Thunderbird has one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever seen. It takes seconds to delete an email from my inbox, the UI thread hangs all the time, if I click on a notification, it makes a black window because the filter moved the email while the notification was up and they didn’t track it by its ID or some basic mistake like that. Every update the UI gets clunkier and slower. Searching has a weird UI and fails to find matches. I could go on and on, there are so many UX issues with this worthless software. I have no idea what’s going on over at Mozilla. I think the org just needs to be burned to the ground.
I use it as my daily driver for now, but I feel like I’m on a sinking ship surrounded by nothing but ocean.
I use K-9 on Android and it’s fine… the idea of transforming it into Thunderbird blows my mind.
Yep, same boat. 100k+ emails, lots of filters, etc., it just works honestly. Thunderbird has only gotten better for me since Mozilla stopped supporting them.
Out of curiosity, are you using POP or IMAP? I imagine the performance characteristics would be very different, given their different network patterns.
I run Dovecot as an IMAP server on a Thinkpad which was first sold in 2010 with an SSD in it. I keep thinking I should change the hardware but it just keeps trucking & draws less than 10W so it never seems worth the effort.
It’s stuck behind a 100Mbit ethernet connection (for power saving reasons) which is roughly equivalent to my Internet connection but the latency is probably lower than it would be to an IMAP server on the wider Internet.
Having exclusive use of all that SSD bandwidth probably helps too of course.
I use K-9 on Android and it’s fine… the idea of transforming it into Thunderbird blows my mind.
Branding is a powerful concept. You think Outlook on iOS or Android shares anything with the desktop app? Nope, it’s also a rebranded M&A. It is kind of funny the same happened with Thunderbird.
Which leads to funny things where Outlook for mobile gets features before the desktop version (unified inbox and being able to see the sender’s email address as well as their name come to mind).
I don’t have it in front of me to double check but yeah the message UI is weird. It shows their name and if you hover over it then it pops up a little contact card that also doesn’t show the actual email address. IIRC hitting reply helps because it’s visible in the compose email UI.
I use K-9 on Android and it’s fine… the idea of transforming it into Thunderbird blows my mind.
i thought the idea in Mozilla’s head would be more like “okay we have this really good base for an email app (k-9), lets support it, and add our branding to it and ship it as Thunderbird “
Thunderbird does a lot of disk I/O on the main thread. On most platforms, this responds in, at most, one disk seek time (<10ms even for spinning rust, much less for SSDs, even less for things in the disk cache) so typically doesn’t hurt responsiveness. On Windows, Window Defender will intercept these things and scan them, which can add hundreds of milliseconds or even seconds of latency, depending on the size of the file.
This got better when Thunderbird moved from mbox to Maildir by default, but I don’t think it migrates automatically. If you have a 1 GB mbox file, Windows Defender will scan the whole thing before letting Thunderbird read on 1 KiB email from it. This caused pause times of 20-30 seconds in common operations. With Maildir, it will just scan individual emails. This can still be slow for things with big attachments, but it rarely causes stutters of more than a second.
Thunderbird was originally a refactoring of Mozilla Mail and News into a stand-alone app. Mozilla Mail and Newsgroups was the open-source version of Netscape Mail and Newsgroups (both ran in the same process as the browser, so a browser crash took out your mail app, and browser crashes happened a few times a day back then). Netscape Mail and Newsgroups was released in 1995.
It ran on Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Classic MacOS, and a handful of *NIX systems. Threading models were not present on all of them, and did not have the same semantics on the ones that did. Doing I/O on the UI thread wasn’t a thing, doing I/O and UI work on the one thread in the program was.
It’s been refactored a lot since those days, but there’s still a lot of legacy code. Next year, the codebase will be 30 years old.
I really agree. I’m a big fan of K-9 Mail and hearing that Thunderbird was taking it over did not sound like good news at all.
I’ll disagree with one of your points though – deleting an email happens instantly and usually by accident. Hitting undo and waiting for there to be any sign in the UI that it heard you, now that takes forever.
With Thunderbird’s remit spanning email, calendar, contacts and tasks my biggest hope for the future is that we can have a MUA for Android that is able to create and handle iCalendar messages. Why is that exciting? Well it decouples calendar/tasks from your email service, just like on desktop. You could use third-party CalDAV or self-host… or even better you could use the DecSync/SyncThing ecosystem to have a calendar that syncs directly between your mobile/desktop/laptop without any internet server. To be practical you need that tight integration between the mail and calendar parts of the client, and most people will want it on their phone as well as their desktop.
It makes me sad that every Android calendar tool I’ve found that supports non-Google calendar sources is always CalDAV, not just “export to/import from an iCalendar file in a place that SyncThing can see it”.
Thunderbird has one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever seen. It takes seconds to delete an email from my inbox, the UI thread hangs all the time, if I click on a notification, it makes a black window because the filter moved the email while the notification was up and they didn’t track it by its ID or some basic mistake like that. Every update the UI gets clunkier and slower. Searching has a weird UI and fails to find matches. I could go on and on, there are so many UX issues with this worthless software. I have no idea what’s going on over at Mozilla. I think the org just needs to be burned to the ground.
