[dhdgrygev]

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings.

Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.

[mcny]

> I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.

[lawgimenez]

In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.

[geokon]

I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process

But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

[ashwagary]

I prefer email sitting in the outbox for a short period of time before send/receive completes, it has saved me from mistakes enough times that it is worth the delay.

[lawgimenez]

This is what the Mail app in macOS does. Disappear in background, outbox for the moment and let me compose another email.

[SahAssar]

I like that. I hate optimistic UIs that tell me something has happened when it clearly is just on a queue somewhere.

[petre]

You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.

[ilyt]

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up

> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.

Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?

[chrisandchris]

Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day.

How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?

[jen20]

I get several thousand emails a day but only a handful require reading or response.

Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.

Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.

Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.

[lathiat]

I was using thunderbird with the same very large accounts on Linux and windows.

For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.

There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.

[bqmjjx0kac]

On my Linux machine, there's noticeable latency when scrolling through the messages pane. I use the vertical (side by side) layout, but the delay disappears when I use the stacked layout. The jankiness seems to be a function of the messages pane's height.

[klooney]

What operating system do you use? I think Windows, Mac and Linux have pretty different performance characteristics with Firefox and Thunderbird.

[sdnas211]

Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop. Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop. Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.

[ilyt]

I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy

[wankle]

> For me it runs lightning fast

Same here, been running it for years, it even runs and looks great on my oldest (10 years old) machine.