Slashdot Mirror
Replacement For Mozilla Thunderbird?
maxcelcat writes: I've used Thunderbird for about a decade, and Netscape Mail before that (I have an email from 1998 from Marc Andreessen, welcoming me to Netscape Email, telling me different fonts can add impact to my emails). Thunderbird has served me well, but it's getting long in the tooth. Given the lack of development and the possibility that it's going End of Life, what should I use instead? I have multiple email accounts and an archive of sixteen years of email. I could get a copy of Outlook, but I don't like it.
Things I like about Thunderbird: Supports multiple email accounts; simple interface; storage structure is not one monolithic file; plain text email editor; filtering. Things I don't like: HTML email editor; folders are hard to change and re-arrange.
Things I like about Thunderbird: Supports multiple email accounts; simple interface; storage structure is not one monolithic file; plain text email editor; filtering. Things I don't like: HTML email editor; folders are hard to change and re-arrange.
I was just thinking of switching to Thunderbird from pine.
1 - What does "end of life" mean in this context?
Nothing.
It is a mature (pretty) full-featured email client with a plugin architecture which is good enough.
2 - Lack of development.
See point #1
An ever changing system is an unstable system
The fact they do not require frequent updates, is maybe a good thing. Loook at Firefox. look at the bloat that has become.
SMTP /POP/ IMAP is just that, it has been defined years ago.
Any admin will tell you, a stable system does not need to be baby sitted or changed often. A stable system is just that. Stable, that includes the code.
To be honest, I use a variety of different email clients, and I suspect most people reading Slashdot do here too. Windows 10 mail on my Windows 10 tablet and test laptop, Outlook on my Windows 7 PC, the built-in clients on my Android device, and so on. Plus webmail.
What is it about Thunderbird that makes you eschew the multi-client approach, standardizing on just the one? It might be easier to suggest a direction to go in if you explain further.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've done this hunt at least three times and came up short every time. Someone please find something I've missed.
Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from all that is known.
gmail - I have 35 years in there, all searchable. goes back to nes-arpa.
nothing to see here - move along
Claws Mail is a good option. It might not have all the features that Thunderbird does, but the important things are that it's FLOSS, supports encryption, and "just works".
Alternatively, just use webmail. These are the best options: https://www.privacytools.io/#e...
No mention of platform. What system(s) do you need it to run on?
Thunderbird has no CardDav support (there's the SoGo connector, but it's ready only and buggy) and I run my own contacts off a Radicale server. Are there any good alternatives with decent CardDav and Caldav support?
The only thing I've found that supports CardDav is Evolution. I'm not a huge fan of its interface, but it does look like the only decent Thunderbird alternative currently. I'm really interested in the answers to this question myself.
I'm really afraid e-mail is going away though. Most people today would rather message via Facebook and this article goes into how unreliable it is to run your own e-mail server due to Microsoft/Google's over aggressive spam filtering: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/
An email client should help me get my job done. For example, I like how Outlook can remind me to follow up on an email X days in the future.
I find the "archive" feature ('a' key) in Thunderbird useful. I'd like the replacement I choose to support that.
I'd like plugin support but I shouldn't have to install 5 plugins just to make the replacement useful.
Ability to mark the priority of emails is critical.
Lastly, a wish list feature of mine is to use some sort of Bayes classification to help me categorize my messages by topic, importance, etc. Not sure any email client does that currently.
Windows Live Mail is a surprisingly feature-rich and lightweight free mail client for Windows. I used it for several years before switching permanently to webmail. It's written by Microsoft and supports multiple mailboxes. It may even import your mail history depending on your export options.
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
I don't see any lack of development in Thunderbird (38.4 came out not that long ago), and I don't see any indication of it going EOL either. There isn't a lot of core development in the email part because as an email client it's pretty much feature-complete and open-source projects rarely make changes to stuff that's working well. Much of the work's been going on in extensions, and IMO that's a good thing because it makes it easier to concentrate on one piece of functionality at a time and if there's a problem with an extension you can disable it until it's fixed without losing all of TB at the same time.
