Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.)
On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface.
I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.
If you’re on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender, can absolutely kill Thunderbird’s performance. There seems to be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be automatically scanned.
At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an interoperability thing.
I can access folders created by thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail client or remotely through IMAP.
It may be they don't want to break those external tools.
So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the internal, canonical store.
FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music library "for interoperability", that you could enable to be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file; when enabled, it worked exactly like this.
Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact.
Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.
I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do understand that folders with large numbers of files is a problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the thunderbird indexing.
> Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.
This is a perfect example of complicating what should be a simple thing to support a very, very niche use case. Thunderbird should just use sqlite so all normal operations including search are fast across all platforms, and if you have a use case like wanting to synchronize with other mail clients using maildir, then write a plugin that will duplicate the sqlite db to a user-specified maildir.
Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.)
The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not allowed on Windows.
(ETA: The obvious idea here to me would be to do something like a bare git repo as a Maildir-like with content-addressed storage.)
AFAIU the problem isn't so much NTFS but the (pluggable) Win32 filesystem layers above. It gets even worse with AV software plugging itself into those layers.
Packing individual resources into archives is the norm for Games for a reason.
Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be. Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders full of small files. Hedgewars too.
I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer.
But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.
So much depends on the specific APIs, of course, and how many versions of Windows you are expecting to support, and what your seek patterns and locking expectations/behavior are. (In my experience, it has been misunderstandings of the Windows file lock model/ACL lookups that seem more often the problem than directory size, but obviously everyone's benchmarks are different. File locks are super "slow", especially if you are not opting out of locks you don't need.)
I'm not suggesting that architecting with lots of small files in a single folder is yet the best architecture on Windows, just that for Maildir specifically on Windows it is among the least of the problems.
'k. take your word for it. Esp in relation to Maildir.
I know very little about Windows development.
But... just, FWIW, this particular subject has come up a lot on HN over the years with various explanations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783525
and many many others easily searchable on hn.algolia.com
My fav comment was by an MS dev: "NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global recursive locks and SEH for flow control."
I definitely understand it gets talked about a lot, endlessly. It's not an unearned reputation. I just think that, especially in light of things like that last comment you like, so much of that reputation at this point is folklore more than benchmarks. People take "Windows is bad at lots of files in a single folder" as faith from some bible of Operating Systems Allegories rather than something they've worked with directly or seen tested themselves first-hand.
Part of what certainly doesn't help is that most of the "lots of files in a single folder" applications make other POSIX-based assumptions (such as locks and consistency with respect to concurrency are generally much more opt-in and eventually consistent by default in POSIX rather than opt-out and aggressively consistent by default in Windows). If you are trying to use POSIX-based assumptions on Windows it doesn't matter what you are doing, including "lots of files in a single folder", you are going to have a bad time. I can easily presume that is what happened in most of your anecdotal counter-examples (Java Minecraft, Firefox, Hedgewars, will all have different, plausible POSIX biases), though I can't know for certain without benchmarks and performance data in front of me, and none of those are currently my job. "Lots of files in a single folder" at that point, under that presumption, is a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's very easy to blame the symptom sometimes, especially when that sort of performance debugging/fixing is getting in the way of your real goals and that symptom is sometimes such an easy fix (use more folders, bundle more zips, what have you).
Again, I can't say that with too much certainty without specific performance data, it's just I do think people need to question the "Orthodoxy" of "well, Windows is just bad at that" more than they do sometimes.
Hm. Did you read the comment by the Microsoft dev in the linked thread? He gives the following reasons:
"We've long since gotten all the low-hanging fruit and are left with what is essentially "death by a thousand cuts," with no single component responsible for our (lack of) performance, but with lots of different things contributing"
* Linux has a top-level directory entry cache that means that certain queries (most notably stat calls) can be serviced without calling into the file system at all once an item is in the cache. Windows has no such cache, and leaves much more up to the file systems... [snip]
* Windows's IO stack is extensible, allowing filter drivers to attach to volumes and intercept IO requests before the file system sees them. ... [snip] .. Even a clean install of Windows will have a number of filters present, particularly on the system volume (so if you have a D: drive or partition, I recommend using that instead, since it likely has fewer filters attached). Filters are involved in many IO operations, most notably creating/opening files.
* The NT file system API is designed around handles, not paths. Almost any operation requires opening the file first, which can be expensive. ... [snip]
"Whether we like it or not (and we don't), file operations in Windows are more expensive than in Linux, even more so for those operations that only touch file metadata (such as stat)."
I can say my personal experience under Windows has been that compiling the same project was twice as fast in a linux virtualbox inside windows, than in the host. :)
Maildir support has been considered beta for a long time in Thunderbird, and using it for anything ‘critical’ doesn’t sound possible unless you like to live dangerously (for me, everything to do with email is critical- some messages are more important than others, but I really can’t deal with email being unstable, it’d be like the postal system being consistently unstable). Do you use the maildir format with Thunderbird? - if you have, how do you find it?
I have been using maildir storage for a few years now, on 4 instances of Thunderbird, each with 10-50GB worth of messages per folder, on both NTFS and ext4. So far not a single case of lost message or usability issues. All operations are instant and don't block UI.
I tried that before, blew out my storage (obviously since each small file now takes 4KiB block minimum in ext4, unless you specifically mkfs with a smaller block size or use zfs)
Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things.
EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail.
'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?
Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.
This sounds like a great business model actually: release a killer software product, and make the beta free to get users addicted, with the caveat that when you get out of beta, there will be a "small" monthly fee. Then, when it's time to go mainstream, charge them $100/month to keep access to their data. And make sure there's no way to go back by locking the users' data behind encryption for "safety from hackers" or similar.
Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native.
It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.
I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy.
The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time...
Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!
I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete the destination folder when one moves a message, you have to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.
I’ve found search in Mail.app to be hopeless, and the solutions you see online of rebuilding Spotlight indexing or deleting-and-recreating your accounts in Mail.app aren’t really solutions in my eyes since they don’t fix the root of the problem (or do so incidentally and invisibly). I use Mail.app only because it integrates with iCloud and my iPhone, otherwise I would go all-in on Thunderbird. On non-Apple machines I always use Thunderbird.
You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.
I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure)
Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.
I'm not sure if it's strictly Thunderbird's fault, or if it's because people sometimes reply to a random message with a bunch of people one it, change the subject, and things go downhill from there.
The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not helping my sanity.
Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.
I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all.
After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing.
They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options.
I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state.
Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery.
If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all?
As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now.
This is what I'm going with. We use Thunderbird for work and as long they don't kill of functionality and disrupt what we're doing I don't really care what Thunderbird looks like.
I'm a little worried about a bunch of new bugs, especially ones that result in data loss though. As things change I may be pushing back on updates for a while just to make sure things are stable.
If things go bad, I'll have to look for forks or set up something else that can reasonably handle IMAP and supports MBOX
Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago, nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning going back to Linux so it's a logical move.
Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(
I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.
Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance.
Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.
kmail imap support was somewhat rough around 10 years ago, but it been totally stable for me ever since. i have push/idle enabled on server/client, it been working just fine.
the only problem that i have it's when letsencrypt certificate rotated at night and at morning i get few hundreds popups asking to approve new certificate
Compacting folders is something I hope that they fix. I tell Thunderbird to download/sync all accounts and immediately it prompts me to compact and if I let it, it will only fail with an error because it's still in the middle of doing what I just asked it to. A little more intelligence in when it prompts for compacting would be nice.
Better yet, they could do a better job handling it automatically so I don't need it to ask me.
Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.
On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface.
I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.