Thunderbird is great. I use it daily since over 12 years. I do have some issues though:
* The ''Compose Email'' editor is weird. Especially for hyperlinks. Why is it so hard to check the URL of links? (No tooltip? No statusbar hint? Not even a right click menu to copy or open the link in Firefox?)[1]
* Font size handling is also quite weird. [2]
* But you can't ''View Source'' from compose email editor. (You have to save a draft and view source from there.)
* Getting the ''Compose Email'' editor in a tab instead of a window would be great too. (Is the Compose Email editor really the only thing still written in C and nobody wants to touch it?)
* Following authenticated RSS feeds theoretically works, but is completely unusable. [3]
Still one of my favorite applications. Many thanks to anyone spending time to keep it alive and improve it further.
Having looked at it again today after about 8 years:
* The onboarding experience is horrible; tries to sell me a gandi email account, then the setup wizard fails with an opaque error. Had to abort and configure manually.
* Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin and results in the GUI getting garbled bad; overlapping items, truncated labels, unusable dialogs etc. Sorry but 12px is not a reasonable font-size in 2015.
* The default conversation view seems to be some kind of in-joke, it only shows the first few hundred chars of each message. A semi-reasonable conversation view can be bolted on with another 3rd party plugin but it feels rough (flickering redraws, ugh).
* Forwarding multiple messages inline is still not possible.
* Search has improved a lot.
* Fully disabling HTML mail is still an exercise in frustration.
* A whole bunch of "wtf" was enabled by default (Silverlight plugin, Flash plugin)
* During setup it tried to connect to about 8 different domains (mozilla.org, CDNs, whatever other crap), none of which was my mailserver. It should not do that.
All that said. It's still one of the best (if not the best) GUI mail clients available. That's how bad the competition is...
> Setting a reasonable font-size on Retina requires a 3rd party plugin...
Thunderbird can handle high DPIs natively, at least on Linux. Hopefully OS X is similar. All fonts and UI elements are scaled up. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Config editor. Set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2, or whatever looks good to you. It's the same procedure as Firefox.
So, a day later I'm back to Postbox now. Here's what broke it for me this time. It's hard to believe but these things are indeed still unfixed:
* The message list can not scroll to bottom. Neither on startup, nor on arrival of new messages. That bug[1] is open since 2010(!).
* The unread count and new message notification can not be disabled for specific IMAP-folders. Since my spam folder is a regular IMAP-folder (managed by spam assassin) Thunderbird insists on notifying me about every new Spam mail I get. Uhm, no thanks.
This is exactly my experience with thunderbird as well. I'm using claws-mail at this moment. The only thing to complain is, fetch mail in claws-mail is slower than thunderbird
Doubtful. If the parent poster is worried about privacy and security, he wants to configure it so as to always read emails as plain text without ever loading images.
Thunderbird is definitely not "great"; the reason why it could appear to be so, is that it's a historical product in a stagnant market (the fact that its user base is growing doesn't necessarily imply that the market is growing as well).
I actually think it's a pretty good example of poor development strategy, specifically, they develop new features without polishing what is a very unpolished product - how on the earth they've spent resources on integrating a useless IM client, when there are tons of things that need work? Who knows. In the meanwhile:
1. using new windows when writing emails, especially in the context of a tabbed application, is a pain in the back. like this wasn't enough, a second window opens with the progress tracker, when transmitting. This means that every time one writes and sends an email, TB uses for a few seconds three separate windows.
2. the address book is buggy, and overall terrible, and it's been clearly untouched for a long time.
2a. it also uses as backend the single most braindamaged file format that JWZ has ever seen in his nineteen year career. as long as it works it wouldn't matter, but it actually does if somebody would like some interoperability.
3. when they updated the look and feel on a "major" release, they made the recipient email search much slower. since that release, I have to deliberately slow down my typing, otherwise TB doesn't find the recipients.
4. with another major release, they broke the shortcut for attaching a file.
All of these are basic functionalities.
Besides, the reason behind #1 is that the code is terrible to work with - some developer offered to work it out, but resigned after some weeks of code-diving.
I surely don't say that it's a terrible product (every product has snags), but I would say that, given the lack of resources, the poor planning, and the landscape of the market, TB is a product that does the job, but nothing more.
You can "view source" by selecting all or part of the message, click on "Insert, HTML".
URL links: If you hover the mouse above a link, do you not see the full URL in the Status Bar at the bottom?
Font size: I hear ya. The mix of fonts make the messages appear amateurish at the receiving end. It's caused by entering text beyond the last </font>. Annoying. I hope they fix it.
Strange. It doesn't appear here on Windows 7 or 8, TB 31.5.0.
(I click "Write", "Insert", "Link...", enter a link text and location, click "OK" and hover over the link. The status bar remains empty. I also tried in safe-mode without extensions.)
* The ''Compose Email'' editor is weird. Especially for hyperlinks. Why is it so hard to check the URL of links? (No tooltip? No statusbar hint? Not even a right click menu to copy or open the link in Firefox?)[1]
* Font size handling is also quite weird. [2]
* But you can't ''View Source'' from compose email editor. (You have to save a draft and view source from there.)
* Getting the ''Compose Email'' editor in a tab instead of a window would be great too. (Is the Compose Email editor really the only thing still written in C and nobody wants to touch it?)
* Following authenticated RSS feeds theoretically works, but is completely unusable. [3]
Still one of my favorite applications. Many thanks to anyone spending time to keep it alive and improve it further.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457300 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782215 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267203