Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky.

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.

Thunderbird constantly lags for me when clicking emails, sometimes locking up for 10-15 seconds. It also has weird issues with how it displays that you have new messages. It will quite often show me I have unread messages that I've actually already read and I need to expand the account and click through every folder to get it to refresh and recognize that there really aren't any unread. I also have an email account on there that its said I have an unread message for the last 3 months, but when I click the arrow and expand the account, the unread bold (1) goes away, then comes back when I collapse the account. Its just permanently incorrectly stuck as unread for some reason.

I tried using Thunderbird a few times because that's what real tech people use. It's just not as good as Gmail in my browser.

I'll repent later.

I've used multiple email provider web mails (Gmail, ProtonMail, and my current provider fastmail). I have also used various clients over the years, haven't used thunderbird in a while but I still use mu4e in emacs as well as neomutt (terminal email client). In terms of feeling "smooth" the web clients have always been superior to the thunderbird, but it's been a couple years so maybe thunderbird has improved. Mu4e and neomutt are equal if not better than most web mail clients but since I always have a browser open I usually just have a web mail tab pinned. I wish I could use thunderbird, I've always liked its design, but it has a hard to describe quality which makes usage "clunky" feeling.

Let me guess, you're using Gmail or another "web mail" on Thunderbird? Yeah there's a lot of artificial lag generated by Google or some bad process along the way. I get the same lag in Gmail, but they hide it behind CSS changes. In Thunderbird they actually show you the inherent lag (until it's ACTUALLY changed state). It's a Gmail thing though and most email connections are blazing fast.

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.

Calendar support is actually a desirable feature for me. I'm sad to find that there's nothing fully outlook-compatible in the open source world. Evolution gets very very close, but it still lacks support for viewing/changing some of the meeting data, and I believe background colour for meetings (which I miss a lot).

I think that the Apple way of separating calendar and mail is desirable honestly.

Calendar invitations are .ics files that any calendar client can consume, it’s a different remote protocol underneath too (caldav)

Ever tried Kontact?

I'm using it as daily driver and wouldn't switch to webmail nor Thunderbird or Evolution.

I think I tried it (for non-Exchange calendaring), but I didn't like it for some reason.

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.

To be fair Kontact (KMail) had its bad days. The whole Akonadi stuff underneath got a really bad reputation because of that. And that was for a reason, for sure!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com