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Comment by Jabihjo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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