First and most important, I can not use Gmail. I use fastmail, pay for it, and dont have my most personal data mined for ads. It also means I can move away from fastmail quite easily!
Second, the performance is better, it's just way snappier even on high end computers.
Third, mail clients (not just thunderbird) often have better os level integration, features, and feel. For example, Mail.app on ios/macos.
Honest question: what do you do with email that's so personal? Disclaimer that I don't like Google mining email data, I value privacy and don't want to dismiss it.
But I'm genuinely curious what you do over email that you feel so strongly about. For me, email is basically just a notification feed for me buying shit off Amazon (which the biggest person interested in selling me shit already knows about) and me occasionally having to complain to a customer service inbox.
All personal stuff is iMessage and signal, or secure things like docusign (for employment stuff).
Honestly if I was going to make a privacy related move, it would be to move to my own email domain but still hosted on gsuite.
Personally I was scared my account might be closed and I would have no recourse as I wasn't a paying customer. Years ago there were stories here of people having all their google accounts closed and being unable to even contact a human at google to check why.
someday when iMessage and Signal are long gone, you're going to want to recall a funny conversation with friends or a message from a lover that you STILL keep thinking about after all these years. when that happens, you'll probably wish those things happened on a platform that makes it easy to save for as long as you want
Noone seems to have mentioned extensions yet so I'll jump in - extensions!
Like Firefox, Thunderbird can be, uh, extended with additional functionality which can really boost productivity. (I know there are Gmail addons that can do similar things, some of which are pretty powerful too.)
Some ones I use:
- ThreadViz[1] - a neat little visualisation of the email thread & its linked replies/predecessors (pre-plies?)
- Mail Merge[2] - powerful mail merge util with a bunch of options for tailoring emails.
- QuickText[3] - keyboard shortcuts for common (template-able) replies - super useful if you are, say, monitoring a support mailbox and want to save a bunch of time with canned replies.
I want to have all my mail backed up locally and I want to be able to check mail and search across multiple accounts at the same time. Basically I don't trust the corporate cloud and want to be platform agnostic.
This winter, Rackspace had malware get into their hosted exchange environment. The only solution they offered for weeks was moving to office 365. Anybody who only used webmail lost all emails, calendars, and contacts.
I swapped over to it. A dedicated mail client, imo, is always going to be more functional and more performant than a web browser for the purpose of mail tasks.
It's nice to have a dedicated piece of software that I know works and I don't have to worry that some weird browser issue or one of several dozen addons isn't causing a problem.
I mean, Thunderbird is really just FF under the hood from what I understand, but still.
> A dedicated mail client, imo, is always going to be […] more performant than a web browser for the purpose of mail tasks.
Counterexample: Thunderbird. I recently tried TB based clients, and then TB directly to see if it already has those issues. And it turns out, it does. Interacting feels sluggish (not on a resource constrained device, Win 11, 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 5 3600).
Now Outlook (which I use for work and was the reason I wanted to get a unified client for everything) is a bit faster than the MS web interface (or the horribly slow Gmail one), but the fastmail interface is faster than all of those.
Anecdotally, TB has been very fast and my browser was always slow for even basic operations.
Though Outlook is an exception. It has always been...garbage in my experience. Crashes, incredible lag, addons that fail to load, etc. I consider it a miracle if I get through a day with it all working properly.
My encryption settings are constantly being reset so I have to enter them almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, which is lovely.
Anything you need another company's permission to access doesn't belong to you. Google could lock you out of your own email at any point. Any important messages you've sent or received over the years can be taken from you and you could be left with no means at all to get them back. Having a local copy of your correspondence is great for piece of mind.
Because thunderbird stores messages in MBOX format your messages can be read by anything that can handle text files and you can use tools like grep to search through your messages very quickly from the command line. If you get an address with a new email provider having a copy of all your messages on your hard drive means that you can easily move them to the new account.
Offline access and far better handling of multiple accounts, mainly. It also means I’m not at the mercy of the webmail provider when it comes to UI, and if my current client of choice takes a turn for the worse I can migrate to something else (or if I’m ambitious, even develop my own).
Web mail interfaces are locked to individual providers. Some interfaces (like io.ox and Outlook) allow adding other providers, but it feels like a band aid.
I do wish I could use a web based client (or one synced with one) so that all my settings are available on all my devices.
Mainly in my case because I host my own domain mail with a cheap mail host with a webmail that's not as good as gmail. Also better offline support than any webmail (gmail's is spotty and last time I used it, only worked in Chrome).
Pretty niche, but I like a desktop client because on my Linux setup (i3) I wasn't able to get reliable always-on-top calendar notifications from Outlook web and was constantly missing meetings.
It's just a bit more snappy and has a few advanced but helpful features that gmail does not.
For comparison... think about how it feels to work in Microsoft Word compared to Google Docs. You can do most of what you can do in Word in Google Docs, but there are helpful things in Word that just make it that much better. And it just feels a little better when you use it... thus, if you need to do really serious word processing, you do it in Word.
Outlook and Thunderbird have a similar feeling when compared to gmail. It won't matter much if you are only sending 10 emails a day. But if you are sending 50 or 60 emails a day over multiple inboxes (particularly in the context of business email)... you might find it's a little easier to organize and respond to people in the desktop clients.
In the case of Thunderbird, here are some features it has I probably couldn't live without:
-Archiving split by Month (As a bonus there is also an easy shortcut key for archiving)
-Open in thread (this is a little different than gmails as far as I understand in the way that thunderbird deals with split threads, which can be important in a business context where you have some replies only going to some people, others going to other people - it's easy to see this tree structure in Thunderbird)
-Folders AND Tags (Thunderbird's Tagging and Folder system are separated, gmails is combined as far as I'm aware. As a bonus, Thunderbirds tags highlight emails in color for easy identification, and also have easy shortcuts)
-Add-Ons (For example, I use a Thunderbird extension that can attach notes to an email message... which can then synchronize between computers which is useful for accounts where a lot of people access the inbox, but where sending an internal email would clog said inbox. For gmail, you can write web extensions, but Thunderbird has an ecosystem already pre-existing and mostly free)
-Reminder if you use the word 'attach' and don't have an attachment (It sucks when you send out an email saying 'such is attached below and it's not actually there. Gmail might have this too now - have not checked.)
These things all seem pretty small but they make a big difference in how I manage my email, and especially with Thunderbird, this is all customizable. Want Unified inboxes, or separate ones? Your choice. Want to see the cc's from an email as a column in your email list, but not the favorites ('important' tag in gmail) column? Your choice too. And there's a lot more options than just these, meaning you can really streamline your email process. And this just ... at least for me, makes enail a little less painful.
Second, the performance is better, it's just way snappier even on high end computers.
Third, mail clients (not just thunderbird) often have better os level integration, features, and feel. For example, Mail.app on ios/macos.