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Comment by miroljub | Hacker News Reader

I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance.

I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...

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I remember it was crazy fast

I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware.

I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk.

Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.

Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.

I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed when when xul went away.

XUL is still there. Even in Firefox, the UI is still powered by XUL – it's just not exposed to addons anymore: https://u.ale.sh/there-is-only-xul.png

They were slowly working away on it until sometime last year.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42RoGf... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446335 https://arewexblstill.com/

Not seeing, not at all, runs great, zero lockups, zero performance issues, looks great, how odd.

In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation.

I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.

Same situation. A few years ago I started moving old emails into yearly sub folders (just moved all of last years emails into a “2022” folder). This improved performance a lot for me. I’m guessing the smaller folders of emails keep the index files small. Search still works through all of those folders.

> as bad as I am at actually deleting email

People delete email?

I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.

(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)

I don’t even archive them, I mark them as read and leave them in the inbox.

What is the advantage of the archive, if you have to rely on search to find stuff anyway?

"mark as read" happens automatically whereas archive is an explicit action (pressing "e" on your keyboard after enabling hotkeys or swiping the email on mobile)

This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.

> Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.

It's funny you mention that because the experience of trying to connect to Exchange with it is bad enough to cow me into using Outlook after all (of course it doesn't help that calendar support is also shunted off to an extension that never worked that well for me).

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