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Comment by plopz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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