I see no reason to stop using it right now. I'm not going to upset the client end of my email unless and until TB stops receiving security updates and bugfixes in a timely manner or someone comes up with a replacement for SMTP/IMAP that I find compelling and that TB won't be updated to support.
<rant> You really would think that it should be simple to publish existing contact lists (customer lists from a database, personal address books, and such) as LDAP - it's "lightweight" right? - but there is practically no documentation or existing code that shows how to write an LDAP server. It would be nice if Thunderbird at least could have a contacts API with their crufty internal format as a replaceable option.</rant>
* supports multiple accounts (fetchmail to your VPS)
* any interface you want (lots of native/web clients support IMAP
* storage structure is not one monolithic file
i personnally use evolution, thunderbird, android mail, horde/imp with the same IMAP account on my VPS
I recommend the use of claws-mail which can be found here: http://www.claws-mail.org/
I am pretty happy with Airmail on Mac and Gmail on Android. Clean UI, OS-integrated notifications, fast search, no issues with huge mailboxes.
But if you are looking for Linux/open source, Evolution and Kmail seems to be the only serious alternative to Thunderbird. People are moving away from e-mail to other channels of communication like chat and social, and most are satisfied with webmail for remaining use. So, without commercial incentives, only major desktop environments maintain an e-mail client for completeness sake.
...not. The only thing worse than Outlook... is the alternatives.
Just use Outlook.
FossaMail is a Thunderbird fork from the creator of the Pale Moon web browser (Though you don't have to use the one to use the other). The devs have confirmed that they are a true fork that is independently developing each release and will continue on as it has been with future security, stability, and useability improvements no matter what happens to Thunderbird.
A Thunderbird user would likely find the interface and features very familiar, and I think there is an included migration tool to import settings and such from Thunderbird.
http://www.fossamail.org/
http://www.seamonkey-project.o...
you can look at a brine shrimp make bubbles while you browse and check email
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Mozilla is just going to stop supporting it. From the original announcement, basically Thunderbird has its own development group that has diverged from the Firefox clan enough that it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to keep adapting to it. Thunderbird development won't stop, and works fine. No need to switch.
The main reason I use Thuderbird is that I can run it on all of my devices (OSX, Linux, Windows, iOS, etc.). What other e-mail client offers this level of cross-platform functionality? None that I've found. The key for me is having continuity across the myriad of work and personal devices that I leverage.
I see no reason to switch. It's an email client. It doesn't need to be updated every day.
Thunderbird has so many bugs, and yet when I tried to find a replacement, there isn't anything good out there...
- Global search never worked right. On many occasions I would search for a specific word(s), it would find nothing, and I would go scroll through emails and sure enough what I was looking for is right there. Sometimes it would find an email, I would click on it in the "found" list, and it would open an empty pane, and no way to get to the actual email;
- It often corrupts the inbox, and sometimes other folders, and you would have to use "Repair folder" to get it back, and then re-configure the columns because it reset it to default (why?!); I always wondered if I lost actual emails because of this?
- Filters never worked right; I have a pretty extensive set of rules (~30), and often the incoming email would still be sitting in the inbox, and I would have to manually run the filters for it to be moved to the right folder; if more than one filter applies to the incoming email, it would sometimes choose one or the other filter at random;
- The font setting for messages is stupid; Why is there no one global setting to use a particular font/size for all encodings (and possibly individual exceptions for specific encodings if needed)? I like a particular font/size, and they keep messing up the settings, and the way it is rendered every few versions, and I'm so tired trying to get everything back the way it looked before, to the point I stopped updating Thunderbird now because I'm afraid they fucked up the fonts again; it's probably because I have a large monitor (who doesn't these days?) so I have to scale up Windows fonts in the system settings, and every few versions they seem to keep changing the way they handle that;
In case it matters, it's Windows 7 and IMAP with several local folders for archiving old emails.
Please, oh, please, tell me there is something better out there?
Sounds like you're linux preferred...
The tool that I see most well designed and presented these days is Mail that comes with OSX. It works with pretty much everything: Yahoo, POP, IMAP, Gmail, Exchange, etc....
I have an email from 1998 from Marc Andreessen, welcoming me to Netscape Email
Hello newbie.
