[gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Wol]

Which is sadly slowly proving itself a crap piece of software.

I don't want to blame TB for the fact it keeps on crashing on Wayland 
(although it's my only software which does that), but I'm just getting 
totally fed up with the number of tabs that get opened.

Looking on the web, the general response seems to be "well, don't open 
so many tabs, learn how they work", but I don't open tabs!

And I'm writing this email because I literally just watched TB open a 
whole bunch of tabs in front of me. And they weren't even from the 
folder I was in! They weren't even from the mail account I was in!

And it's a pain in the arse because all of a sudden I've got a load of 
emails marked "read" (because TB's read them for me) that I haven't seen...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Marco Rebhan]

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I'm a fan of KMail (it can be somewhat janky while you set it up but 
afterwards it doesn't cause too many problems), I used Thunderbird 
before too and prefer KMail over it.

Maybe the problem with the Thunderbird crashes on Wayland is the same as 
for many KDE apps including KMail though: they do blocking work on the 
main thread in some cases which freezes the UI which then causes the 
event buffer to fill up... and as a result wayland terminates the 
connection. To work around that I have these patches that increase the 
event buffer size when it fills up, like X does (not written by me, 
though I did make a similar one before I discovered these existed, these 
are better written so I ditched mine) to dev-libs/wayland, might be 
worth trying them first before switching to anything else: https://
tinyurl.com/yeozw297
If you do decide to try out KMail you might want them anyway though, 
they have fixed crashes for me there.

-2xsaiko

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Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Wol]

On 14/11/2021 22:39, Marco Rebhan wrote:
> If you do decide to try out KMail you might want them anyway though,
> they have fixed crashes for me there.

Does kmail run on Windows?

(Oh, and although I run KDE, I tend to avoid kde apps like the plague - 
after my experience with KDE4 so would you ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Michael]

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On Sunday, 14 November 2021 22:23:33 GMT Wol wrote:
> Which is sadly slowly proving itself a crap piece of software.
> 
> I don't want to blame TB for the fact it keeps on crashing on Wayland
> (although it's my only software which does that), but I'm just getting
> totally fed up with the number of tabs that get opened.
> 
> Looking on the web, the general response seems to be "well, don't open
> so many tabs, learn how they work", but I don't open tabs!
> 
> And I'm writing this email because I literally just watched TB open a
> whole bunch of tabs in front of me. And they weren't even from the
> folder I was in! They weren't even from the mail account I was in!
> 
> And it's a pain in the arse because all of a sudden I've got a load of
> emails marked "read" (because TB's read them for me) that I haven't seen...
> 
> Cheers,
> Wol

Just tested T'bird on Plasma Wayland and it does not crash or open any 
unsolicited tabs.  I don't have any addons other than calendar, which works as 
advertised.

Mozilla Firefox was rather unstable on Wayland until a month or so ago - can't 
recall what T'bird was like at the time because I do not use it regularly.  I 
assume both applications use the same window rendering mechanism and widgets.  
After a recent Plasma/Wayland and/or Firefox update, I noticed it started 
behaving properly without flickering, or disappearing and generally becoming 
unusable as an application.  Before its latest improvement I had to switch off 
"Use smooth scrolling" to stop it flickering and then minimise/maximise the 
window to get Firefox to stabilise.

I'm mentioning all this in case a Firefox/T'bird and/or Plasma update will fix 
it.

I have found desktop mail clients, for those of us who still use them, is a 
highly subjective choice.  User brains are wired differently and the workflow of 
one client suits us better than any other.  I think the best approach is to 
try other mail clients for a week or so and see if you can live with them, in 
preference to T'bird. 

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Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Marco Rebhan]

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On Sunday, 14 November 2021 23:54:13 CET Wol wrote:
> Does kmail run on Windows?

I believe there were efforts going towards that but currently I don't 
think it does. If you're looking for a cross-platform mail client I 
think Thunderbird is still your best bet.

> (Oh, and although I run KDE, I tend to avoid kde apps like the plague
> - after my experience with KDE4 so would you ...)

That sucks to hear. I would recommend giving them another try though, 
KDE 4 was a disastrous release and things have improved since then. 
Though it's rare to see someone use Plasma but not the accompanying 
applications.