I use it as my daily driver for now, but I feel like I’m on a sinking ship surrounded by nothing but ocean.
I use K-9 on Android and it’s fine… the idea of transforming it into Thunderbird blows my mind.
I have an inbox with > 20k emails in it & deletions happen instantly in Thunderbird.
Likewise dialog boxes appear & disappear instantaneously.
Are you sure there isn’t something up with your system?
Yep, same boat. 100k+ emails, lots of filters, etc., it just works honestly. Thunderbird has only gotten better for me since Mozilla stopped supporting them.
Also for me. 157k mails, everything feels snappy.
I like it significantly better than any web client too, as those are usually pretty laggy.
OP, could it be slow hardware or no compaction?
Out of curiosity, are you using POP or IMAP? I imagine the performance characteristics would be very different, given their different network patterns.
IMAP.
I run Dovecot as an IMAP server on a Thinkpad which was first sold in 2010 with an SSD in it. I keep thinking I should change the hardware but it just keeps trucking & draws less than 10W so it never seems worth the effort.
Ah, IMAP, but on the local network? That’s likely to be much faster than IMAP over the internet, which I think is a very common use case.
It’s stuck behind a 100Mbit ethernet connection (for power saving reasons) which is roughly equivalent to my Internet connection but the latency is probably lower than it would be to an IMAP server on the wider Internet.
Having exclusive use of all that SSD bandwidth probably helps too of course.
Branding is a powerful concept. You think Outlook on iOS or Android shares anything with the desktop app? Nope, it’s also a rebranded M&A. It is kind of funny the same happened with Thunderbird.
Which leads to funny things where Outlook for mobile gets features before the desktop version (unified inbox and being able to see the sender’s email address as well as their name come to mind).
Wait what?
Be thankful if you’ve never had to use desktop Outlook…
I don’t have it in front of me to double check but yeah the message UI is weird. It shows their name and if you hover over it then it pops up a little contact card that also doesn’t show the actual email address. IIRC hitting reply helps because it’s visible in the compose email UI.
i thought the idea in Mozilla’s head would be more like “okay we have this really good base for an email app (k-9), lets support it, and add our branding to it and ship it as Thunderbird “
I think it’s more like “K-9, now known as Thunderbird”
Are you on Windows, by any chance?
Thunderbird does a lot of disk I/O on the main thread. On most platforms, this responds in, at most, one disk seek time (<10ms even for spinning rust, much less for SSDs, even less for things in the disk cache) so typically doesn’t hurt responsiveness. On Windows, Window Defender will intercept these things and scan them, which can add hundreds of milliseconds or even seconds of latency, depending on the size of the file.
This got better when Thunderbird moved from mbox to Maildir by default, but I don’t think it migrates automatically. If you have a 1 GB mbox file, Windows Defender will scan the whole thing before letting Thunderbird read on 1 KiB email from it. This caused pause times of 20-30 seconds in common operations. With Maildir, it will just scan individual emails. This can still be slow for things with big attachments, but it rarely causes stutters of more than a second.
It happens on any platform as long as you have enough mail. IDK why we still have GUI apps in $CURRENTYEAR doing work on the UI thread.
Thunderbird was originally a refactoring of Mozilla Mail and News into a stand-alone app. Mozilla Mail and Newsgroups was the open-source version of Netscape Mail and Newsgroups (both ran in the same process as the browser, so a browser crash took out your mail app, and browser crashes happened a few times a day back then). Netscape Mail and Newsgroups was released in 1995.
It ran on Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Classic MacOS, and a handful of *NIX systems. Threading models were not present on all of them, and did not have the same semantics on the ones that did. Doing I/O on the UI thread wasn’t a thing, doing I/O and UI work on the one thread in the program was.
It’s been refactored a lot since those days, but there’s still a lot of legacy code. Next year, the codebase will be 30 years old.
No, I’m on KDE. I also experienced this behavior on XFCE.
I really agree. I’m a big fan of K-9 Mail and hearing that Thunderbird was taking it over did not sound like good news at all.
I’ll disagree with one of your points though – deleting an email happens instantly and usually by accident. Hitting undo and waiting for there to be any sign in the UI that it heard you, now that takes forever.
With Thunderbird’s remit spanning email, calendar, contacts and tasks my biggest hope for the future is that we can have a MUA for Android that is able to create and handle iCalendar messages. Why is that exciting? Well it decouples calendar/tasks from your email service, just like on desktop. You could use third-party CalDAV or self-host… or even better you could use the DecSync/SyncThing ecosystem to have a calendar that syncs directly between your mobile/desktop/laptop without any internet server. To be practical you need that tight integration between the mail and calendar parts of the client, and most people will want it on their phone as well as their desktop.
It makes me sad that every Android calendar tool I’ve found that supports non-Google calendar sources is always CalDAV, not just “export to/import from an iCalendar file in a place that SyncThing can see it”.
Is this what you are looking for: https://icsx5.bitfire.at/ ? It is one-way though (read-only).
Maybe we should write a CalDAV version of this: https://github.com/lvkv/whenfs
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