Seamonkey and Thunderbird are more or less compatible "under the hood". I don't know if Seamonkey will survive Firefox's incontinence, but for now it is an alternative to Thunderbird that would remind you a lot of Thunderbird, and if you want to look around in the config files you could even just move your current Thunderbird environment straight into Seamonkey.
I'm about to test Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Ge...
--Steve
FossaMail is a fork of Thunderbird by the Pale Moon people. They have de-suckified Thunderbird the way they de-suckified Firefox.
Things you like about Thunderbird:
* Supports multiple email accounts -> YES
* Simple interface -> YES, better than Tbird in my opinion
* Storage structure is not one monolithic file -> YES
* Plain text email editor -> YES
* Filtering -> YES
Things you don't like:
* HTML email editor -> Don't use so I can't comment
* Folders are hard to change and re-arrange -> NO, I find it easy in FossaMail.
https://www.postbox-inc.com/
Its based on Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com
Way better than Thunderbird on pretty much every aspect.
I still use both Pine (actually its successor Alpine) and Lynx, on a 15000K broadband account. Eliminating needless decorative clutter is still useful.
Relevant to what I was just reading - http://pragmaticemacs.com/emac... More seriously, emacs runs on nearly every platform around, in some cases is natively installed, and has several VERY good email clients depending on your needs and workflow... mu4e as a search-based client, gnus for people who deal with lots of threaded and list-based emails, mew for the more traditional IMAP workflow... Extensible to nearly any purpose, each client is on it's own a best-in-class for a certain type of user.
You don't want to use outlook? Because every other thing you mentioned outlook is more than capable of doing. Yes, the stupid PST nonense is a nonstarter for some, but actually it's not that bad and if you understand powershell even a little, it's pretty easy to pull out what you want if you are talking restores. There's a plethora of email clients out there most of which do exactly what you want. A few slashdotters have already provided the ones I'd recommend. But don't ignore outlook just because it's a microsoft product.
If you are just looking for a better Thunderbird, no such thing exists, so you can forget about it. There are other clients which may or may not be better than Thunderbird but change (even to something objectively better) will come with trade-offs (you'll immediately lose support for Thunderbird extensions, for example).
That said, the most straight-forward suggestion here (and the one I suspect you will get other than jokes) is to use a web-based email system like gmail. It just works and requires 0 maintenance from your part.
Personally, I use Thunderbird, and will continue to use it until it starts falling apart. It works well enough, and I don't care about e-mail that much to try to change right now.
1) you don't need 16 years of email
I hate to admit this, but the mobile space, iOS and Android, is really where the attention is being paid where email apps are concerned. The desktop space has become dominated by free webmail monoliths like Gmail and Yahoo. The corporate/business space is dominated by Outlook and... Gmail, yup. Thunderbird was the only strong, independent email app I ever liked since Eudora become stupid years ago. But these days that entire desktop email space has been a vast wasteland. And yet, on mobile devices there is still so much development going on. Look at Outlook mobile (once an independent app called Accompli). The app is great, integrates with Gmail perfectly, and makes reading my work email on my mobile device almost a better experience than on my desktop.
The problem with Firefox isn't that there's change.
The problem with Firefox is that the changes are fucking idiotic. We aren't talking about one or two bad ones now and then. Far too many of the changes to Firefox are dumb, dumb, dumb!
Those are the kinds of changes that are unwanted, because they cause problems for users.
But users still want positive change.
They want bug fixes. They want performance improvements. They want support for new features and functionality that they desire.
This is another area where Firefox devs fuck up. They rarely make changes that the Firefox users actually want!
Firefox's approach to change is upside down. Firefox typically includes lots of unwanted changes, with very few wanted changes. That's what drives users away, sending Firefox's share of the market from the mid-30% range down to single-digits.
It should be the other way around. Firefox should include lots of wanted changes, and few to no unwanted changes. That would drive Firefox's share of the market up, as existing users would not leave, and new users would use it to get access to the new changes that they want to use.
I look over the shoulders of people thumbing thru their mail clients from time to time and it makes me glad to still be using (Al)pine. Make fun of me all you want I can find better things to do with my time than waste it needlessly farting around with mail clients. Computers are supposed to be tools for getting shit done not an end in itself.
