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K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck. The ui is clunky but worst of all, the search is bad. Very bad.

If you don’t do anything special, that will be enough but for everyone else that won’t do it.

If I type ‘repor’ in Apple mail, It will show me all report before I even type enter. And if there is too much, I will then add ‘2026’ for instance.

On k9, first you got to type the entire word because it won’t progressively search as you type, but then you press enter and see hundreds of mail so you want to add 2026 ? Too bad. Got to type report once again followed by 2026. Made a typo mistake ? Got to rewrite it all over again.

This is just bad.

And I’m not trying to diminish the work done by Thunderbirds/k9 developer, it’s just that it’s done by unpaid developers and it shows. Things move slowly and just suck at using.

Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven't set up an email client in 20 years

From what I've heard though, Mail has pretty horrible searching in Apple land. Just for that, it may be worth it to look at alternatives.

Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can't remember if it was a protonmail limitation or a Thunderbird one that meant I had to pre-add any email addresses before I could send any messages from them though.

Now I'm on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.

what does being able to edit the from field enable you to do?

I tried but got an oauth error :-/ Hopefully it works soon!

Yeah, the only thing it doesn't do is shared inboxes with Microsoft Office accounts. I would really like to uninstall Microsoft Outlook.

I struggle to get it to search things. Even emails within the last few days. It'll show me irrelevant mail from years ago but not yesterday's.

I also don't like that it renders PDF attachments. Just seems to be enabling scammers

They're weird with contributions and fixing old bugs as well, to the point community run patchsets make it a much better product...

See Betterbird for reference and their blog posts, it sheds some more light on aforementioned weirdness.

Also see other comment in this thread mentioning how you can't search for "wedding". A bug that is 14 years now.

At this point I'm really considering trialing one of those two vibe coded clients recently shown here on HN.

Very much agree. I still use it on windows because nothing else seems much better, but there are a lot of things I feel are fairly basic/core features that just don't work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..

- Search - Threads - Windows integrated notifications/unread badge - Syncing unread counts in folders - Text/Email Editor

I use it as well, and it's a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.

Thunderbird desktop has the expression-search-ng addon that is notoriously breaks on updates. Wonder why the team does not make search a priority cross platform.

I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?

It's impossible (other than mutual TLS) to do mfa on the native ios mail app without trusting a third party for one of your factors. Hopefully Thunderbird will support it...

They have a paid email service now. This is likely for that and for other users who want a thunderbird-based, free e-mail client.

I don’t understand people complaining about Firefox UI. It barely exists. There’s a url bar with some buttons in each side. If you use vertical tabs, another bar with tiny icons for each tab.

There’s so little chrome I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just grey, out of the way, as it should be.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/1I4gG22 tell me where the bad/ugly UI is.

Remember when Mozilla did a huge rebrand that introduced a new logo many people actually loved for its ingenuity, styling their name as moz://a? [1] And then, not very long after, they did another rebrand that resulted in… whatever they’ve got now? [2] Taking a step forward and then two steps back seems like a very Mozilla thing to do.

  [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
  [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-of-tech/

Looking at the screenshots, I don’t have a problem with the aesthetics of the UI, but with how it’s wasting a lot of space. It feels like we could see more content on a small 4” smartphone screen 15 years ago: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/R... (and that already felt a bit wasteful back then, where a different layout could almost double the number of items visible at once)

You know what? We also have people complaining about the new Firefox UI redesign, which is exactly the whitespace-heavy style you found in Arc or Dia.

> some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous

With all due respect, what a low bar for beauty!

Zen is delightful to use, and based on Firefox. I just don't get what's going on at Mozilla.

They're tools. I expect BM 085232, not the Book of Kells.

was wondering the same. Mozilla seems out of touch

I don't care for the Material Design, even when Google did/does it.

To parent commenter, "beautiful design" just means "AI powered browser".

A quick glance at their product and its literally just a clone/fork of chrome/chromium with AI-pilled features.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" holds true.

About as often as I check my physical mailbox.

Magic login links tho…

Mostly because I have multiple email addresses. But I make good use of the filters (which could be improved) and tags. That really helps with searching through everything.

If I only had one email account I probably wouldn't care as much but that's not as common these days

On my desktop, because I download my mail, store it on my laptop, backup it. Nothing is left on the servers of my email provider.

Juggling multiple e-mail accounts in a single client, and I haven't found anything better - also haven't really had any major complaints, the desktoo app works perfectly for what I use it for.

What alternative do you suggest?

I have seen this. Some devs actually write a pure swift ui app and still manage to make that look like anything but a pure switt ui app. Since the mothership is Mozilla I won't put is past them.

Thunderbird for Android is based on the 15+ year old K-9 Mail app while Thunderbird for iOS is a greenfield project.

Yeah, the search in Thunderbird never worked for me, so I use the quick filter. Apparently it does not use the index (and is slower), but it works.

That thread is both hilarious and sad. Incredible that nobody has forked the project simply to implement a working search.

If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched "wedding" and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the "Wed" results.

Well, they are funded by Google after all -- infamous for replacing or ignoring search terms entirely.

Many such cases. Duckduckgo is practically unusable because it just decides for itself which of my search terms it actually searches for. I have to explicitly quote every word to get it to function like a search engine.

Meanwhile, Netflix search (on Apple TV at least), is not only practically unusable, but literally so. Doesn't matter what you input, it just returns a random selection of films. I saw Kill Bill the other day, and wondered if there were any other Tarantino films on there. "Tarantino" returned things like Indiana Jones and other completely nonsensical results.

Am I the only one around here who knows SQL?

Have you vibe coded any apps that you use daily?

In my experience I spent a lot of time on design nowadays. It turns out I did that in the past too I just had quite a lot of time to think that through slowly while hands were doing vim stuff. And good design is hard. And somewhat subjective. But mostly just hard, pretty sure in some time agents will get better at it, but for now it's still something they can't do well at all.

And by design I mean all of it: UX, look and architecture.

An e-mail client is the archetypal demo-in-a-weekend, ten-million-lines-in-production program. Not to deny the power of coding agents, and maybe you can vibecode something that's just right for reading your e-mail, but does it support my nested MIME folders and the obscure encryption used by my mail host?

I am confused by your comment. Is it modern practice to vibe code everything these days instead of installing an app developed and maintained by a team? Do you expect everybody to be vibe coding their own software now?

There's much more to a good app than the code.