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Comment by heretohelp | Hacker News Reader

Is a native, snappy email client something you'd pay for?

$20? $50?

What operating systems? Is there anything specific features/aspects/licensing that would push you to $50?

If neither, (I assume free or close to it) why? How much time do you spend in an email interface? How much is your time worth?

Cheers!

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I'd easily pay $100 for a perpetual license for a client that has as many capabilities as TB, plus does exchange calendars/address books right. I'd expense it then, of course :) And it would be worth every cent - while TB has many excellent features, lack of some more enterprise-y things probably cost me much more than $100 in time and effort over my career.

The thing is, however, $100 paid to closed-source software vendor never guarantees he won't be out of business or bought by some Novell that will promptly run it into ground in a year or two. With open source chances for product survival are higher - though, as we see here, are in no way guaranteed.

Just in case anybody cares, I'm currently on Mac OS X, but when I worked on Linux & Windows, I used Thunderbird too, and the same applies for both of these OSes too.

>exchange calendars/address books

That would seem to be the catch, I was originally talking about just an email client. This would now be an email client, exchange client, calendar, address book...

The fact is that calendaring uses email as exchange platform, and address book is directly related to emails, so one would expect naturally all of it to come to one place. Especially if we talking about business environment where all IT/organizational/business procedures expect it to be so traditionally.

I would pay if it were something amazing (i.e. not just a bit faster than Thunderbird), probably around $20. I don't spend that much time on email, but I hate the small annoyances of Thunderbird (when I delete messages a new, empty one appears that can't be removed, it has no tray icon, it starts up maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later" functionality, etc).

These are all things that Thunderbird doesn't get right. Also, search is completely broken.

It sounds like your "what to do when I mark a mesdsage for deletion" setting is wrong.

What is a tray icon? Is that a windows thing?

systray (system tray)

Exists in OS X, Windows, (both since their nascent editions) and Gnome since at least 2 if not 1, and KDE since at least version 2 as well.

Usually shoved off to the right as a cluster of icons designed for some core verbiage and notifications.

'notification area' is a little bit more generic a label. If your OS has a global status/taskbar of any kind, it's usually on the right hand side of it.

It is a Windows thing. I'm on Ubuntu, though, with Gnome 2, and it has one too. They all have one, really.

The little icon biff-like that shows if you have new mail? I always thought it was fairly useless. One or two active mailing list subscriptions and the icon was always lit up.

PS: What is the signifigance of the italicized is?

It's more like "the little icon biff-like that prevents Thunderbird from taking up space on your alt+tab bar when running".

The "is" was just emphasis.

Operating system of choice? Is it worth more to you if it is cross-platform?

Edit: I saw you use Ubuntu. I happen to use Ubuntu as well. Does cross-platform matter to you?

Edit2: Got it, cross-platform doesn't matter. Cool, thanks for the responses!

I use Linux, I don't really care about the other OSes, I never use them.

> it has no tray icon

I've got a tray icon in Gnome Shell (and I had one when I was using Gnome 2), using the FireTray extension, and there is also a Gnome Integration extension that provides a tray icon, in theory, but it doesn't work for me.

I just installed FireTray, it looks better than what I used to use, thanks!

> it has no tray icon, it starts up maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later" functionality

All of this can be solved by installing addons.

I have, obviously, and it didn't help. Got any recommendations?

I'd happily pay up to $80 for a robust, snappy, modern non-bloated email client that did IMAP very well. Preferably written in C or C# if it was for the Windows market or QT if it needed to be cross platform (I think half of Thunderbird's performance issues are due to it being written in XUL...)

Edit: I'd be happy if the developer of Sublime Text 2 decided to have a go at making a modern, cross-platform email client. Something tells me it would be exactly what I want.

Postbox may fit your particular needs. http://www.postbox-inc.com/ It doesn't support Linux sadly.

Thanks sbuk, hadn't heard of Postbox before - I'll give it a go :)

I suspect they'll add Linux support at some point, though, particularly if there's demand (and they will be more, as core Thunderbird declines...) -- it shouldn't be too big an effort, as they're built on Thunderbird in the first place.

This is a rare case on HN where someone's username is quite relevant.

I chose this name consciously as a reminder to be constructive, inquisitive, and helpful (where I have anything to contribute).

This is not my first tricycle ride around the HN block.

Eh, I wouldn't necessarily call such a thing rare...

Anyway, I'm starting to get to the point where I don't trust a piece of proprietary software to not try stealing my data, so that's a non-starter for me.

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