Why do people constantly suggest a web console as a replacement to a native application? When you use gmail, the browser gets in the way, there is lag, you have to do things in an HTMLy way.... Web services are far more clumsy, and if I'm deaiing with hundreds of emails it's really nice to not have all those obstacles. Owning your emails is nice too.... my wife lost the last emails that her father sent to her because Microsoft decided she wasn't using her account enough.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I assume yo are on Windows since you talk of Outlook. Well, in the last 4 years, I tried and bought most of them. IMO, all the open source one developed on linux primarly look butt ugly on windows(GTK and all simply does not blend well with Windows Native UI) and are a pain to navigate. Plus, they do crash alot on that OS. I also bought and tried Mailbird Pro. For simple emails and social stuff it's good, the unified inbox work nicely but it uses alot of memory and doesn't support 10% of Thunderbird features that you can get through it's plugin system. They are also insanely slow to add requested feature like PGP or s/mime support.(even though they say they are working on it, they have nothing to show for it after 2 years now...) You can add "app" to it, but not sure if the API is public, I doubt it. I also acquired EmClient 6 2 years ago: Stable, fast, but outdated security(support SHA-1 certificate only), no support for PGP, no plugin system and always has trouble with Gmail sync every few months(probably due to changes on Google side) that requires an update to fix. Also very slow development. Version 7 should come out in 2016 when it was supposed to arrive in Q1 2015, but it looks like it will still be stuck with SHA-1 and no PGP. I hope I'm at least wrong about SHA. So, honestly, save money and stay with Thunderbird. It's not perfect, and the interface is dated(especially with no real unified inbox) but it's way more features rich than anything else commercial out there right now.
Claws Mail
http://www.claws-mail.org/
I too have thought about a replacement for Thunderbird if the bottom falls out. I do use multiple email clients throughout the day but at the end of my day when I get home, I use Thunderbird to download the emails (I use POP at home as I don't really need to look at those emails remotely) to store them locally. I do not like having my emails out there on the internet for long periods of time. I use Windows 10 but also dabble with Linux. I like the fact that I can take my Thunderbird folder with my emails and just copy them wholesale to another installation of Thunderbird and with minimal interaction on my part, have my email back the way it was. Outlook's PST's are almost as simple, Export to a PST file, copy it to a thumb drive and voila! A backup that I can then import to another Outlook installation. But they don't have Outlook in Linux (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure you guys will). If I used IMAP for all my email clients I could really care less. But having a 'physical' copy of my emails that is backed up offsite is something that drove me to using email clients to begin with, and Thunderbird since I like it's interface and capability of handling multiple email accounts.
Pretty sure Outlook does all the 'things you like' and will be supported for the next 16 years
You might want to check out Postbox. It's a commercial version of Thunderbird.
I used The Bat! many years ago and liked it. Haven't used it since, though.
Too bad; the predominant operating system is not supported.
I started looking for a new client when yahoo started asking for pw everytime I logged in even if the computer I am using never rebooted lol.
I found Zimbra Desktop https://www.zimbra.org/download/zimbra-desktop pretty easy to use and supports multi mailboxes.
Like the questioner, I want an email client, not a webmail service. This is partly, but not entirely, because I am often in situations where I can't get internet access. I used Outlook for years, but eventually changed to Thunderbird because it was better and open source. But when development stopped on it and there was no realistic hope that bugs would be fixed, I went shopping. After some false starts, I eventually settled on eM Client. It's kind of like Thunderbird, but better. It is not open source. It is not free. It is not perfect. But I decided that for a primary tool, I wanted something that would be fixed regularly by people working for a salary. The folks at eM Client actually listen to feature requests, although they don't always implement everything you ask for. I think there are several other similar commercial email products that would probably work as well. I like eM Client, but am not claiming it is better than other products I haven't tried. The email client as a category is fading away because many young people use GMail or some other webmail program. Fortunately there are a few decent email clients remaining for use old folks.
I might be open to webmail with GPG as long as I am in control of the server and it is locally stored. I think that would probably work well enough and not be too big a security issue if done right.
