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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Same thing with Windows Mail. I just got a message telling me, "We've decided to move you to Outlook (which I don't want) instead of the Windows Mail client that you're happily using." Now I've got to go searching for the magical wizard spell I need to cast in order to stop it from doing this.

I really wish a Windows Product Manager could comment here and explain why the hell they keep doing this shit despite the user not wanting any of it. I know they won't. They're ashamed of what they are doing, and/or hide behind some "do not post online" corporate policy.

Why can't operating systems just stay out of the user's way? Go schedule the CPU, manage the filesystem and network peripherals, and stop with the user behavior modification experiments.

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I switched back a few times but it keeps doing it automatically more and more frequently, and the new app is absolutely crippled and hideously slow (all operations are over the network and the latency is insane).

I just switched back to Thunderbird (which I haven't used since the 00s) instead. It's still ugly, but it isn't getting in my way.

In which way is Thunderbird ugly?

Ugly visually and ergonomically.

Default choice of fonts, mishmash of visual styles from across decades of development in the various widgets, non-native/non-pixel-aligned font rendering, context menus that relegate the most common actions to submenus while elevating actions that you're not going to use as much, alignment issues abound, use of modal dialogs for things that are taking place in the background and should be progress bar widgets instead, dialogs that need focus being placed under dialogs that can't be used until the backgrounded dialog is interacted with, etc.

It's dense, and requires a pixel perfect pointing device to use.

In other words, it's a desktop app, through and through.

If you're used to stuff that's mobile-first, it's a rather jarring change - I can see how one would consider it ugly. I happen to find it "dense, usable, and does the job fine." I wouldn't call it pretty, but neither do I mind a utilitarian interface to do things like "read my mail."

Those weren't my reasons, actually — I am old-school and prefer information-dense layouts designed for use with a mouse (though Thunderbird needs a lot of work to be usable via keyboard). I posted another comment with my actual reasons.

As someone who has been on the email client hunt ever since Google Inbox was taken off my feet I can say that I'm a very happy customer of eM client and it's actually one of the few apps that make it painful to leave Windows (since the devs have no intention of porting it to Linux).

It's pay once and it comes with a free version if you just wanna give it shot, the only bad thing for me was how annoying the website was with dark patterns trying to push sales, the software itself is great.

Hello, what do you mean by dark patterns on our website? I am not aware of such things.

Regards

Michal Burger eM Client CEO

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