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> the world sucks in general

It does! But like the other HN post about software complexity, it has a lot to do with our ever-increasing expectations and demands.

When email was just plain text, it was way easier to deal with. Now it's rare to receive an email which does not have and image or more in addition to the text (which itself may be plain and html (a non-standard, host+client specific subset of).

I gave up on using email clients. I now just use web clients. Consequently I have 4 email websites I regularly use. But at least when crap fails, it's not a problem on my end, and there's no point in spending time to troubleshoot. Honestly, stuff rarely fails. Gmail website works for me usually. Zoho works always (or at least I've never caught it with a problem). Tutanota works mostly, sometimes awkwardly. Protonmail works as long as you understand it.

My complaint is cloud storage. They all fall down, except for Tresorit; but it's rather expensive.

> Believe you me, I tried them all.

I'm curious, what issues did you encounter with Thunderbird?

I have found Thunderbird pretty wonderful overall. Using my Gmail as an example, I can select the "All Mail" folder (about 50,000 messages) and press Ctrl+Shift+K (for search) and it shows me results in just a few seconds.

I use Thunderbird to manage multiple email accounts, and it has been a huge time saver having it all unified in one place.

Thunderbird provides an option per account - Synchronisation & Storage > Message Synchronising > Keep messages in all folders. I keep it unchecked for all IMAP accounts.

Only headers are fetched in the beginning, and rest is fetched when you open and attempt to view the e-mail. Sort of a middle-ground, and saves disk space.

For me, Thunderbird's number one defect is that it is unable to show threads unless you view all your accounts under one combined inbox. And it's not only a major defect but an absurd one as well.

Thunderbird 91 has threaded views in individual accounts. It is a little hard to enable the view though: In the header bar directly above the list of messages, there is a little "thread step" icon on the left by default, that must be clicked to enable thread view. This is next to the star icon, the paperclip, Subject, etc. Unlike the other header items, clicking the "thread" icon does not sort by threads, instead it toggles the thread view on and off.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, it is not the same. Under combined inbox (unified folders) threaded view shows your own messages while the supposedly same threaded view will omit them when viewed in any single inbox.

I dropped Thunderbird when my inbox reached a certain size. I can't remember exactly how many messages (probably 100k+), but not so many that I'd expect the whole thing to just grind to a halt.

I like Thunderbird but sometimes it just gets ... stuck. I don't know of any better way to explain it.

I presume that some networking thing hits its limits and needs to time out (generally DNS ... it's always DNS). After some mysterious amount of time, Thunderbird gets unstuck and continues on its merry way.

The real problem, at the end of the day, is single-threaded GUI toolkits, though.

I used to have some hangs as well, but then I played around with the compaction settings and that seemed to fix it. I think there is a settings option to add a prompt before compaction, and maybe modify the schedule. It would be a good feature if they would allow compaction to run in the middle of the night to avoid bothering the user.

Just curious, what kind of supercomputer do you have?

I am in an older Thinkpad on Fedora Gnome and I get the kill or keep waiting message when going through my inbox. Even k9 mail on my Poco X3 pro doesn't freeze as much.

Thunderbird suffers from the same on-by-default phone-home/sync cancer as Firefox, the last time I looked (admittedly over a year ago).

Did you try Mailspring? Positively surprised me. But Kmail still is my preferred mua.

Mailspring is great, simple, elegant and in my limited use, very functional.

I used Mailspring with about 7 accounts (fastmail, outlook, gmail and yahoo) and it routinely fails to sync and I have to reconnect them. There is also this bug I've had for well over a year on windows where if you close the window it cannot catch focus and be maximized again, found a weird trick on the forums where you double click the taskbar icon to get it back. The latter was fine but getting kicked out and missing emails made me find an alt and so far so good with Thunderbird.

Is it possible that the perf issues were related to the number of account/mail?

Unlikely, I don't think I have 10k emails between all 7 and on average I get maybe a dozen or so a day. Even when I had like 3 accounts they would randomly just disconnect and need reauth.

I've been loving `mblaze`[1] lately after trying `aerc` for a few months. It's been a lot of fun using an email "client" that really emphasizes the unix philosophy. I don't have a ton of email in my primary address and I always reach inbox zero by the end of the evening. So ymmv.

[1] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

Interesting! I'm curious to how it compares to MH? Have you tried both?

I don't remember things being so bad back when IMAP was more popular. That and back when threaded messages were a thing. Nowadays, the way gmail shows threads is about the best I can expect.

What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.

> What happened? I don't know any reason that programs such as Mutt should have gotten bad.

If you have a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages and you also use mutt's IMAP capabilities, mutt's UI is going to freeze on you for prolonged periods of time. It also is trying very hard to be efficient and only download relevant stuff, but somehow it translates to "is downloading stuff all the time" (and freezes its UI while doing so).

Basically you reproduce this by subscribing to a high-traffic mailing list, letting it send you stuff for a month, then trying to use Mutt on that.

It also turns out that a maildir with all that stuff is also a stress test for your filesystem, so you add all deficiencies of email client to all deficiencies of your filesystem. Meh.

Crap... Late to getting back to this.

Newsgroups used to churn through a ton of messages. I don't remember them bogging down this badly. ;(

Maybe it boils down to async being hard and Mutt actually using synchronous network transfers, obliviously assuming they would be zero-cost which they are obviously not.

There's also this work in configuration that you have to do to shoehorn Gmail's labels into Mutt's mailboxes. Oh, have I mentioned already that your 100K+ messages in one maildir will be really, really taxing on your filesystem?

I don't know, maybe someone should come and try and reinvent this whole crap around more modern workflows.

I'm tempted to get gnus running again. :) Love to see how things compare to my memory.

Can you explain the difference between threaded messages and what gmail does?

Gmail displays you a "conversation" where there's only one parent messages and threading is lost inside. It's bearable when conversation is more or less under control. But inside it, you lose, UI-wise, the information on who actually replied to whom. The only way you can infer that is if all participants have good quoting discipline.

What was the problem with KMail? I've found it consistently good but largely ignored by Americans (like most KDE programs, to be honest).

+1 for Kmail. One detail I found is that it's underlying engine, Akonadi, is unstable/prone to unsolvable problems (I tried!). Debian stable's version is however, of course, rock steady.

Agreed. All I want is the ability to grep my mail.

I've done that when searching in-app has failed me, grepping through the mail store on a zimbra instance. Only useful for plain mail though, unless you are scanning headers not bodies. One day I might write a script to harvest IMAP accounts into a database (unpacking encodings on the way into the DB, and sitting a few other transforms & derivations where relevant like finding the local "received for" information and putting it in an efficiently searchable column, so things are easily located) so I can just SQL the crap out of it. Doing the same to a filesystem structure designed for easy getting might work if you'd prefer that.

Try `magrep` from `mblaze`. All you need is a maildir.

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

Have a look at notmuch

The Bat!