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Comment by fooqux | Hacker News Reader

> The UI looks pretty good too. It's really not hard to beat thunderbird.

I don't understand this mentality. It's an email client. There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface. Display a list of emails, show the full message when you open it, etc. I don't see anything functionally different between this email app and basically every other one I've ever used.

You've either got insane standards or are using email way different than I.

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Can’t speak for others but for me Thunderbird’s UI feels distracting and almost grating in some ways. It’s technically functional but doesn’t feel right.

I know things like that don’t bother some folks and that’s fine, but others like myself can’t turn the visual parts of their brains off and so some software feels like nails on a chalkboard to use.

> It’s technically functional but doesn’t feel right.

That might be the most accurate description of Thunderbird that I've come across. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with Thunderbird, despite me using it every day. Somehow it feels like the emails aren't the important bit of the UI, but I also couldn't tell you what I'm looking at instead.

The search is also incredibly slow. I didn't notice just how slow and inaccurate it is until I built my mail client on notmuch.

Maybe if you could spend some time defining the "feels right" aspect, this would go away.

I often find myself in situations where someone wants to break the UI I like, because they're used to something else.

It seems that most of the time, "feels right" just means "it works like I'm used to in other software". So: GMail, Outlook, whatever. Which is sad.

I wonder how would you react to "TheBat!" or Pegasus Mail?

It’s a gut feel sort of thing that’s usually grounded in some set of UI design principles that haven’t been adhered to. Defining it just pins down what the issues are rather than making the feeling go away.

Glancing at screenshots of TheBat! and Pegasus Mail, i don’t find them objectionable in the way I do Thunderbird. They’re just old school desktop clients like I used in the late 90s/early 2000s, which I generally find workable. They’re not quite my preferred style these days (which falls into the “it’s not what I’m used to” bucket you mentioned) but I could probably get used to them again if I had to.

Thunderbird on the other hand feels wrong somehow, and the recent UI “modernization” didn’t do much to change that.

>I don't understand this mentality. It's an email client. There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface.

I don't understand this mentality.

Human communication is one of the most complicated activities in existence. Most (all) clients are modelling it very poorly.

Thunderbird still doesn't have proper threading

From an engineering standpoint, I get it.

But from a normal user's standpoint? I don't care. If my email client needs more than a single thread, something's fucked.

I randomly bounce between Thunderbird and KMail and honestly I can't tell the difference except cosmetically. Both are snappy. Neither crash. Both send and receive emails just fine.

Threading as in grouping together all replies to an email. This is still somewhat buggy on Thunderbird in 2026.

I know parent is probably talking about a different type of threading, but Thunderbird's lack of process threading means the UI just gets stuck when it's syncing a large numbers of emails, which can happen if your subscribed to a lot of mailing lists, etc.

> There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface

I remember waiting for ~15 years until Thunderbird finally implemented rich content support in the e-mail list (needed for a proper 3-column layout, as otherwise the e-mail list, being a simple table, wouldn't fit on the widest screens available).

So, yeah... Not a lot, but Thunderbird has been missing the bar for over a decade.

Clearly you have never tried to use Thunderbird...!

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