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Comment by mpawelski | Hacker News Reader

After couple of years of not using Thunderbird (I switched completely to web portals) I tried it when they released Supernova and all I can say is that it's... slow. Really, I often have UI freezes, data doesn't appear immediately, downloading mails take a lot of time, calendar also is not that snappy. I somehow expected to have everything super fast as it's a local app (after all the data is downloaded), but it clearly doesn't handle large amount of mails efficiently.

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I have used Thunderbird for years and my work account has to handle large numbers of emails. In general it is fast for me on both Windows and Linux. I have had some issues over the years but they normally turned out to be due to corrupt mail folders.

It always was slow with larger mailboxes, taking a few seconds to react to a click (and sometimes freezing for minutes to move a bunch of emails ti a different folder).

I can’t tell if it’s any slower with Supernova or not. Feels about the same, to be honest. I suspect its bottlenecks are somewhere else.

On my computer it is much slower now. It was always slow on large mailboxes but now it is almost unusable and I am thinking about downgrading or switching. Any recommendations?

Are you using POP3 or IMAP? In my experience thunderbird on IMAP has always been very slow whereas I have no problem on my 2012 laptop with 30k emails when using POP3.

I use IMAP and, yes, it has always been slow but something also happened with the new UI.

Compact the folders. Vacuum the sqlites. Also could move old mail to its own folders.

I have mail back to the mid-nineties and it works fine, besides a few UI glitches from the new version. (There are buttons that can't be removed.)

I do that from time to time. The issue is that the performance got worse with the new UI and that cannot be due to compacting. Will try to do it again though to see how much it helps.

My laptop is 5+ years old, and while TB is not the snappiest GUI app on the machine, performance is decent/acceptable. I welcome any optimization however.

The vacuuming is important on an older install I suspect.

It runs well enough on my desktop, but on my tablet (SP9 with an i7...), each action has 1-2s latency. Ie selecting a new email, opening a compose window etc.

We need a from-scratch desktop email client that is fast and streamlined. I give on Tbird. At least in this version I can figure out how to disable the HTML email formatting and MS-word-style auto-spacing below paragraphs when composing.

Also, search still doesn't work for me.

Over the last few months Thunderbird has got noticeably slower for me. When I click on the 'sent' folder for one of my email accounts I now have to wait ~30 seconds for anything to happen. Previously it was pretty much immediate. Not sure if I can change a setting to speed it up.

I entered to say the same. Not only Supernova. I purchased a Thunderbird based client (Postbox) in thehope that they solved the sluginess and...same problem.

Also, I have the feeling that the Windows version is slower than the macOS one.

For me on Linux the change made it _way_ faster, like 5x faster. The previous releases were systematically slowing down, but now it feels fast like around 5.0.

Same. I opened Thunderbird recently after probably over a year and this switch to a browser rendering engine. The entire application locked up while it was updating my list of emails. I’m glad the project is seeing some FOSS love but it also seems to have gone down the entirely wrong path in pursuit of modernization without benefit.

Sadly for Linux there aren’t really any great modern UI-style (not browser rendering modern but just the look) email clients so I’ll just keep using my browser since there is now no benefit to using Thunderbird.

Oh and this is a brand new machine I built in 2022. So it’s not the hardware.

My answer us certainly subjective but I find Gnome Evolution quite fast, user driendly and well designed.

Another vote for Evolution here. I also like its calendar integration. Works well on its own or can interface with Google Calendar as you prefer.

Yes, e-mail downloads are often very slow. Even worse: downloading tends to freeze the UI. Ridiculous!

That being said, I haven't found a better alternative yet...

betterbird

The biggest issue for me is search, gmail spoiled me.

Yes, Supernova is much slower than previous versions.

Maybe you have too many emails?

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