Rebirth of the email client

I was relieved by the "rebirth" of thunderbird, because I percieved it as the rebirth of the email client as a concept. The very idea that you can access all your mail "aggregating" it in a single program, no matter how many email addresses you need to watch from how many providers. The alternative is typically a website with a web-mail interface for every single provider, with its own notifications on, the inconsistency in the interfaces of the multiple web-mail codes, etc.

IMHO, there are two threats that could rapidly lead to the redeath, though, and both are serious.

The first one is on the side of the email client itself. The mass of archived email is constantly growing and Gmail has taught everybody never to delete email. Email clients must remain fast and *practical* enough even where the folders are huge. Thunderbird currently fails on the practicality side. When you search email, the message list view often starts "jumping" all around (see https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/176y7z8/kee... or https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1827042 or https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860875). On the speed side, it is a bit on the boundary (still on the good side, because web-mail interfaces are slow themselves).

The second and more serious one is on the providers' side. In many cases they have stopped serving IMAP altogether. For instance, schools in Italy provide an email address to students used for parents to receive communications from the school, but you can only access that from the provider web mail interface (often gmail). This was already discussed on lwn. While the matter involves many aspects, most of it has ultimately to do with "what email is". Apparently, many institutions/companies, etc would like email to be "revokable" and to be able to "remove" what you have already received. This is clearly diverging from the original concept of email as the electronic counterpart of physical mail. Clearly, anything that helps local email storage is undesired in this model, in which there is no space for thunderbird or any other email client.