[BinaryIdiot]

To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow, horrible application that I've tried again and again.

I'm all for them killing it.

[jacquesm]

My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you. I've yet to find a client that works as well as Thunderbird with my massive email archive.

Why would it be slow? I can only type so fast and sending/receiving mail is mostly dependent on the connectivity, not on the software.

[webwanderings]

I recently downloaded TB to move some offline mbox emails of large quantity. TB became increasingly slow processing few thousand. I downloaded Opera Mail to do the same exact work. I was done within few hours.

I have a need for more people to repeat the same process. There's zero chance I'll be asking them to download TB.

[cat199]

TB by default saves 1x file per folder (e.g. MBox like) -

This means depending on your storage configuration and how you use folders, potentially writing 100MB, 1G, 10G, etc. back to disk on folder content change.

For batch processing though, I use the CLI tools - thunderbird is view/compose only (procmail/formail/archivemail/offlineimap,etc)

I was hitting performance probs on bigger folders, and setup some more strict archiving to archive older mails to subfolders/zap offline using an 'archivemail' job, etc, and the problem went away, with TB being quite snappy.

as I understand it there was some effort to support 1-file-per-email, which might be an option now, but this has it's problems too.

Outlook has it's PST corruption hell...

Basically, in my opinion, email is a pain, each client shows it differently, though I am admittedly not up to speed on Opera Mail.

[jacquesm]

Thunderbird sets up a full-text index to allow you to search your emails. This eats up a bit of time while importing large mailboxes but is quite handy once it is done.

[webwanderings]

I tried that (I googled to see what am I missing) didn't help.

[lmm]

How does KMail perform for that? I never had trouble with its performance, though I don't think I ever quite made it into the millions of emails.

[lizzard]

Thunderbird searches can be quite slow.

[BinaryIdiot]

> My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you.

You seem to be attempting to address just the slowness of my complain and not its overall awfulness. Start-up time, loading each email; I've never seen it work very fast it always has that android-like lag throughout the entire thing. It also doesn't feel native to whatever OS you're using it in almost like using a Swing app.

The UX is just awful.

[jacquesm]

Well, maybe I'm just used to it. I tried many other email clients and other than text mode ones it is the best I've found so far (Linux, Debian).

[open-source-ux]

Have you tried Sylpheed? It's a lightweight, open source email client for Windows and Mac OS. I am using the Windows version. The installer is a mere 8mb in file size. I switched from Thunderbird to Sylpheed and am very happy with it so far.

http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

[Endy]

Question, does Sylpheed have a calendar like Outlook or Thunderbird+Lightning?

[Arizhel]

The problem is that there aren't exactly a lot of other great FOSS standalone email applications these days. Everything's been neglected because of webmail, and corporations' dogged insistence on Outlook.

So if you think Thunderbird should be killed, what do you suggest as a replacement? It needs to be free, and run on Windows for my company to use it.

[st3fan]

Not free, but Postbox is pretty great. It is a continuation of Thunderbird. By former Thunderbird engineers if I am not mistaken.

https://www.postbox-inc.com/

[asymmetric]

Might be pretty great but it's Windows/macOS only, so not sure how much of a continuation of thunderbird it can be considered.

[diegoprzl]

Claws Mail is a good option.

[jhasse]

If you're using Linux, try Geary.

[pfg]

The only thing that forces me to keep Thunderbird around are mailing lists. I haven't found anything else that doesn't break quoting or messes with word/line wrapping in plaintext mails. To be fair, even Thunderbird requires quite a bit of about:config tuning to get it to behave sanely.

I suppose I'll have to learn to live with mutt eventually.

[jlgaddis]

IMO, mutt is the best mail client there is when it comes to lots of high-volume mailing lists. I can catch up on all my lists so much quicker than with any other mail client.

[__jal]

Seconded!

Mutt is the only way I can keep up with my mail volume. The only time the UI doesn't react instantly is when it loads huge mailboxes. And it still does that faster than I've seen graphical clients load the same mailbox.

Add to that pretty much infinite customization, and it does indeed suck less.

If you have to deal with large amounts of mail for pretty much whatever reason, you can do it faster with mutt than with any other client I've ever used. Yes, there is a learning curve. It isn't a vim-style learning curve, but it is there. But if you're considering a command line MUA at all, you can handle it.

[jackmoore]

Totally unrelated, but I keep falling for this same cycle of disappointment based on testimonials for The Simpsons.

[ghostly_s]

I just hope you realize when people say the Simpsons are good, they mean seasons 1-{8-12}.

[aluhut]

Every single time anyone complains about Thunderbird I ask myself wtf they are doing with this mail client.

[Certhas]

I use Thunderbird on MacOs and on Linux. On Linux its a fine email client, no complaints at all. On Mac it's a pile of shit that randomly hangs for 10+ seconds (and eats my battery) because I have a combined inbox.

There's a bunch of config tweaks that are supposed to help but so far they haven't.

[aluhut]

I wasn't even aware it had a Mac version but since you and me had no problems with it on X and I have no problems with it on Win, are all those complainers Apple users and should that undermine the otherwise good product? I don't think so.

[throwaway7767]

My experience using thunderbird on linux is that it's a decent mail client, but I've found it corrupts its search index every few months. Rebuilding the index with my mailbox takes several days.

Also, sometimes it'll just not find certain messages. That also means it's time to clear out and rebuild indexes.

This has been my experience every time I use thunderbird, over many years. I'm not sure what it is about my mailbox that makes me see these issues when others don't.

It's a good program but could use some maintenance loving.

[pix64]

Thunderbird is awful, but I have yet to find anything better.

[gweinberg]

So did you find a better client?

[dboreham]

Slow? Hmm...are you sure it isn't your server that's slow?

[richardwhiuk]

The speed of a desktop UI client shouldn't be related to how quick the server is.

[wott]

I imagine he was talking about IMAP?

[hubert123]

I was recently looking for desktop email clients and there is literally not a single free alternative? Cant be that awful if it's the only one.

[fghafoor]

Mailbird is pretty awesome. Been using for a year now.

If you like thunderbird theres postbox developed from thunderbird

[fgonzag]

I use opera mail client. It's quite decent. I switched from thunderbird.

[fghafoor]

Ddbdh