Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become.
I'm actually not sure about this, Thunderbird to me seems like it's pretty good: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
The only bloat that i can think of is the calendar functionality that i simply don't care about, but that's easy enough to get out of the way. Maybe one could also have gripes with the account administration section, though that's not necessarily touched in the daily usage.
Apart from that, it does everything i need, in the simplest way possible and is as boring as it is usable. Contrasted with lots of the modern day software, i'd instead put it into the category of "workhorse" software, where LibreOffice, GIMP, KeePass, Notepad++, SourceTree/Git Cola and others live - dependable pieces of software that do what i need without many breaking changes and all that many bells and whistles. The kind that you install and forget about, maybe updating them once every few years if at all needed.
Calendar invitations are .ics files that any calendar client can consume, it’s a different remote protocol underneath too (caldav)
I'm using it as daily driver and wouldn't switch to webmail nor Thunderbird or Evolution.
As far as Evolution goes, I don't see myself moving away from it for now. I can't afford to have reminders not showing up, or have my calendar not syncing for half a business day because something has gone wrong. Evolution is the only program that I've tried that gets both of these right, and I've tried many, many applications both native and Electron-based.
Don't get me wrong, I'd switch in a heartbeat if I discovered a superior solution. But as-is, the few issues are found, aren't enough of a motivation to switch. A few cosmetic/UX glitches and nice-to-have missing features (highlighting background entries with their category's colour, busy/free/out-of-office setting on meetings) are tolerable when the alternatives are so, SO much worse.
But those issues are solved today (and since a long time by now).
I don't know whether Kontact could be considered substantially better than Evolution. But it works fine and has a lot of features not found elsewhere. It's also quite focused on power-users I would say. For example you have configurable one-keystroke commands for all important functionality (and being a KDE application you can configure shortcuts for actually every action if you like to). It handles big inboxes in different accounts (being capable of showing an unified inbox if desired) and independently of that multiple identities. The calendar and mail components handle Exchange idiosyncrasies. The GPG stuff just works.
For people looking for a true Outlook alternative on Linux it's at least one of the things worth trying. That's why I've mentioned it.
I'll repent later.
Here's a test to run on Gmail web client: Mark an email unread or do anything that changes state. Now click the email, as to read it, and then close your browser. It will not let you because it's still "lagging" in the background for you. It's dreadful.
What about downloading 70 MB of compressed binary code for Thunderbird?
> Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become.
I don't see how does it differ from traditional e-mail clients, except that you don't have to install, configure and allow unlimited access to your computer.
I value my time more than I value my data, I guess.
Of course, that's not the use case of most people, but that's also one that shouldn't be dismissed entirely - for people who don't trust the modern web in any capacity, local system software is indeed a better choice.
The quick filter finds messages in seconds in a folder with > 10000 mails. Not instantaneous, but not forever.
The global search is instantaneous because Thunderbird indexes the mails.
Not having to rely on the Internet to find your stuff is a feature, not a bug.
Snark aside, I sometimes feel like we reinvent the wheel using new technologies just because we like the new hotness.
I see the OS battles take place and my only thought is..at work, I want an OS that: Boots and then gets the hell out of my way so I can do my work. I don't want it to try and sell me things or re-arrange things or have to spend time tinkering or fixing it.
Now in my free time, sure! I set up a computer with pass thorough GPU so I can game in Windows while running Linux. It was fun and a learning experience.
The problem is mail servers. They usually don't support search this way, so the client has to download or cache each message to do the search. Gmail gets around this by having their own protocol and the indexes ready.
Full-text indexing isn't dark magic at all.
Also most of it will be likely some bloat form HTML mail and attachments (especially with their inefficient encodings).
My point was: Handling full-text search indices over even dozens of GB of plain text isn't anything a mediocre computer couldn't handle nowadays.
You do it only once, do not risk having to do it when being on a metered or spotty connection because your cache is not warm or the webmail got yet another update, which can happen at any time. You can apply Thunderbird updates when you are on a good connection.
You can access your mails offline, you don't re-download them each time you open them. It's faster, even on a good connection.
> configure
The configuration part for most providers is essentially typing one's email address and password, so there is not much to say.
> allow unlimited access to your computer
That is why I am reluctant to run non-free software, but Thunderbird is free, I can reasonably trust it. Especially the version packaged by my OS vendor. I agree a better isolation for native desktop apps may be desirable though.
I just checked and my second gmail login downloaded 500 KB before it became usable. Browser allows for caching of downloaded code.
> do not risk having to do it when being on a metered or spotty connection because your cache is not warm or the webmail got yet another update, which can happen at any time. You can apply Thunderbird updates when you are on a good connection.
I agree with your point. I think that it's possible to implement a separate update for web apps with explicit request, but it's rarely done and unusual for web.
> You can access your mails offline, you don't re-download them each time you open them. It's faster, even on a good connection.
Web browser allows for local storage and offline work which could be utilized for those features. You can enable offline mode in Gmail. I just checked, it works.
Sure, but tomorrow? This afternoon?
500 KB is 1-2 seconds on the connection I'm currently using (not at home right know). It's 4-5 seconds on the train to get there… in the sections were connectivity is available. 500 KB is huge. That's 1% of my previous monthly mobile data plan.
I think we should revisit our idea of what amount of data is fine to do anything on the web today. Data transfer is not free, it needs infrastructure and electricity.
500 KB should be the amount of data to download for getting the full web application with cold caches, tops. Can you imagine the number of instructions you can fit in 500 KB of code, especially high level? I can't.
> Web browser allows for local storage and offline work which could be utilized for those features. You can enable offline mode in Gmail. I just checked, it works.
I guess, but I don't trust this. And as a web developer, I am well aware that local storage is limited in size and there is no way my gigabytes of mails are going to fit.
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/151823/how-to-se...
Compare to the mutt package, a fully features mail client, weighting in at ~1.8 MiB — without the need for an additional gigantic runtime.
I'm not saying mutt is an alternative to GMail for most people. But just to give some feeling for the size relations here.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
Don't get me wrong, I use webmail all the time with protonmail, Gmail, outlook and purelymail, because it abstracts installation and updates, but your argument doesn't seem to be valid.
Most people are using Google's client in some form (Chromium), so they do pretty much have unlimited access to your computer, unless you use Firefox or Safari. Most people are logged into the browser itself, so it's even worse. With Thunderbird you aren't linking every single thing you do online to your email account.
(Or at least, once per upstream update.)
If you stick with mutt, the binary is < 1 kB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes
>Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features. Zawinski himself has stated:
https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1331287160738070528
>My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So it follows that most programs that can read email are enormous ("expand" being the operative term, with Emacs and Thunderbird being the archetypal examples)!
App stores try to solve this, but they suck in other ways (e.g. security -- at least the web has a security model. Native apps just expect some kind of ill-defined and unrealistic "trust" in the app's author).
It's strange to compare content to an application, I see this more often and it looks logical for a second because of the matching units but it's like calling a car heavy because the gasoline only weighs 50kg... what?