Thunderbird shares a lot of parts with Firefox. Since Firefox is rapidly developed, the Thunderbird people spend a lot of their time trying to keep up with the changes. A lot of those things may not be needed for an email client.
By splitting the project, Firefox can stop worrying about breaking Thunderbird and Thunderbird can focus on things they like to build.
The split may result in a more stable Thunderbird with a longer time between releases, resulting in less breakage with the addons and also more and more interesting features per release. Making encryption accessible would be at the top of my request list. It might be easier to obtain after a split.
Man, I freaking hate these "Ask Slashdot" questions that people give wonderfully unhelpful answers like, "use webmail", "use the built-in Microsoft client", and "no development, no problem!"
I have been trying to get rid of Thunderbird for a while now. Every time, instead of saying, "Oh, you should try this client", they come up with brilliant responses like the above. Webmail, seriously? The built-in MS client, really? Why do you need to change, really? Thunderbird is slow as a dog on Windows 8. Yeah, seeing as it's 2015, a text email client isn't an option. All of you who are still on text Linux - I salute you. Now utilize your brain the size of a planet to tell me what the graphical, performance-based, non-bloat email client of today is. Like the man asked.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Stop being a whining baby. Thunderbird does almost everything anyone would want. It might not be perfect, but what is? It doesn't need any further development, it is kind of "done". It doesn't need new features.
And I never had a problem rearranging folders... care to elaborate?
Simple, fast, flexible
Then if you need, do a ssh to a remove *nix machine and use mutt to quick read the email directly from the MH folders
Higuita
Bring Eudora back. It has been so widely used it is the clear archive format, even if a different codebase.
.. and here I was thinking of upgrading my daily driver.
Switching from Log to Pine!
The Browser is the new OS
Probably should be looking at pure Javascript or HTML5 mail clients with Cloud msg storage for a backend
Thunderbird isn't approaching end of life. If anything, it is about to open up. The TB developers were frustrated by having to maintain compatibility with Firefox technologies that don't really apply to TB. They, the developers, were the ones who suggested Mozilla let them go to another entity. This isn't about finding a replacement for a dieing Thunderbird, but for Thunderbird being able to chart its own direction free from Firefox influence.
This is a good thing, a very good thing!
If someone can point me to another open source mail client that allows me to inspect inbound mail, classify it and automatically file/destroy it I'll consider an alternative.
But not until then...
I have been using evolution for a number of years now. Mature, multi-account, plugins... Simple folder storage (compared to Outlook); portable with ~some~ work. Has a good migration utility for Thunderbird. IMO: much better with POP (if you can live with your mail on the client); mail interface much better than calendar; address book, etc
On Ubuntu my main issue was that it defaults [used to?] to the seahorse keyring, which was having problems (hard! to find support); solved after moving to gnome-keyring.
Has anyone else issues with searching thru messages?
Surprised no one has mentioned Eudora? Still using Eudora Pro 7.0.1.9 day to day for the last decade.
Works great for me. Does just what you need and not a bunch of M$ crud, cuteness, overhead, and lets you layout the screen the way you ( and not Bill ) wants it to look like.
Email was designed around plain text. This is fine with me. But many others think HTML mail is somehow more useful. Maybe because their ads are more shiny, I don't know. But the end result is that a lot of senders use HTML email, and not all can be blocked. Your bank might be sending HTML (mine is) and not getting bank statements might be a problem.
Therefore HTML should be dealt with. I would be very ok with having my mail client presenting a text version of the HTML without all the pretty pictures and tracking pixels, but hey, I'm just an old fart.
I'll be using Claws from now on.
Honestly, why would anyone need to keep 16 year old emails? That sounds like hoarding behavior.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
If it looks like an Ask Slashdot post and it sounds like an Ask Slashdot post and smells like an Ask Slashdot post . . . then Timothy will probably not manage to post it in the Ask Slashdot section or in this case even identify it as such..
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Long in the tooth??
WTF is that supposed to be?
You mean mature, right?
