I’ve been an Airmail (Mac) user for many years now. But it’s been really buggy lately and there’s no motivation to fix the issues apparently. So I switched to Thunderbird about a month ago after a lot of research. It’s … ok.
Search is great.
Seeing stats/charts on my last 20 years of emails is super interesting.
Composing emails is not great, but I use a markdown plugin that makes it better … but it’s still pretty bad UX.
I hate the way it quotes previous emails with “>” for each line instead of an indented block quote. Maybe I’m missing the setting to turn that off.
I miss having an avatar/icon for each sender. It let me quickly visually scan my inbox for the person I want to talk to instead of parsing through all the text.
The spacing of elements in certain places is weird and inconsistent. In places where it’s too tight it feels cramped and bothers me.
You can’t compose a reply inline. You just have to use a floating window on top of the rest of the app.
I miss the one-key shortcuts to label and archive emails. This was originally a GMail feature and Airmail also implemented it.
Sending an email doesn’t happen in the background. You have to stare at a progress bar modal while it sends, and it seems to take forever. I just want to move on to my next email but I’m stuck waiting.
The tabbed interface is really nice. It’s definitely an underrated feature.
I wish it had super advanced rules like you get with MailMate. But what it offers is fine for 99% of users.
Again, I might be missing some settings to correct some of these issues, so take it all with a grain of salt. But these are my takeaways after about a month of usage.
What a weird thing to read. I open my work’s email in thunderbird because the search is so good. Outlook is really slow when searching for something and so so tedious.
In all fairness, my usage is still minimal at this point. I’ve only searched a couple of times, but the thing I needed popped right up. Maybe my experience will change over time.
This is ultimately what made me try out Betterbird. It has regex searching which imo every search box of every app should have as a basic feature. Plus it still has all the features Thunderbird has and even some that Thunderbird has removed in recent releases.
I’ve been an Airmail (Mac) user for many years now. But it’s been really buggy lately and there’s no motivation to fix the issues apparently. So I switched to Thunderbird about a month ago after a lot of research. It’s … ok.
Again, I might be missing some settings to correct some of these issues, so take it all with a grain of salt. But these are my takeaways after about a month of usage.
Search is great?
One of my biggest issues with Thunderbird is that I can never find emails I want.
Search works really well for me. Definitely reveals a less aesthetic side of Thunderbird but it works!
Aworks to archive messages btw, I’m not sure about a shortcut for labels though.It has the most powerful search of any email client I’ve used. That was one of the reasons I switched. What issues have you had?
What a weird thing to read. I open my work’s email in thunderbird because the search is so good. Outlook is really slow when searching for something and so so tedious.
In all fairness, my usage is still minimal at this point. I’ve only searched a couple of times, but the thing I needed popped right up. Maybe my experience will change over time.
This is ultimately what made me try out Betterbird. It has regex searching which imo every search box of every app should have as a basic feature. Plus it still has all the features Thunderbird has and even some that Thunderbird has removed in recent releases.
Apple seems to have a lot more variety in the email client ecosystem than Win or Linux. One of those weird unexpected things.