I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1].
It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are going to be different, it should be to some purpose, but after 6 months of using it I still don't see any purpose. There are still some vestiges of its previous Eudora-like interface, but everywhere it is different from Eudora, it is to no purpose I can fathom.
1: The other two I could find are Evolution and davmail (which bridges EWS to imap). There may be more now; I last looked about a year ago. I can unreservedly say that using Evolution is better experience than Thunderbird, though its underlying architecture is a bit bizarre.
I don't know. I've been using it since 2005. Its UI is stable and efficient. Gets the job done and does not get in the way. And it's free software.
You are not actually saying what you don't like about Thunderbird so it's hard to oppose anything to your comment. Why Thunderbird should change its UI if it works okay?
Gratuitously different from what by the way?
And to me, the UIs of Evolution and KMail don't seem that much different from Thunderbird's and from what I've seem from Outlook, same thing. There's a pane listing inboxes and folders, there's a pane showing the content of the selected folder and there's a pane showing the selected email's content. ?
People do not appreciate good UIs enough. I think many software engineers might be UI-blind, actually.
Thunderbird is ugly, atrocious on 4K screens, does not group messages by conversation like mail client have in the past 20 years, and insists on listing emails in side-by-side columns instead of using a more compact and space-effective layout like many mail clients in the past 20 years. It's got a menubar, 3 level of toolbars and a burger menu; unnecessary tabs, cramped spacing, and two search fields. It offers XMPP chat and in-browser junk filtering when the former is pretty much dead, and the second is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition.
Someone mentioned LibreOffice elsewhere in the comment, and both projects seems stuck in the 2005 UI, UX and feature wise. I actively avoid using them even if I have to resort to using subpar web applications.
I like Thunderbird's UI. It doesn't get in the way, and more importantly, I have used it for a long time, so I know my way around it quite well. A lot of attempts to "improve" UIs end with things like Microsoft's Ribbon interface (which I really dislike).
> does not group messages by conversation
Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.
> [client-side spam filtering] is not needed anymore since GMail and its modern competition.
It kind of is, though. Not everyone is using GMail, and my idea of what does or does not count as Spam might differ significantly from what some email provider thinks.
I'm sure there are prettier mail clients around, and by all means, if you prefer one of those, use it. I used Apple's Mail.app when I using a Mac, because I needed to access an Exchange mailbox at the time, which sucks on Thunderbird. The UI looked shiny, I never got upset about it (UI or functionality), but I happily went back to Thunderbird when I got back to Linux.
> Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.
It's not a unified conversation view like Gmail or Fastmail. There's a plugin that does that, but it's not very pleasant either.
I'm on Linux, all other email clients are pretty bad or similarly stuck in 2005 in appearance. I am very happy with the Fastmail webapp, but Mozilla is against PWAs so I have to resort to using Chromium to keep it around as a standalone app. I would like to use Thunderbird, but I have tried getting comfortable with the UI a dozen times in as many years, and I uninstall it in frustration 30 minutes later. These days it is also very sad to open its extension store and see that most of its plugins are unmaintained and haven't been updated in years. There's a true feeling of abandonware every time I give it another chance.
I've been using it for a few years now. The UI is outdated and a bit clunky but it's worked great for me on my old Mac Mini and the old Apple Mail app is pretty much unusable now. My next best option is Roundcube Webmail, and it's pretty good too.
I have a hard time with complaining about free software. I either use it or don't, but I won't complain about it.
Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years, Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts, Mailspring is electron-based, TUIs are right out, Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird.
So yeah. For handling multiple e-mail accounts, Thunderbird works best.
> Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years
Indeed, my reaction to Geary was "wow, they managed to make KMail look good!"
> Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts
I don't like this about Evolution either; I haven't run a GNOME desktop for at least a decade, and (depending on the distro) it can be a tiny bit fiddly getting Evolution working without a GNOME desktop. It "just works" on recent NixOS versions though. Once it's installed though, it's a joy to use, while Thunderbird feels like a drag. I'm not a UI expert, so I can't put my finger on what the difference is.
> Mailspring is electron-based
I hadn't heard of mailspring previously, but I suspect we have similar views of what at typical electron-based app is like...
> TUIs are right out
I have no problem with TUIs, I use a TUI along side a gui mail client, but the latter is necessary when dealing with non text-only messages (particularly responding to).
> Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird
Maybe I'm just old, but Claws is way more usable than me than Thunderbird. The only thing it lacks for me is an html e-mail editor, which is necessary for responding and quoting to non text-only e-mails. There are plenty of good TUIs that can handle text-only e-mails, so claws isn't really something I currently have a use for.
That's my experience as well. And I would like to use KMail since I use KDE anyway. I haven't tried Mailspring but I don't feel like running another Electron app when Thunderbird does the job amazingly well.