And Thunderbird will most likely never be "discontinued". The moment Mozilla abandons it (simply splitting it off is way more likely) there will be an alternative project with the identical codebase up and running. Faster than you can say "Clone on GitHub".
When it comes to FOSS GUI Mailclients, Thunderbird is just about the best there is.
Stick with Thunderbird. Better yet, join the project and help them out. It doesn't have to be coding. Simply advocating, helping out in the forums or maintaining the project website can be help too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
To think thunderbird will die is just stupid. Somebody will adopt it or you can just use seamonkey mail, which is basically the same. Look at kompozer, nvu, ... how ever the mozilla composer is currently called, opensouce does not die, there is always someone to adopt it.
FossaMail? Basically a fork of thunderbird. But given the fact that it's the same developer as Palemoon, it should be a suitable replacement that's easy to migrate to.
Have a look at mutt with offlineimap and notmuch.
You can use lynx to dump HTML into text for reading message from the miserable people that use HTML email as a built-in.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
My recommendation is Claws-Mail. Not only is it fast and simple to use, but is stable and feature-packed as well as being free, open-source, and multiplatform. http://www.claws-mail.org/
I run Windows. I've used Pegasus Mail since DOS days (internet and Netware 2.15) and still do. Searching is via grep. But Pegasus, as much as I like its simplicity, is also getting long in the tooth.
I used Eudora some, and supported others with it. Qualcomm, after several attempts to make it financially practical, finally gave it up. They recommended Thunderbird ... and we know where this thread started ....
I'd like a newer free or low cost 99% text based client ... the 1% is to view emails containing HTML. I have 3 active POP3 accounts from which I read mail on multiple Windows and Android devices ... and normally delete only via webmail. I want convenient attachment addition and saving. Viewing pdf and jpg would be nice.
What is out there? Google returns Mailbird, em, windows live, zimbra, inky, lookout, thunderbird, opera, metromail, and incredimail (YUCH) as options ...
I'd also like recomendations.
Vivaldi is getting M3 soon.
I liked Sylpheed when I was looking for a lightweight client back in the day. Now... Firefox is my Gmail client, and Gmail is my POP3 client. You might be able to upload your archives into there via IMAP somehow.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
and use Mail.app
Never had a Mail program that suited my needs more ... when I have to use Outlook I always have my pills against travel sickness at hand. I'm always close to vomit using it.
About Thunderbird, I'm simlly sad they never figured how a Mail browser should look like.
I liked my old Netscape (3.0?) mail client, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I finally bit the bullet and switched from Eudora to Thunderbird this year, because everybody's post-Snowden improvements to their crypto meant that Eudora no longer could make an SSL connection to my main ISPs' mail servers. Thunderbird had the advantage that it could read Eudora's mailboxes, which were in basically traditional Unix mail format for most things, as well as the various address books and such. Now I've got to find something else.
(My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac - with dialup modem, it's still good enough :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Things I like about Thunderbird: Supports multiple email accounts; simple interface; storage structure is not one monolithic file; plain text email editor; filtering.
So, Gmail ;)
WTF? Thunderbird uses a non-standard extension of mbox mail format, which is one monolithic file per folder. That simply doesn't scale for multiple GBs of email per folder.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
For a simple and clean UI try Geary.
Otherwise try ClawMail.
Apple's Mail is a delightful replacement for Thunderbird. I left Thunderbird in 2004? I think. Started running the default mail app in OS X, and although I have a few small complaints, I'm generally happy. Happier mail-wise than before I stopped using Thunderbird.
Back when I ran a large website and replied to 300+ emails a day, I used mh under emacs, but that's not really for everyone.
Years ago, I really tried to use desktop email clients. I'd try whatever the latest Netscape/Firefox folks cobbled together from their 20-year-old code base. Then I'd try Eudora again. Then a dozen proprietary clients, even the old Outlook Express before MSFT killed it. Occasionally I'd revisit tkRat and another two dozen Unix apps from Elm to Pine to Mutt and Evolution and Emacs VM and even Emacs Rmail.
And then it dawned on me that no matter how perfect I could get my email experience to be on the desktop, I still could not access my email from everywhere. I moved all of my email online and I never looked back.
