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Comment by astameteo | Hacker News Reader

I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.

Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!

So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.

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They're weird with contributions and fixing old bugs as well, to the point community run patchsets make it a much better product...

See Betterbird for reference and their blog posts, it sheds some more light on aforementioned weirdness.

Also see other comment in this thread mentioning how you can't search for "wedding". A bug that is 14 years now.

At this point I'm really considering trialing one of those two vibe coded clients recently shown here on HN.

Very much agree. I still use it on windows because nothing else seems much better, but there are a lot of things I feel are fairly basic/core features that just don't work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..

- Search - Threads - Windows integrated notifications/unread badge - Syncing unread counts in folders - Text/Email Editor

GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.

It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.

> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device

Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways

I don't know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.

Historically that hasn't been my experience, but it looks like that's because I never enabled the Solr-based Full-Text Search! Thanks for mentioning this, as I'm going to turn this on right away:

https://doc.dovecot.org/2.3/configuration_manual/fts/

My ActiveSync app does server side search using server side indexes just fine.

> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.

How long do you imagine it takes to fully index 100 emails? 1000? It's likely under a minute even for 10,000. And it's work that's only done once, they don't need to rebuild the entire index every time a new email is added. They absolutely could (and should if they don't already) index all locally downloaded e-mails. It's bonkers not to do it.

I would totally use TheBat on Windows

Never heard of it but will chekc it out, thanks!

I use it as well, and it's a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.

It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.

I don't know what you're talking about. As you said mail hasn't changed that much, I've been using Thunderbird all that time, and except for an improved default theme, they honestly haven't changed much about their core features. In that time I was able to remove several plugins that have been added to core thunderbird, like threaded conversations, google calendar and contact support.

I think the biggest change has been that people nowadays expect more from a regular email client.

On linux I read my mail in emacs, and use notmuch for searching/indexing. It's amazing.

On the go I use a web browser on my phone for gmail or outlook. No apps. I try to minimize doing email on my phone because it's so awkward to type.

Thunderbird desktop has the expression-search-ng addon that is notoriously breaks on updates. Wonder why the team does not make search a priority cross platform.

I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?

I use FairEmail in Android.

I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It's been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn't buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.

> $99.99 for a lifetime license

Yeah, just a small hiccup. I can buy a whole phone with a hundred dollars.

Isnt K-9 Mail supposed to join forces with Thunderbird? K-9 Mail works fine for me.

Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc

Thunderbird for android is K9 just rebranded afaik.

I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org's on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)

I use ProfiMail on Android. Loving the app since Symbian era. K9Mail is ok too.

K9 with the old interface, the original one.

I picked K9 among the other clients because of that interface so I was in that 50% of users that were pissed off by the new UI. Luckily email protocols did not change and I can still sideload the APK on all my devices.

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