> 
> Cheers,
> Wol

-2xsaiko

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Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Jigme Datse]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 22:23:33 +0000
Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:

> Which is sadly slowly proving itself a crap piece of software.
> 
> I don't want to blame TB for the fact it keeps on crashing on Wayland 
> (although it's my only software which does that), but I'm just
> getting totally fed up with the number of tabs that get opened.
> 
> Looking on the web, the general response seems to be "well, don't
> open so many tabs, learn how they work", but I don't open tabs!
> 
> And I'm writing this email because I literally just watched TB open a 
> whole bunch of tabs in front of me. And they weren't even from the 
> folder I was in! They weren't even from the mail account I was in!
> 
> And it's a pain in the arse because all of a sudden I've got a load
> of emails marked "read" (because TB's read them for me) that I
> haven't seen...
> 
> Cheers,
> Wol
> 

I'm using Claws Mail though I'm not sure if it is a valid answer, I do
know that it's the answer I have decided on.  Yes, Thunderbird is still
installed, but I don't have a clue when I last used it.  The last time,
was when I wanted to see if things in Thunderbird were working better
(for a specific message) than in Claws Mail.  And no, not really.
Though it may have been useful for that specific message.

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Matt Connell]

On Sun, 2021-11-14 at 22:23 +0000, Wol wrote:
> Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

I switched to Evolution and never looked back.  It does everything I
needed from T-Bird without relying on plugins/addons.

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Philip Webb]

211114 Wol asked for alternative mail clients :

Don't overlook Mutt : simple, easy to configure, powerful.

> On 14/11/2021 22:39, Marco Rebhan wrote:
>> If you do decide to try out KMail you might want them anyway though,
>> they have fixed crashes for me there.
> Does kmail run on Windows?

Mutt should run on Losedows : I certainly haven't tried.

> Although I run KDE, I tend to avoid kde apps like the plague :
> after my experience with KDE4 so would you

You are very much behind the times !
KDE 5 has long been mature : give it a try.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Róbert Čerňanský]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 15:39:14 -0800
Jigme Datse <jigme.datse@datsemultimedia.com> wrote:

> I'm using Claws Mail though I'm not sure if it is a valid answer, I do
> know that it's the answer I have decided on.  Yes, Thunderbird is
> still installed, but I don't have a clue when I last used it.  The
> last time, was when I wanted to see if things in Thunderbird were
> working better (for a specific message) than in Claws Mail.  And no,
> not really. Though it may have been useful for that specific message.

+1 for Claws Mail; and it does run on Windows.

Robert


-- 
Róbert Čerňanský
E-mail: openhs@tightmail.com
Jabber: hs@jabber.sk

[gentoo-user] Re: Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-11-17, Róbert Čerňanský <openhs@tightmail.com> wrote:

> +1 for Claws Mail; and it does run on Windows.

I don't suppose Claws will talk to MS Exchange unless IMAP/SMTP are
enabled?

I'm currently using Hiri, but getting fed up with the bugs and lack of
features. It looks like Thunderbird with the OWL plugin is the only
other option that understands the OWA protocol.

I'm a bit confused regarding Evolution, apparently it used to support
OWA, but all the recent documentation I can find only mentions EWS,
and AFAICT that's a different protocol.  I'd install it and try, but
it requires something like 30 other packages as dependencies.

--
Grant

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Wols Lists]

On 17/11/2021 11:55, Róbert Čerňanský wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 15:39:14 -0800
> Jigme Datse <jigme.datse@datsemultimedia.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'm using Claws Mail though I'm not sure if it is a valid answer, I do
>> know that it's the answer I have decided on.  Yes, Thunderbird is
>> still installed, but I don't have a clue when I last used it.  The
>> last time, was when I wanted to see if things in Thunderbird were
>> working better (for a specific message) than in Claws Mail.  And no,
>> not really. Though it may have been useful for that specific message.
> 
> +1 for Claws Mail; and it does run on Windows.
> 
I'll have to try Claws - my make.conf includes -gtk -gnome, so Evolution 
isn't a very good fit ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 17 Nov 2021 17:57:30 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:

> > +1 for Claws Mail; and it does run on Windows.
> >   
> I'll have to try Claws - my make.conf includes -gtk -gnome, so
> Evolution isn't a very good fit ...

Claws uses gtk, but it is a hard dependency so not affected by your USE
flags. I've used it for years, on KDE, and am happy with it.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full
house and four people died.

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