Thunderbird's Quality [LWN.net]

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 13:47 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Thunderbird's Quality by PastyAndroid
Parent article: Thunderbird plans "Thundermail" email and other services

Yeah, I found Thunderbird was getting way too heavy for my liking. I tried mutt, but never really got comfortable with it. I do like a GUI email client, so I settled on Claws Mail which for me is just the right combo of graphical with nice features, yet lightweight enough that it doesn't feel sluggish.

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Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 14:46 UTC (Thu) by audric (guest, #86999) [Link] (3 responses)

It's been a while since I've used Claws Mail. Is it still single-threaded which makes the UI irresponsive when there are large synchronization operations going on?

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 14:48 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

It is. I really like Claws for the most part, but it being single-threaded and not allowing, say, users to open multiple folders in different windows is a non-starter for me.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 16:25 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, Claws does suffer from occasional UI freezes. Most of the time, for me, it's not too bad because my IMAP server is on my LAN, so I have a 1GB connection to the server and sync operations happen fairly quickly.

But I've used it long enough that all the keyboard shortcuts are in my muscle memory, so I live with that.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 16:25 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Ugh, 1Gb/s Ethernet connection, I meant to say.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 4, 2025 23:49 UTC (Fri) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link]

I've bounced between most of the 'big' email clients available for GNU/Linux. I used seamonkey/thunderbird for a number of years on GNOME 2, they were good but even then had odd bugs. After GNOME 3 hit and I had to migrate to XFCE, I also used the time to switch to claws and in fairness, claws was good and worked very well. I do wonder how much it has changed since then, but I do remember it "just works" (or did at that time.).

I also used gnome's evolution for a while (on XFCE), it was actually a really good solution for when you want all the features built in, such as contact sync, calender sync, etc. I continued to use that after claws right up until I switched to KDE around 2022 or so, since I didn't really encounter any significant bugs.

I didn't want the gnome dependencies within my KDE setup so I switched over to Kmail which seemed like the natural replacement. It worked mostly, but it also had peculiar issues where it would lose the synced contacts / events and sometimes even emails themselves if you use filters or move mail between folders (the emails were simply gone, no longer on the server nor stored locally.).

I tried out thunderbird again... and.. I basically noped out of that.

I eventually got fed up of dealing with all the GUI clients and their oddities along with all the other syncing. I decided to try out mutt/neomutt. Granted, it has nowhere near as many fancy features but it does "just work" and as yet it hasn't failed to do anything I told it to do or lost anything.

It just brings peace of mind and a lot less frustration. :-)

Or maybe I'm just getting too old for that software, lol.