OT- Thunderbird ugliness, Was: Eudora email client source code released

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Thu May 24 08:55:02 CDT 2018


On Thu, 24 May 2018 at 14:51, Peter Corlett via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> There are two parts to this. The first is that Thunderbird is a bloated
> monstrosity ejected when Mozilla collapsed under its own weight and went
> supernova. It's had years of feature creep since.

Up to a point, Lord Corlett.

It is a bit, but on the other hand, it does actually work and work quite
well most of the time. (An as-yet untraced bug prevents me using it at
$JOB.)

I've tried Evolution, Sylpheed, Balsa, KMail, GNUmail and a number of
others. All were lacking functionality I consider important, such as being
able to fetch mail in the background while I am reading/writing.

I currently use Claws. It's clunky but functional. It can't do simple stuff
like remembering anyone I ever write to in the address book, though.

> The second is that Google
> would rather you use the web interface where they can show you ads so the
IMAP
> service is subtly nonstandard to confuse your client.

I never see 'em. I've been routinely running ad-blockers for about 15 years
or more.

It's about *the* best browser-based email I've ever seen, though, and I've
tried most of them since Elonex HTMaiL in 1995. Most suck. A few are OK.
Gmail is actually _good_. They're dropping useful features all the time,
though.

> MacOS includes a perfectly good GUI mail client. It is even aware that
GMail is
> not a standard IMAP/SMTP mail service and works round its quirks.

It's OK. Its facelifts have not improved actual functionality. The thread
mode is weird and I never fully understood it. I can't mark mails as
read/unread, flagged/unflagged, etc with a simple click as I can in T'bird,
betraying its mid-1980s origins.

And of course I can't use it on my Linux laptops.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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