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Comment by fracus | Hacker News Reader

Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.

I use it and feel like it's...fine. A tad slow, and doesn't have some basic features I'd like. But I haven't found any other non-browser clients that I like better than Thunderbird.

> Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.

Count me as one. It's nice to have a single local application that is set up for around 5 different accounts on two different providers.

I also like the immediacy of search on the local data. When I search for something I don't want to see a spinning busy-beachball indicator.

I think it's definitely a minority.

I use it to follow three Gmail accounts in parallel, since the web version is a PITA to deal with that scenario. Getting access to my local archive is a bonus point.

I use it for my email. It does exactly what I need it to, works across several platforms. Is Open Source.

Virtually nobody uses mail via web browser on phones, the primary computing device of the world right now.

> the primary computing device of the world right now.

Whether this is true or not depends a lot on which the bubble is that you live in.

If people are using their phones then they are using their email service's app to check their mail. Not Thunderbird.

I used it at a previous job that didn't have a web option for email, but for me the killer feature was that it was the only mainstream newsgroup client (the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups).

> the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups

Well, now I've heard everything. This is either peak greybeard creativity, or that was a thing in like 1992 and a system has been left alone for 30+ years to just do its 90s thing. Either way I kind of love it.

Haha probably peak greybeard - the founder and his two friends had been doing Internet stuff since the mid 1990s but the code was much newer. I assume the system worked so they kept doing it. Everything was on-prem too so I guess was an easy option to make logs accessible to everyone without paying for a service.

Yes, on desktop (macOS and Linux). It's not a speed demon but I trust it (on Linux I build from source).

On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.

Thunderbird lets the user change the UI and hide almost every single element of it. I don't like clutter.

With that feature I could also help an elderly friend after Microsoft abruptly replaced the easy to use Windows Mail with a mess that they didn't even bother to translate into other languages.

At my (small) workplace we all use Thunderbird, and I use it for my personal email as well.

A good desktop client, once configured, works a lot better than web-based email clients, especially (but not only) when you have different email accounts that you want to use in the same interface.

Not only do I use it for my non-primary email accounts, but I use it for NNTP too. :)

yes i exclusively use thunderbird to check my email

I like not looking at ads when reading my email, so I use it. If it added local AI based drafting assistance, I would check out that feature. I don't care about FF Send, but might use it a couple times a year.

Don't most people use an ad blocker?

No, I think people who use ad blockers are a minority. And it's not getting better with Chrome/Chromium switching to Manifest v3 which has significantly worse support for ad blockers.

I do, but Yahoo for example includes ads in the inbox itself, disguised to look like new messages.

Web based email is a disease.

What don't you like about it?

The handling, the speed, the unavailability of functions and the idea about it.

Unconvincing at best, but most likely not even true.

> I would guess 99% of people use their browser [for email]

Your comments reveal a major blind spot. 99% of people (or whatever) are using dedicated email clients instead of webmail. They do everything on their phone.

I do mostly for work (Alpine does not work out that nice if everyone is sending Exchange-blended tag soup), and a lot of my friends do, many of them (non-IT) engineers.

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