Hacker News Reader

Comment by presto8 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com