I just can’t find a decent email client that looks like it’s from the last 20 years. Geary and Evolution both appear to be pretty modern but something about using Gmail with a Yubikey just doesn’t work and neither of them will connect to my account. Both on Fedora and OpenSUSE. Thunderbird works but it’s so old fashioned and Betterbird doesn’t look much better. What’s everyone else using?
Thunderbird all the way 🙌
I have used Thunderbird for years. HOWEVER:
- I don’t know why Thunderbird can’t get a reliable, functional search ability. It’s such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
- The problems connecting to gmail are also so frustrating. Yes, they are Google’s fault but if you make an e-mail client you maybe need to add a workaround for the world’s most popular e-mail provider. It’s totally fixable because you can apply those fixes manually.
I don’t know why Thunderbird can’t get a reliable, functional search ability. It’s such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
Maybe see if Betterbird’s search works better for you
Wow very interesting thank you! I like that it can be run side-by-side from the same profile to test it out. If search was fixed I would have never migrated so much of my e-mail to gmail.
Are you taking about the semi recent rewrite or the old discontinued version?
All versions over the past decade including the latest one
Thunderbird for desktop computer, K-9 mail for mobile phone.
Did you know K-9 mail is soon to be thunderbird mobile
true
Sort of. They are going to keep maintaining K-9 mail with the current branding but there will also be a version of K-9 that is called is called Thunderbird for Android that will be themed like Thunderbird desktop.
Thunderbird is fine.
Maybe I have too much grey in my beard - I don’t care how modern it looks.
Nah it has nothing to do with your beard colour.
I like it a lot and I’m almost as old or as young as Thunderbird is.
I gotta tell you… If you’re almost as old or young as Thunderbird that makes you a graybeard. Do me a favor. Next time you get out of a chair, try not to make a noise. We all find out we’ve turned old somehow.
Just so its clear this comment is coming from a loving place I love Thunderbird and you seem nice and I enjoyed your comment. Just razzing you a little bit as someone else who’s also around the same age as Thunderbird
I don’t have a beard yet but sure.
Thunderbird. Hate the redesign. If it ain’t broke dont fix it.
K9 for phone
I still have pgp signs, but no one has used it to encrypt back to me in years. Don’t know why I keep those on there and active
Thunderbird + K9 Mail are my way to go, too.
Though I mostly do like the redesign, since it fixes some long standing issues with Thunderbird (e.g. not being able to select a multi line message view (“cards view”), instead of the traditional table view.) The search bar being always on top annoys me each time I open it, so I understand a more long time Thunderbird user might have more nitpicks. Almost all of the changes can be reverted through settings, which I find awesome.
I still have pgp signs, but no one has used it to encrypt back to me in years. Don’t know why I keep those on there and active
Me too. I mean if I got an email with someone’s public key attached I’d send an encrypted reply. One day the person you’re emailing will eventually do the same lol. (I mean I do get people sending me encrypted emails sometimes, but most of the time it’s “wtf is this .asc file you’ve attached to this email”)
The refactor fixed a ton of issues
The redesign is actually what convinced me to switch to Thunderbird. Otherwise I would’ve never used it since for me it was an eyesore!
Thunderbird on desktop, although I don’t love it.
FairEmail on Android.
FairEmail is fucking awesome. If it were a sentient being or object, I’d pound it so hard. With consent, of course. Does everything I want and then some: fast, strips everything down to text, lets me appear to send from any address on my domains, blocks trackers, is constantly (almost literally) updated and improved, custom notification handling per folder, custom colors for messages/folders…
I’d pay for it again to get a desktop version, no hesitation about it. TB is /fine/ but… that one meme with the guy looking back at the other girl
Just installed it and woof, this is very good looking. I was waiting for K9 mail to get a few more updates before making it my daily driver, but this works really well already.
Also love an app with an FAQ that actually answers questions I’m thinking lol
Thank you for mentioning FairEmail, and thank you @[email protected], for elaborating on what makes it great.
Thanks to your recommendations I installed it last night and paid the $6 one-time license fee to unlock the advanced features. Being able to set custom notification sounds per sender is a feature I’ve been wanting on my phone for years. I finally have it now and it’s already changing my life for the better.
^__^ yay! I’m glad to hear it. I’ve been using it for… 4 years, I believe, and it’s just been fantastic for me, so I like to spread the word whenever it comes up.
