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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Sincere doubt: what percentage of users still use a "mail reader"? Hasn't most of the "end-user" base switched to web alternatives?

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https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

I use an email client because I don't want to deploy PGP keys to the server -- then there's no point.

It's interesting though: on mobile, everyone wants a client application. On desktop, people wonder why bother with client software when we have a browser. "Reddit for Desktop"? Hah, doesn't even exist! But "Reddit is Fun" for Android? People died on that hill.

Poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36703772

For mobile I think usually it's so it can handle error cases more gracefully. How people expect something should act when the network goes away and it's a web page is often different than when it's an application.

The Reddit thing is also mixed with the fact that Reddit's mobile web interface is complete shit. You can't even collapse threads (or it's so hidden as ot be useless), which is something the desktop web interface does. It might not be the best example of why mobile users want an app, as it's functionally worse using their mobile web version, probably on purpose to force you to their app so they can monetize you... and now we understand why they did what they did and why people didn't want to use their official app, as the way they monetize you is to inconvenience you with more ads.

In that particular case, Reddit has a usable browser interface that works on desktop (old.reddit.com) but it doesn't have a mobile equivalent.

Tildes.net is meant to work well on mobile web but I still get a vibe that there would be a large group that would appreciate an app for it. I am undecided myself: notifications in the notification area were nice (back when I used reddit is fun, 13 days ago) and things felt more... native? Fast? Behave as expected? But it's not like it's essential.

old.reddit.com works fine for me on mobile. I use it every day. (Granted, I have the iPhone with the biggest screen available).

I find the mobile web interface is decently usable … except for all the ways it tries to shove the native app down my throat.

(I'd rather use the web interface on mobile and desktop, so I'm not sure the original criticism applies to me, either.)

This is indeed fascinating - people not being as passionate about desktop clients than mobile clients.

I wonder if it's to do with desktop usage more linked to typing compared to mobile usage pattern framed around clicks /taps...

And that, on mobile, you're sometimes offline. Desktops and especially laptops are meant for use in fixed places like homes and offices (*cough* it's the truth!), where there is internet available, so you don't need an app to have your data cached offline.

I'm thinking of the Play Store which make installing and buying apps very easy and more intuitive for non-tech people.

Pardon my french, but Play Store is a bloody mess. My parents and grandparents have a lot of trouble navigating it to find what they need. They have less trouble with f-droid, probably also because it's not overflowing with adware and other crap that they need to wade through on google

Perhaps the difference is that on mobile, users are more sensitive to bad UX because there it's so much more easy for sites and apps to be irritating/unpleasant to use, and big corp first party mobile apps have a tendency to optimize for ad impressions, IAP sales, or engagement over usability. This creates a market for third party apps which exist entirely to be more usable.

I think certain mobile websites are terrible on purpose, because they want to put their spyware on your phone.

In my own experience, it's because there are much more spaces in desktop and it's easier for companies to do what they want on it, and easier for users to ignore the flaws. Also usually users can use 2 hands to operate on desktop environment, so everything would look a bit more smooth.

On mobile, it's a different story, the screen real estate is small, and users can't operate both/one hand(s) comfortably like on desktop. Therefore, if you don't design the app smart enough and make users not comfortable, you're screwed up.

Apollo on mobile and desktop here. I haven't used reddit in a browser except by accident in something like five years, and I haven't used reddit pretty much at all for the past three weeks or so.

Its security, among other things. No mobile app has root access and can interfere with other apps or steal data easily. With desktop, many apps want admin access and its usually granted with one mouse click or one password copy paste. Even without admin access, desktop apps have many more rights.

*raises hand* I have my own domain with an IMAP account, and use Thunderbird right now because:

1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.

2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.

3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.

P.S.: While I would ideally want all filter-to-folder stuff to happen server-side, there are some issues with how easy that is to keep up-to-date and issues where some clients (i.e. on my phone) won't sync non-inbox folders to see new messages, etc.

Exactly the same for me.

Same. I self-host and spend time places without consistent internet access. A dumbfounded browser is useless. A disconnected client is still useful; they were designed for that use case.

> I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.

Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.

Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.

> a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.

That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.

> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.

I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)

> 3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.

This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?

I use Apple Mail in most cases because I have several email accounts and don't want to keep a tab for them all open or have to use a forwarding setup, and on mobile because I don't want to have to use several different apps to check mail.

Any time I want to blend multiple accounts, I greatly prefer a mail application. Web blending options all suck and/or give one party all the data all the time, which isn't always an option even if you wanted that.

I still use Thunderbird. It's occasionally really nice to have old emails available offline

Yes I use an email client. That way I can deal with my email the way I want to, not the way some web provider thinks I should.

I'm a big fan of Mailspring. It has some notable features other mailer apps (including webmail) don't have. Its only drawback is no iOS/Android app.

https://www.getmailspring.com/

Thunderbird has 31 regular and core contributors, so I'd say at least 32 (Them plus me)

I never used the client while on windows (for decades) but for some reason started using the mail app on MacOS. (I recall I used to need to mess with POP/IMAP/SMTP addresses in the past but now I just authenticate once and it just works.) It’s still not an entirely pleasant experience (my biggest gripe is it doesn’t show full email addresses, so you don’t know which account received the email). But still beats having to type the browser and clicking a bookmark I guess.

I still use Thunderbird, but at v52, because I want a local copy and archive of all my emails. It's also better to use compared to most webmail interfaces, particularly Gmail which is terrible.

Why v52, you might ask? Because I don't have time for updates to break my shit and v52 is the oldest version that supports TLS1.3. I do not like the new interface. At all. It can die in a fire.

What is the 'doubt' part in your question? If the number is big enough to be worth building? Probably absolute figures are more interesting than a percentage. And they're high enough to take in enough donations to fund an engineering team.

I used to prefer Apple Mail on the desktop over web-based alternatives, but nowadays Apple Mail has become quite unstable and slow for me, so I’ve been using gmail’s web interface more and more.

A shame really, desktop should provide a better experience.

Web alternatives are so horrible right now, I would not be surprised more folks are migrating back

Fastmail's web UI is as good as ever.

Fastmail won't load your messages if you don't have internet; I think Fastmail users should be especially in need of a client/local storage.

Yep. That’s a reason why I use Thunderbird.

In the context of the two comments above yours, that doesn't invalidate what their point.

I've been using a web/online only client for a few years and agree with the parent comment. Fastmail's web UI works better for me than Gmail or Outlook.

I like Protonmail’s.

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