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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

Been using Linux for ages, but only for a few years on my home desktop, because Steam is now that good, and gaming is a major part of that computers duties.

HOWEVER - I've yet to find a good email client. Kmail is good, but uses Akonadi with is a disaster, and literally doesn't work. I have to restart it multiple times a day, because it silently stops working. I have found bug reports about this issue going back years which are either ignored or marked fixed, which it clearly isn't.

Don't say Thunderbird.

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> Don't say Thunderbird.

Thunderbird. Seriously though, why do people hate on it so much? I use it on all of my non-mobile devices and the latest version out of the box (at least for Linux desktops) is really sleek.

My only issue is Google Calendar integration, and that's only because auto-generated calendar entries suck and cannot be dismissed. When those events pop up, I just click on the link in the notification which takes me to the email and calendar view, and I delete the auto-gemerated event on the Gmail website.

I've heard folks complain it gets slow with very large or old mailboxes. One reason that happens is that they need to be compacted, another is that the sqlites need to be vacuumed.

So, twice a year I compact my mailboxes, and I put a sqlite command loop to vacuum in my main cleanup script. Which I run maybe once a month.

Yes, strictly speaking I shouldn't need to do this, but my tbird install has been running happily for decades now.

I just switched from mbox to maildir instead. More storage used, faster client. Single change in settings.

Does Thunderbird convert each folder automatically? Reliably?

Yes. At least in my experience.

Because in v115 (I think, it's been a while), the interface received a thick coat of clown makeup for no reason, and now it's terrible and there's no way to revert it. You can apparently hack some CSS to make it tolerable, but I'm not going to engage in a war with my email client, because I know that solution will break with every update.

You search for a solution to this, you get plenty of hits of people trying to revert the UI. I'm not alone with this opinion. It's an email client, it's not supposed to be new and exciting. The interface was fine.

All I really want is working Kmail. It's boring in the best kind of way.

Is "Message List Display Options -> Table View" not pretty well exactly what you want? I enabled it (on desktop) shortly after the roll-out, and I've never had it revert back. There's no CSS hackery, no forced reversion, not even a hidden menu - Card vs. Table view is a top-level menu item.

Telling me "There's no way to revert it" feels like, at best, giving up at the sign of the smallest difficulty. At worst it's a bad-faith argument, as it's clearly possible - and fairly easy and straightforward, IMO.

No, it's not the list view.

Mozilla themselves called it "Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch", and as we know, rebuilding something from scratch is a great idea, and improves the product on all metrics always.

In my opinion, it's a travesty. I refuse to use it. I would rather use broken Kmail.

> Don't say Thunderbird.

Hmmmmmm, why are you saying that?

I'm using *** for 20 years. Even when I was on Windows years ago. *** might not be fancy, but just works. And IME works very reliably.

What actually do people expect from an email client that they don't get from a web-based one?

Working offline such as on a train. This includes having all emails and attachments saved locally. Also useful for backups. E.g. suppose you get locked out of your email account because "AI says you look suspicious". How ruined is your day?

Managing multiple email accounts in a single interface.

Easily moving emails between different accounts and from online to offline.

Relatedly, storing years of emails with attachments on a local drive is cheap. Storing them in webmail is a hefty subscription fee. I have no issue with one time payments, but I like to minimize subscriptions.

The new outlook lost all these capabilities - I was stunned to find out that I couldn't search through my emails while being offline

Local search in most commercial software has regressed since ~2000.

My only explanation is that local search is inherently cross-team and integration-heavy. Consequently, if there's no higher-org prioritization it just molds and breaks over time, as unaddressed integration bugs pile up that cannot be fixed by a single team.

Companies shipping their dysfunctional org chart.

Still, I never thought I'd say that I could do things with the built-in search 20 years ago that I can't today.

> Companies shipping their dysfunctional org chart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law , hmm?

I used thunderbird when I had multiple email inboxes I needed to monitor. They were all visible in the same interface, with one master password.

Personally, I like local apps rather than everything being a browser tab.

I have seven emails to monitor for work. I'll probably have more before end of year. Multiple environments for multiple clients.

Having that in one place, is essential.

Not seeing ads?

The only ads I ever see in either Google or Proton web mail clients are for their own services, or if I check the spam folder. And I don't have an ad blocker set up (I have NoScript, but there isn't any third-party JavaScript anyway).

I use webmail clients nearly every day and I don't see ads.

Do you Yahoo!?

No, I use Google Workspace and Zoho and Roundcube for my webmail.

Mailspring is ok but pretty massive. IIRC only the sync part of it is closed-source. Managing 10+ accounts is not a problem.

Also nextcloud email maybe?

mutt is all I'll ever need...

I personally use Claws Mail with plugins, but OAuth2 is laborious to setup. Works though.

What were you using beforehand?

Vivaldi mail component is underrated but comes with the browser baggage.

gnus (on emacs) is pretty good. But it may require an entire lifestyle change :)

The beauty of gnus is that it's elisp all the way down. So if you don't like something, it's most likely configurable.

Did you try Evolution?

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