I love fairemail. I had an issue with some mails I was getting regularly not rendering properly and the guy was so helpful that I donated again even though I already had the paid one (which confused him!)
Thunderbird. It’s great
I am not sure how to make it look shitty like Gmail, maybe you could theme it to wast a ton of space.
Seriously, do you want a useful email client or not?
Thunderbird had a redesign not too long ago. I mean, maybe you still consider it old-fashioned, but did you check you’re on the latest version?
Switched from the default win10 mail app to thunderbird about a year ago when the mail app started forcibly updating to the outlook and broke some shit on my windows installation to use a whole lot of resources. I quite liked the old mail app of the windows, but Thunderbird is quite enough of a replacement at default settings and much more customizable after fiddling. K9 has no difference than Gmail on default settings, either.
Thunderbird. Idk what you mean by old fashioned. It works fine, and you can style it with gtk themes.
On Android I use K-9 Mail, which looks modern to me.
I mean everyone has their preferences, but personally I don’t use email clients because I want to look at something pretty—I use them to read my emails. Thunderbird mostly matching my gtk theme is more than enough for me.
I don’t know if you were aware of this but K-9 Mail has joined up with the thunderbird developers and will at some point transition to thunderbird for mobile devices
Woah, that’s cool. Yeah I had never heard that but I’ve read the K-9 blog posts about it now. From the sounds of it, K-9 Mail is just going to continue developing along the same trajectory they were going on but are just going to change the branding to Thunderbird. Which is cool with me.
What do you find “old-fashioned” about Thunderbird? Do you not consider an interface “new” if they don’t change it and hide all the common features every five minutes like Microsoft does? It’s an email client, you read your emails in it. How would you do it better?
“needs more whitespace and rollover disclosure on invisible icons”
Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that’s definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.
Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.
It is but the “holy trinity” of Ui/UX design Apple, Google and Microsoft have been pushing this for years now.
My eye twitches anytime I go onto a webpage that’s just a phone app in the middle of my screen with two blank voids on either side.
Information density MUST be suitable for humans. Usability and productivity both have nothing in common with amount of clicking and scrolling required.
Just imagine making your font size something about 5px. And 1.0 as a line height. Sounds good, isn’t it? There ia so much information displayed on the screen.
If you need less information on screen, they invented a great thing for that in the 90s: resizable windows. And later, HiDPI-aware interface scaling.
That is the right way to control information density. The user can control both of these however they like and set it to whatever they work best with, and it applies across the system. You can’t do that with usually custom written interfaces that insist on putting like two lines of text worth of whitespace between every UI element.
Agree. But we could say tthe same thing in the opposite direction: if you need more information on your screen, just use scaling and font settings :)
Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn’t work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to increase usability.
That’s great. And if something is comfortable for you to use, it doesn’t mean it would be comfortable for the majority of other people.
Maybe you use large screen(s). Maybe your information is not important and/or the interface doesn’t require actions. Context matters.
As a user of 13-inch 2560x1600p screen, I definitely can say that apps need more whitespace to be usable. I’ve also been using 2 monitors 27-inch each some time ago. And yes, such a configuration allows for a greater density of information on the screen.
That’s why I say (again): information density must be comfortable for humans. In their contexts of course.
What’s even better is that Thunderbird somehow managed to do better branding and marketing than Microsoft. Outlook (new) is the dumbest name I have ever heard. And that’s compared to Thunderbird supernova
Why is Thunderbird old? It recently had a major redo and was rebranded with the supernova branding. Try the flatpak version.
I use Thunderbird and I don’t think it looks old, specially after recent updates. You can also change the colors which is pretty cool.
Mutt.
Thunderbird with the conversations add-on. It’s a game-changer that makes it much easier to transition from Gmail.
Interesting extension, didn’t know about it, thanks!
Oh hi Jure of KDE fame ;)
How is KMail these days? I haven’t used it in years. It always largely worked, but never really exceled at anything.
Wasn’t it supposed to become Thunderbird for android?
You are mistaking KMail (desktop client by KDE) and K-9 Mail (Android client that is being rebranded into Thunderbird for Android).
You are thinking of K9
I think this was a different smartphone app that would get the Thunderbird branding… searching… ah, it’s K-9: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on-android-plans-k9/
Thunderbird, much like Firefox, is the best because it’s the least bad.
