[SyneRyder]

I like Postbox, which is a commercial fork of Thunderbird. Seems to hit most of your needs (not sure about the conversation view as I always turn off threads) and has some of the keyboard shortcuts of GMail. Definitely lets you store emails on disk / offline. Alas version 4 has been less stable than version 3 was.

(Not free, but $20 is pretty cheap.)

[ronjouch]

Postbox looks like a fully-featured fork and I'd be glad to support their awesome work with dollars, but sadly there's no Linux build: https://www.postbox-inc.com/download

[mariusmg]

Genuine question but what does something like Postbox has (for regular users) over the vanilla Thunderbird + addons to justify $20 ?

[SyneRyder]

It's been so long since I used Thunderbird that I'm not sure. I don't know if Thunderbird has things like the Focus Pane, where I can live-filter my Inbox down to just certain topics or certain senders. It feels a bit like OmniFocus or a GTD / Getting Things Done workflow:

http://www.softwarecrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/postb...

The killer app for me is the Postbox 4 feature to file a message in a folder just by pressing the V keyboard shortcut. Postbox then shows an Alfred/Spotlight-like "quick bar" with autocomplete - so just by typing "V GER" I can file an email in my "German Lessons" subfolder without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. They have a similar feature for automatically entering responses with a couple of keystrokes:

https://www.postbox-inc.com/blog/entry/postbox-4-quick-bar

(I also like that Postbox prompts if it detects the word "attached" and you forget to add the attachment, but I assume most email clients have that now.)

[mariusmg]

This can be done with addons in TB :

- Expression search addon to filter/search the inbox.

- Nostalgy addon for moving mail (and navigating the mailbox only with the keyboard). This addon is basically required for serious usage. Just press b and a popup shows up and allows you tochoose folder with autocomplete. It looks like this http://i.imgur.com/qYheafo.png

[SyneRyder]

I took a look, and it does seem many of Postbox's features are renditions of Thunderbird addons, just with a slicker UI. Nostalgy has clearly been a big influence, and possibly Expression (though both are inspired by Gmail). I haven't found an addon for the focus sidebar, but I bet that's out there too.

My only issue is that during the years I used Thunderbird (pre Postbox) & exploring the addons, I never even knew about Nostalgy or Expression. For me, it's worth $20 for someone to design a pre-loaded Thunderbird with the best addons & make it part of the default UI & support docs. I would have easily taken $20+ of billable time just to discover & decide between the TB QuickMove and Quick Folder Move addons.

[But I'm really glad Thunderbird can do this, now I can recommend Nostalgy & TB to folks who don't want to pay for an email program.]

[ionised]

I currently use Postbox but heard that the company behind it was experiencing financial difficulties and a low user base (not sure how much of this is true).

Given that, I was going to wait until PB4 is no longer officially supported and make a full switch over to Thunderbird.