped spacing, and two search fields. It offers XMPP chat and in-browser junk filtering when the former is pretty much dead, and the second is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition.

Someone mentioned LibreOffice elsewhere in the comment, and both projects seems stuck in the 2005 UI, UX and feature wise. I actively avoid using them even if I have to resort to using subpar web applications.

I like Thunderbird's UI. It doesn't get in the way, and more importantly, I have used it for a long time, so I know my way around it quite well. A lot of attempts to "improve" UIs end with things like Microsoft's Ribbon interface (which I really dislike).

> does not group messages by conversation

Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.

> [client-side spam filtering] is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition.

It kind of is, though. Not everyone is using GMail, and my idea of what does or does not count as Spam might differ significantly from what some email provider thinks.

I'm sure there are prettier mail clients around, and by all means, if you prefer one of those, use it. I used Apple's Mail.app when I using a Mac, because I needed to access an Exchange mailbox at the time, which sucks on Thunderbird. The UI looked shiny, I never got upset about it (UI or functionality), but I happily went back to Thunderbird when I got back to Linux.

> Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.

It's not a unified conversation view like Gmail or Fastmail. There's a plugin that does that, but it's not very pleasant either.

I'm on Linux, all other email clients are pretty bad or similarly stuck in 2005 in appearance. I am very happy with the Fastmail webapp, but Mozilla is against PWAs so I have to resort to using Chromium to keep it around as a standalone app. I would like to use Thunderbird, but I have tried getting comfortable with the UI a dozen times in as many years, and I uninstall it in frustration 30 minutes later. These days it is also very sad to open its extension store and see that most of its plugins are unmaintained and haven't been updated in years. There's a true feeling of abandonware every time I give it another chance.

I've been using it for a few years now. The UI is outdated and a bit clunky but it's worked great for me on my old Mac Mini and the old Apple Mail app is pretty much unusable now. My next best option is Roundcube Webmail, and it's pretty good too.

I have a hard time with complaining about free software. I either use it or don't, but I won't complain about it.

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