It hasn't been rosy lately. SquirrelMail has been badly neglected for years so better things are available out there. I'd like to use Amazon Workmail if it didn't cost $4 per user per month.
I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but please consider the universe of webmail.
Kriston
At some point I got onto Postbox, which itself has gone through some development cycles.
It struggles somewhat with plugins, but I find if you mate a Google Business account (or gmail) with it then the Calendaring requirements are automatically taken care of.
Every time I set up Thunderbird for someone, I appreciate how clean the Postbox UI is.
What about N1? You should run the client and the API Server locally to have full "control", but the project it's interesting though.
https://nylas.com/N1/
There's a commercial product called postbox. I don't use it, but I tried it a year ago and it seems to give a similar experience to thunderbird with a bit more polish https://www.postbox-inc.com/
It's my choice
For folders + their navigation, you can use my addon QuickFolders; it added several productivity enhancements, such as Tabs for folders, mouseless navigation (jump to or move mail to by entering folder name), bookmarks to emails (reading list) that make it very easy to navigate the folder tree.
In my own experience, traversing the folder tree was wasting too much of my time, with QuickFolders you can completely omit that. I have about 400 folders and I do almost never use the tree; especially not for categorizing / filing emails or navigating through my folders; this can be done exclusively with QuickFolders.
Having to use Outlook at work I really experience finding and navigating Emails is a lot slower and more cumbersome there than on my Thunderbird.
Another addon I have written is an assistant for generating new mail filters (outlook calls them rules) - with quickFilters this greatly simplified.
Finally there are some good addons out there for making it easier to do standard replies to emails; check out Stationery and SmartTemplate4 for this.
I think Thunderbird's weak point is in fact the composer, which is a pity because it can display 100% standards compatible CSS3. Due to using Mozilla's superior Gecko engine Thunderbird is very well suited for handling html emails, but the feature set of Thunderbird Composer (which comes from the mozilla central build so it basically a firefox feature) is sadly lacking a lot of features.
I am hoping that there will be some ground breaking improvements in the next 2 years, if not I will start writing some addons for addressing this gap.
$SUBJECT says all, really.
AC wrote: "We've lost the arms race for content over presentation in this medium. Pages with perhaps a kilobyte of text take over a megabyte to download and 10 seconds to render. Firefox is mortally wounded. Safari and Opera are hobbled. Chrome is a trojan horse. Guys, I think the Gopher people were right."
This is a very insightful AC post. That is a big part part of why for the last week (since hearing about the Thunderbird uncertainty) as a sprint, I've been working towards a webapp / server called Twirlip as a proof-of-concept for a server version of Thunderbird. The idea is to support the same functionality as Thunderbird (and more) but use standard Firefox as the client loading a Thunderbird-like webapp from a local Node.js server. The project repository is currently here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
The sprint is not "blessed" by Mozilla or the Thunderbird Council at the moment. It is just my own take on things and to demonstrate what is possible. And given I just blew all our cash/credit writing another FOSS project (NarraFirma, a webapp in TypeScript/Mithril/D3 with Node.js and WordPress backends) over the past year or so, financially, this is so stupid for me to be doing right now instead of finding a paying job. :-)
That said, the leader of the Thunderbird Council (Kent James) suggested in September considering making Thunderbird into a webapp, so the idea is not completely new, or presumably unwelcome as a proof-of-concept demo:
"Future Planning: Thunderbird as a Web App"
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...
"As we are discussing our future, both in relation to radical changes expected in the Mozilla platform, and our need to express where we are going to potential partners and donors, we need to discuss and agree on some big-picture issues. One of those was end-to-end encryption that we discussed recently. I want to discuss here our future platform, and how it related to users and their needs.
tl;dr Thunderbird over the next 3 years needs to convert to being a web app that can run on any browser that supports ES6 Javascript and HTML5. (web app does not imply cloud-based, only that the underlying platform is js/html)."
Here is an update on my last week's progress sent to the Thunderbird Planning list.
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...
I've used Thunderbird for over a decade, and have a million messages in it totaling over 15 GB (mainly from a bunch of mailing lists). I know of others who have 50 GB in it. So, I'm obviously concerned about its future.
