Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.

I'm tired of:

- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or plain text format.

- Search that takes forever.

- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.

- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.

Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross platform?



Your Thunderbird experience is almost completely opposite of mine. Gnus is my main e-mail client but there are a couple of Windows machines I run Thunderbird on.

All of your points can be solved by going through the configuration options. Maybe that shouldn't be necessary, but not everyone's the same.


Likewise. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the Thunderbird client, but it consistently and mostly stays out of the way. Search is pretty fast and messages go where they're supposed to go.

In ~five years of using it across three machines, I've only had two instances in which a folder got corrupted, and in both cases I was able to repair it and recover the messages.

Also, when I migrated from Windows to Linux, transitioning my email profile was utterly seamless.


If the command-line interface doesn't scare you, I recommend Mutt. It's customizable and have pgp integration.

It seems there's a Windows port too but I haven't tried it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unixmail-w32/


I have not tried it, but Zimbra released a desktop client. http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html


Well the prompt for html/plain text can be turned off... But I also had a hard time finding it when I started using Thunderbird. Junk in your inbox - use a e-mail server with a good junk mail filter... your e-mail client won't ever be as good as filtering... and you don't want to be downloading tons of e-mails before you can filter them...

I agree with your other pointers....

But no, I can't recommend another e-mail client


have you looked at thunderbird 3.0b4/ the new search works great


gmail?


GNUS




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: