Just be curious why are people still using email client other than web based one? Gmail or outlook 365 is quite good, and I think most people will have one web browser opened always.
Because I like all my email in one place basically. I don't want to hunt for tabs whenever I'm looking for specific mail account, mentally all my mail is behind one icon separate from my browser, and they all look and work the same.
Also maybe not Gmail but aside from that IMHO Thunderbird offers better UX than all other browser mail apps.
1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)
3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-ch...) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)
I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there is progress slowly being made here. For example composing messages used to frequently lock up for a few seconds but I haven't seen that in a couple years.
> 1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
You can disable this - it's called "Conversation mode" and you can turn it off. Many of my colleagues have it off as they find it unusable due to their workflow (they often end up with threads with 50-100 emails in them & conversation mode makes it painful).
(Be aware that Conversation mode is required for some tools/plugins/extensions to work though.)
Because you have more than one email address? Or because you want to work offline (e.g. connectivity on trains is bad)?
I am more curious why people are still using the very limited web based ones and one for each address, when much more capable and universal local clients exist.
Outlook.com only loads successfully about one time out of ten for me. Same as MS Teams web app. I've tried all the recommendations around third party cookies, no dice.
Gmail has weird limitations around non Gmail accounts. You can only add up to five, and they get checked randomly - sometimes only once an hour but mostly around 20 minutes. There's no way to force a check. This is a ridiculous limitation - imagine having to wait that long for an email log in code, for example.
If I only used one Gmail account there would be no reason to use Thunderbird. Now I have something like 7 or 8 email addresses across several businesses and a real, reliable email client is vital.
They are great for managing multiple email accounts in the one place. Also for me, browsers are kind of ephemeral - I open and close them quite a bit. Whereas I have Thunderbird open constantly in its own separate workspace.
There's also the local backup point that others have mentioned.
I don't want my mail managed by either of those two. Many other providers use Roundcube but that's quite "meh". But the killer feature for me for Thunderbird is that I can force everything to be plain text email, both sending and receiving.
Just be curious why are people still using email client other than web based one?
So that my emails are truly mine. I pull them off the server straight away for anti-tampering and reducing attack exposure should the provider be compromised. I can then compress and backup my emails. If my provider should falter I can change providers and still have all my emails, even pushing any of them back up to the new server should I have such a need. The same logic applies for my contacts. When a web-only provider goes offline, so do all my emails and contacts which feels too much like corporate capture to me.
Gmail is good? I am not seeing it. It's a weird 90s gui which is hard to discover. For my use case both round cube and afterlogic webmail lite are better than gmail. I don't use my company account there. (My rspamd based spam protection is better too)
The interface won’t randomly be changed from under you every couple of years?
On a more serious note, am I using my desktop so very differently? The idea that a web app could even come close to competing with a native app for me simply doesn’t compute.
I use Thunderbird for work, for legal reasons (can't move sensitive data to the cloud) and also practical (no mix up of private mails and work). Additionally, Thunderbird has chat, which I use for our internal system.
Also maybe not Gmail but aside from that IMHO Thunderbird offers better UX than all other browser mail apps.