A proper mail client also seems essential for taking part in mailing lists. I used to use gnus but got too frustrated at people sending me email in stupid HTML formats that I couldn't read. Thunderbird is the easiest thing to use that behaves like a proper mail client but also deals with the garbage from bad clients like Outhouse etc.

> Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around.

Have you tried Sylpheed? https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

> Everybody migrated to webmail

That is so far from the truth it isn’t even funny. Outlook reigns in corporate and phones have native clients. Hell, i am still waiting for POP3 to die.

I really prefer Seamonkey's Mail cleint (it has the same roots as Thunderbird), especially since you can always switch back to an good old desktop-like theme. Has been rock-solid since 15 years.

Mostly to avoid service vendor lockin, I'd like to switch back to Thunderbird -- after I have a solid plan for replicated local backups, under my physical control. Is this practical with IMAP, or would POP3 be the way?

I agree, I've been using it for more then 10 years now and migrated between multiple machines and os platforms, all while holding onto several email accounts for historical needs.

That said, I also feel it is one of the worst calendar clients around. I've used lightning, I've tried the calendar plugins for google, things just don't work.

I've been using Mailspring for a couple of months now on Linux and it's been a very good experience. I think it's better than Thunderbird if you are more used to webmail clients.

I keep using Thunderbird because I haven't found anything better, but it's unbearably slow. I'd gladly jump ship to a better cross platform, featureful, responsive email client, but apparently they don't make these anymore.

I recently installed it and synced up 5 imap accounts, some with as many as 10 years of mail and its bloody fast. I recall trying it a few years back and was very frustrated that archiving a message seem to block the UI. That is no longer the case and now I’m very fast with it when using keyboard shortcuts.

Try a new profile, vacuuming it, and/or moving ancient mail to separate folders.

Don't trust random me on the internet (I'm dog, woof), google it yourself - but for me deleting "panacea.dat" made everything fast again.

For life of me I don't see how what you wrote deserves a downvote

Did you create a bug or search for one?

I read that as "I've been stuck 31.7 years because it's the only ..." and did a triple-take on how old the software is and how long you've been using it. But no, Wikipedia lists it as "Initial release: July 28, 2003; 14 years ago".

Still very old to be in such widespread use, though. From where I worked to my grandma to my in-laws to the Linux poweruser that I am, a very widespread range of people use it. I am not 100% happy with it, but email is important enough that I want something stable (e.g. no bugs that either mess up my email server-side or stop it from working) and secure (both the connection and for viewing).

On the same page. Have gone through endless flavors of Linux, Win and OSX by simply copying the emails folder from system to system for close to 20 years now - and never lost one email. To say I appreciate this piece of software would be an understatement.

I love Thunderbird, I have used it at several previous jobs and I'm finding joy in email clients again as I now actively avoid using the web client for gmail. I have never understood people's gripes with the client, but maybe I'm just not a power user.

Seems like Mozilla could be a trustworthy mail provider as well.

You should take a look at notmuch [1]. It takes a little bit of time to get started (I recommend afew [2] for initial tagging), but I don't think I could ever go back to another mail system. It changes the way that you go through mail, no more folders: between tagging and extremely fast searches, there's no need. Just like an application launcher on modern desktops, there's no need to go through a big menu: press your search key, type what you're thinking, and there it is.

It doubles the size of your maildir with the indexing, which is a downside if you're crunched for space, but maybe that gives you an idea for just how much is indexed and how fast you can expect searching to be.

It's fair to say that the most popular interface for it is the emacs interface, which is great if you're already using emacs for mail because your workflow won't change substantially. There are other interfaces available, I have used one called alot [3] and find it to be very good as well.

[1]: https://notmuchmail.org/

[2]: https://github.com/afewmail/afew

[3]: https://github.com/pazz/alot

Tried that — it kept choking on the 80k or so emails in my inbox. Apparently mu4e users just have tidy folder organization schemes from what I was told on mail list. I got spoiled by gmail and never sort my mail. In fact my dependence on search is why I turned to mu4e in the first place. I just assumed a unixy toolkit would scale just fine (bad assumption!).

I’m using this setup too for quite a while now and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. But some HTML mail is barely readable. How do you deal with that?

I’ve written an emacs function which opens the mail in firefox, but I’m not really fond of that as every remote content is loaded by the browser. Is there a way to stop that?

I don't know the default OS X client so I can't go into detail, but I'd guess that one is better integrated with OS X. On the other hand, Thunderbird works cross-platform and allows you to choose any operating system without having to consider a new mail client, set it up and learn new ways. You could probably even copy over your data folder and resume working without any set-up (`scp -r ~/.thunderbird user@newpc:` would be the complete migration process, assuming it works between OSes).

I switched. Better search, better tagging, customizable layout, better peformance (apple mail often had problems with syncing flags and folders for me)

mailmate is a far better mail program than the default mail program on OSX. worth every penny.

Thunderbird uses Firefox ESR as a base. Firefox ESR supports Windows XP while it is at version 52.x. Firefox ESR will move up to 60.x in August 2018 at which point neither Firefox nor Thunderbird will support Windows XP any longer.

Honest question - why?

There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.

But sad it only goes back to Mac 10.9.

I agree, in a positive way. It feels fast, no-nonsense UI and takes as little space as possible on your harddrive. Much better than 2000s software where internet connection is a must, UI is as pretty as possible without considerations for the user and often is 200MB for a simple todo list manager.

Yes, and it would be great to keep it that way. But unfortunately, some say there are plans to adopt more "web tech", maybe Electron... I hope that day never comes.

And that's good.