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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.
The last time I used pine was 20 years ago. Those were the days. A 56K dial-up account on a UNIX server to browse the Internet in a text-based web browser called Lynx. The Internet was blazingly fast back then. No need to wait for Flash content, every social media icon, and the kitchen sink to load.
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/
I still use both Pine (actually its successor Alpine) and Lynx, on a 15000K broadband account. Eliminating needless decorative clutter is still useful.
E-mail clients really don't have much to add. If one wants a one-size-fits-all client for everything, there is always SeaMonkey, which does everything Thunderbird does, as well as brings a NNTP reader, browser, and HTML editor to the table.
I have looked at a lot of E-mail clients: I went with Thunderbird for a number of reasons (a number of them subjective.)
1: Multiplatform capability. When my Windows desktop died and I had to repurpose my MBP, all I had to do was copy a backup of my Thunderbird directory to the proper spot on OS X, and all my settings, mailboxes, and other stuff was in place. If I jump to Linux or back to Windows, I just copy the profile into place, and done.
2: A standard, text file format for storing mailboxes. mbox format may be old hat, but it does work, and if it gets corrupted, isn't too tough to fix by hand. I used to use Outlook .PST mailboxes because they offered encryption, but after corruption took out a mailbox, once I restore it from a backup, I jumped clients.
3: Webmail is OK, but it means that I have to go to each provider's site, log in, dig up the TKIP app or wait for the SMS message (I use 2FA on all accounts I can), browse the account, then log out. With a good MUA, all my E-mail from all accounts is in one place.
4: It is easy to archive mail. I select a folder, hit "archive", and all the mail that piled up in a mailbox gets moved to my IMAP server.
5: Searches are pretty quick. I can sit for a while waiting for another popular MUA to return results, while Thunderbird, once it builds its local caches, can get me an E-mail pretty quickly, regardless of location.
6: There are a lot of extensions available. AdBlock, and folder copy come to mind.
7: MUAs are not general web browsers, and they tend to be far more secure than web browsers for the task at hand.
All and all, I don't see how one can add any major new features to Thunderbird, other than a tool that can automatically back up the Thunderbird profile to a target destination, similar to how FEBE works for Firefox. Bonus points for compression, deduplication, and encryption [1].
[1]: The ideal with encryption would be similar to how Titanium Backup works. It generates a RSA key, stores the key pair on each backup volume, password protects (well, encrypts) the private key, and uses the public key for encrypting the backups (well, uses the public key to protect a symmetric key on each backup.) The result is that backups can be done unattended, restorations is easy with the password, and existing backups are kept secure.
OP said s/he has "an archive of sixteen years of email". I take this to mean an offline archive, probably from POP3 servers, that are best handled as a hot backup that can be accessed and searched. You can import mail and contacts into Windows Live Mail in a variety of formats, at least one of which should be exportable by Thunderbird.
It's not easy to find a replacement for Thunderbird that's got feature parity. Windows Live Mail has way more features than one would have expected for an Outlook Express successor but it's actually a very good client. My recommendation was based on OP's vague requirements.
Second the recommendation for Claws Mail. If I leave my Thunderbird open and exercise it for several days it grows to 6 GB RAM use and beyond. There does not appear to be any way to set an upper bound. That is unacceptable, inexcusable, and an incompetent and moronic design. Watch your PC get driven into thrashing the page file and I guarantee you will know what rage is. For a while I thought I could run with no swap (I have 16 GB RAM), but behavior is even more pathological and irrecoverable when you run into the memory wall with no paging.
I have seen Claws Mail grow to around 0.4 GB; no more - even if left open and exercised INDEFINITELY.
There are some huge, commanding wins for Claws Mail over and above the RAM win clincher:
1) Threaded view, easily/quickly toggled on/off.
2) View shows headers in line; I happen to prefer that to a second scrolling pane.
3) I found the accounts setup to be more rational and well organized than it is in TB. I have a LOT of accounts set up.
There are a few negatives with Claws Mail:
1) No HTML support beyond a hokey plugin. Idiots do send me HTML mail. You can't stop them; I've tried.
2) No Unified Inbox.
3) Seems really slow to sync hotmail and gmail.
4) I found the PGP plugin harder to set up than Enigmail in TB.
5) The accounts setup does not have the cool auto-detect you get in TB. Even if you fine tune the setup, the auto-detect is great for getting you going.