All that said, there is no immediate reason to panic. Thunderbird still works well for what it does.
In looking into this issue though, maintaining Thunderbird is apparently difficult though because the codebase includes a copy of Firefox, which bloats the source code by 20X or more up to about a gigabyte of mostly C++.Any security patch to Firefox needs to be evaluated and then likely integrated into Thunderbird to keep it secure. That may be the biggest issue -- and it is worse now that Mozilla has essentially defunded Thunderbird over the last few years to make it a "community" project, so synergy has been lost with the Firefox development team. (SeaMonkey, formerly the Mozilla application suite, is in the same boat and uses essentially the same codebase.) Thunderbird itself also has a lot of XUL to define UI functionality, but Mozilla has deprecated XUL (not reasonably, but there are consequences) creating an obvious future maintenance issue of sizable proportions. Thunderbird plugins likewise are written with XUL. So, while Thunderbird can be maintained, given that codebase and the size and the need to closely track Firefox, maintenance is hard and probably not a lot of fun (given the C++ and XUL) as a legacy thing.
As others have said, this i
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Looks like you're getting the usual non-answers. Here's my recommendation: Forte' Agent. It is THE best mail and newsreader, period. It's a windoze program but they've intentionally kept it WINE compatible for us Linux users. No, it's neither free nor open source. It's the only piece of non-FOSS software my Open-Source-dedicated company uses.
I've very reluctantly switched to Thunderbird for the sole reason that we need GPG encryption and signing for the business. It's a miserable POS in comparison. I still use Agent for non-encrypted channels.
J
Oh Slashdot--as usual, 318 comments and not one helpful comment--coupled with obvious useless suggestions ("webmail!" "mutt!" "pine!"). *Anyway*, Evolution or KMail. I haven't tried them in years, but may be good. Outlook is fantastic. I don't use it, but have seen the new one enough to love the UX. However, it has serious problems with IMAP--5% of emails don't go through. Mileage may vary. I always loved Pine, but it's 2015. It's not a realistic suggestion.
This seems to be a good email client. Has anyone tried it?
I've used Thunderbird since forever as well. I gave up on it a few years ago with its lack of support for searching through multiple address books.
Em client may cost a few dollars but it is a great stand alone program that connects the way an email program should to your different servers.
Em client all the way
Just switched to Mailbird from Outlook 2010. Works well, nice design.
hey!
i'm not too techy but love good computer tools..........
i've been using web based gmail, (and most other associated google products) for years.
i'm running ubuntu 15.10 and have just connected to it's native mail, calendar, contacts manager etc. to my google account.
having used it for only a few minutes, it seems fantastic.
anyone else?
http://trojita.flaska.net/ - IMAP-only, QT-based client, seems very promising. Early stage but stable. Unfortunately lacks GPG support (at least last time I checked).
-- mg
If someone liked Thunderbird, they'd love PostBox. It's based on Thunderbird, from a former Thunderbird lead engineer, and it's only $10. I've been using it for several years now and have never been dissatisfied. Way better UI, actively supported and updated/upgraded regularly.
It really makes one wonder why Mozilla can't figure out how to improve Thunderbird further when these guys have had no problem doing exactly that.
Check it out: www.postbox-inc.com
I'm also looking for a replacement for Thunderbird. For me, conversation view is a desired feature. Geary was a good option, but it is no longer maintained since Yorba team is ended. Fortunately, I found a new e-mail client that looks promising: Nylas N1. It has conversation view, it's easily configurable and it's open source. Currently it lacks a proper addressbook, but it's still in development. You should take a look: https://nylas.com/N1/
I have been using kmail for the last 15 years. At times, bugs in kmail have been trying my patience with it, and I have attempted to move to another MUA. Mostly I have tried Thuderbird, but others have been attempted from time to time. I have always found the regular features of other mailers to be much more irritating than the bugs in kmail, so every time, I have gone back to kmail within a few days.
I am using 'gnus since last couple of years. It would suit your requirements. 1. You can configure multiple accounts 2. Use it with offlineimap and dovecot, since you have huge archive of mails.
emClient is pretty nice. http://www.emclient.com/