How do you do bulk actions on emails? Clicking a checkbox for every single one? Having to write an run a query for each set of emails you want to operate on in bulk?
Here's how I do it in thunderbird. Sort by sender (or other thing). Click first email. Shift click last email. Do whatever I want (usually archive or move to a folder).
My employer turned off IMAP access a few years ago and I've basically given up managing my github/jira/mailing list spam. Filters turn out to be surprisingly fragile.
>Here's how I do it in thunderbird. Sort by sender (or other thing). Click first email. Shift click last email. Do whatever I want (usually archive or move to a folder).
This is pretty basic functionality for an email client to have. In GMail (Proton and Yandex too; probably any modern web client) works by clicking the checkbox. Click first email's checkbox. Shift click last email's checkbox.
I used the Gmail web interface once in 2005 I think? I didn't include webmail in my assessment, or the office 365 mail client would have "won" this award.
Hmmm... let me try and answer this, as someone who likes Thunderbird quite a bit (and is cool with people not liking it, but just wants to provide their own perspective).
For traditional business email, you are pretty much stuck with two options - Outlook or Thunderbird. You can try and use webmail of various types - and there are some decent webmail clients out there - but it's just not quite the same as using a good Desktop client.
For the newest Outlook versus the newest Thunderbird, Outlook wins feature wise - it does a lot of things and all of it is pretty well integrated. But if you don't need all the bells and whistles, Thunderbird, in my opinion, is oftentimes better than Outlook.
For example, I find that Thunderbird has a better search than Outlook, and better conversation capabilities (threading and open message in conversation) than Outlook. It's tagging system and archiving system are better than Outlook's. It's add-on system is easier to use then Outlook's (partly because most everything is free). It also allows much more manipulation of the UI than Outlook does as far as I'm aware. All of these things add up, and Thunderbird becomes a much more efficient email client than Outlook for me, which is important if I need to deal with 100 or so emails a day.
On top of these things, in my opinion, Thunderbird is really good and not causing issues down the line. Part of my job is to manage workplace computers (probably no where near as many as some folk here on this site, but not a really small amount either), the amount of trouble Thunderbird gives me compared to the amount of trouble Outlook gives me... well, it makes me want to make everyone use Thunderbird. There are only two things I really have to worry about with thunderbird (they relate to the calendar and mass moving large amounts of emails), but with Outlook... well... I've had to repair people's email enough that I never want to do it again. It sucks. I hate repairing .pst files.
Mmm... I personally have never tried Evolution or davmail, so I can't speak to them, unfortunately. I will have to try them later probably. As for Exchange OAuth, yeah, I can see you having some troubles with it in Thunderbird. I was having Microsoft 365's IMAP implementation give us trouble (ended up dropping it). On the other hand, it was also giving older versions of Outlook trouble... so I'm not sure I can put the blame solely on Thunderbird for this one. I do hope you find something that does what you want it to though.
> Hmmm... let me try and answer this, as someone who likes Thunderbird quite a bit (and is cool with people not liking it, but just wants to provide their own perspective).
Thanks for that. If it wasn't clear from my original comment, I'm totally cool with people liking Thunderbird.
FWIW, It seems that the intersection of <people who like Evolution> and <people who like Thunderbird> is near zero, so perhaps it's a matter of taste there.
I fully agree with your comment. Thunderbird is just plain terrible.
Over the weekend I migrated to a 100% Linux/open-source environment. So of course I went through a series of alternative apps. While you'd never find feature parity (eg. with MS Office and the Adobe Suite) existing alternatives are mostly good enough.
Thunderbird has been tooted to me as THE alternative to MS Outlook. What I found was a total mess of a software stack needing countless addons and customization to even get close to Outlook. Then I discovered Evolution. It was certainly different but worked pretty much flawlessly out of the box.
It's good you found a solution in Evolution. I don't use many extensions in Thunderbird, just one to show different colors in the new mail window depending on the account used to send the mail. I'd be interested in knowing which specific features of Outlook you needed that required extensions in Thunderbird (and that Evolution has by default).
Evolution is what I used for years until severl years ago when they greatly modified the way the email was stored. I switched back to Thunderbird. Now I discover TB is including more and more usage of sqlite (which is great for data, by my email is not data); my email is files.
It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are going to be different, it should be to some purpose, but after 6 months of using it I still don't see any purpose. There are still some vestiges of its previous Eudora-like interface, but everywhere it is different from Eudora, it is to no purpose I can fathom.
1: The other two I could find are Evolution and davmail (which bridges EWS to imap). There may be more now; I last looked about a year ago. I can unreservedly say that using Evolution is better experience than Thunderbird, though its underlying architecture is a bit bizarre.