I have been using K9 for a long time on Android. No complaints. I guess most Apple users will simply use the default email client, which works well and is probably better integrated and has a better UI than Thunderbird.
On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email/CardDAV/CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.
It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.
IMAP is a horrifically insufficient protocol. Literally every mail provider just implements their own custom JSON protocol to use with their own proprietary apps. Fastmail created JMAP which was meant to be an open source standard but so far only Fastmail uses it so it's just another provider specific protocol and client.
I do think 2027 might be the year that JMAP finally gets wider adoption! Between Thunderbird using Stalwart for their hosted product, and the fact that the new agentic tools are very good at writing JMAP integrations, I expect plenty of much better JMAP tooling.
I'm also close to a much more releasable version of the proxy which was first written back in 2014: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl/ -- which can wrap existing IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV/Submission infrastructure so you can access it via JMAP.
Not sure what the difference is then. I use iCloud Mail and didn’t have problems with search on iOS or MacOS, I did however have plenty of issues with search when syncing my work Outlook email via Mail.app, so I assumed there was something special about iCloud (similarly to how Mail.app offers push email only for iCloud and FastMail). I’ve imported decades of email into my account so it’s not about a small email volume either.
I don’t know what most do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps.
If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to Mail Accounts, click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.
Oh for sure. Huge assumption on my part. I just feel like 90% of people I work and interact with have a gmail account, and the last 5 companies I've worked at used gmail. I think the last time I setup Apple Mail was for my Grandma so she could see her old Cox account emails and Gmail emails in the same app.
Absolutely not. I see a huge number of iPhone users for in person tech support and most use the Apple Mail app. These are ordinary people who know nothing about pocket computers.
Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.
I recently switched from android back to iOS and tried to use mail.app for everything, as I rather like it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t sync properly with Gmail. I am in the process of de-googling my life so that’s okay with me. I use mail.app with my fastmail account and it’s perfect.
I think you can actually add other providers to Gmail, but my comment was about how most people I know only use Gmail, and they have no need to configure their os-of-choice's mail app. I guess that was kind of implied. Sorry if I was ambiguous!
I might be an anomaly. I've ran iPhones before and have an iCloud email address presumably, but have only ever used the Gmail app for email on my iOS devices. And on my other machines I just use the web app. This seems to be the same for most people I've worked with in the last 5 years or so. Obviously it's super anecdotal and just from observation.
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.
Isn't a lot of that just the suckiness of the IMAP protocol? Mozilla is pushing to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, and they're planning on using it in their upcoming Thundermail hosted email service.
I get this, but most email is through Google and Microsoft in NA, at least, neither of which seem to care to support JMAP at all, on fact they are getting locked down more and more.
Obviously they want you to use the web interface so they can show you ads and gather more data about you (for ads).
JMAP support turns out to be a strong signal for the business model of an e-mail provider. IMAP they have to have, JMAP is for those who actually care about supporting local client software.
I'm sorry but fairemail has easily the most convoluted UI I have ever had the misfortune to gaze upon in my life. Like seriously what the hell is going on there.
It's quite cluttered UI for sure but it actually works and you actually get notifications when new mails come in, which is more than could be said about k9 the last two times I tried it.
I don't understand how scrolling is so bad. There's some kind of frame-in-a-frame effect where both frames try to scroll at the same time, and it just rapidly blinks one of the scroll bars on the edge.
Search on desktop thunderbird sucks too. I wanted to find an email with file://foo/bar, but it ignored the non latin characters and still couldn't find it. I gave up and grepped the mbox archive instead.
I'm sorry, are you claiming that Apple Mail has good search? Like, the thing that had search so bad that they had to explain that they had once again fixed search in the latest OS on stage at WWDC?
I bounced off of k9 several times. I could never get it to actually work reliably. I would get an email and never get a notification unless I opened the app to manually check. It was like the bad old days of pop3.
Awful, awful app. Fairemail was much better for a power user.
Standalone email has really been a frustration when it comes to using Linux. I was happy with Mailspring, but it doesn't really work with my window manager. Thunderbird does way too much and its default search behavior is unacceptably bad. I've tried a few other clients and been extremely unhappy with them for various reasons.
Tried a couple of other clients from time to time (mostly when OAUTH logins for GMail and Outlook365 weren't implemented yet), but haven't been convinced to switch.
I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.
Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:
> Designed for growth
Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
If your e-mail provider supports it, Customize From Address allows you to make a one-off minor alteration to your From address without having to create a new identity in Account Settings. For example, if your From address is John Doe <john@example.com> you may want to change it to John Doe <john+doe@example.com> or John <john@example.com>.
My usecase:
I have one email account with multiple aliases.
I added it to iOS mail with the main alias.
I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more "neutral toned", also one I'd expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...
Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.
I report a bug in the app, and the way it happens: it throws up an email editor, with debug info attached to a partially pre-filled form mail. However if its sender is not the alias I set up at the bank, it will get rejected, and will have to do lots if identification turns etc...
Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I'd need to log in twice to the same account to be able to do this. Also apple mail is a piece of ... modern outlook, to be really rude, so I'm interested in alternatives.
In iOS Mail aliases aren't available only with the email providers that you can pick directly on the Add Account screen. But if have an account with someone else and had to add the IMAP/SMTP servers manually, you can add an alias in Account Settings -> Email -> Add Another Email.
If you have my-personal-domain.tld and you have 57 catch-all addresses then to send mail from them you have to add 57 email addresses in there. People know this “feature”. It’s just not what it is being discussed here.
If you ask me for a contact email I will tell you something like jaksmit5@basilikum.monster. Editing the FROM field allows me to write an email to you.
If you ever start sending me spam I can just block that address. Especially helpful with companies.
You can also use it for sorting emails.
It's honestly a basic feature of an email client. Even if you don't have your own domain stuff like the plus sign for aliases exists with many providers (or at least with gmail).
Just noting that the thundermail email service (not to be confused for the app) - allows setting up a limited number of custom domains and subdomains with catch all aliases - so I could move my s.hypertekst.net domain over.
Can be an alias, can be a catch-all email on your domain. Select the right email account (here, email account ≠ email address) with the right pre-configured credentials and that email will be sent, if not it will fail as it should.
It’s that simple and basic feature. But apparently email clients decided that’s not the right way and they make you pre-add every single bloody email address you ever want to use — this is specially painful for personal domains and catch-all addresses, especially the one-off ones.
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.
If by "input box" you mean "drop down list" and by "anything" you mean "any of my account's configured email addresses" then yes.. but FastMail doesn't just let you put anything in the From field - on the web or Android as far as what my subscription shows me.
It definitely does for me in both web and android. You can setup specific hardcoded aliases for routing purposes but I have a wildcard/catchall and I can put anything in the From when I compose or reply to an email.
I'd guess it has something to do with Proton Mail's End to End Encryption. They might generate separate keys for each email address or add DNS records for autocrypt.
I'm on Android, but tbh I'm quite happy with Thunderbird mobile. It's not fancy, but generally works well. Though I'm not an email junkie on mobile, mostly use it to check some info like MFA code, magic link etc.
I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.
Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!
So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It's been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn't buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.
Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc
I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org's on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)
I picked K9 among the other clients because of that interface so I was in that 50% of users that were pissed off by the new UI. Luckily email protocols did not change and I can still sideload the APK on all my devices.
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.
It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.
I don't know what you're talking about. As you said mail hasn't changed that much, I've been using Thunderbird all that time, and except for an improved default theme, they honestly haven't changed much about their core features. In that time I was able to remove several plugins that have been added to core thunderbird, like threaded conversations, google calendar and contact support.
I think the biggest change has been that people nowadays expect more from a regular email client.
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
GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device
Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways
Historically that hasn't been my experience, but it looks like that's because I never enabled the Solr-based Full-Text Search! Thanks for mentioning this, as I'm going to turn this on right away:
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
How long do you imagine it takes to fully index 100 emails? 1000? It's likely under a minute even for 10,000. And it's work that's only done once, they don't need to rebuild the entire index every time a new email is added. They absolutely could (and should if they don't already) index all locally downloaded e-mails. It's bonkers not to do it.
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.
it's also much too trusting of the senders From field. I get emails all the time that look like they come from Apple or a bank, etc. I have to tap the name before it shows the actual from address.
Yeah that too! I've only had an iPhone for a few years but as soon as I used Mail I immediately understood why my parents got phished. Mail hid all signals people would normally use. Their spam detection is bad too. In my first week I got a PayPal used to buy bitcoin scam and neither Gmail nor Thunderbird showed it (both flagged as spam). Both also just showed it was an empty email with only a PDF attachment whereas Mail showed what looked like a normal email, including an address that looked like PayPal's.
I also notice it doesn't handle relayed emails well. I have a bunch of dummy emails and Mail doesn't show me the relayed name, which really hinders my ability to track and combat spam
I wish it could do something what should be seemingly incredible simple task - sync and download ALL the email.
But afaik Mail iOS can’t do it, Gmail ios app can’t do it , and no other mail app I tried seems to be able to, which seems absurd.
All I want is all the mail and attachments downloaded locally the way normal desktop mail clients work. Not the last 90 days of it (Gmail ios max) - all of it, I don’t care if it’s many gigabytes or more, i just want the full mail, so that something as full text local search of the email would actually work…
It has a few annoyances. For example it doesn't let you see which email address the sender used, or to which of your email addresses it was sent, instead it only shows the person's name. Also it can't attach pictures without having them inline.
> Right now, we are focused heavily on getting the core foundations right.
Are the core foundations not right in the rejected shared code? Why not fix that instead to get the core right everywhere?
Especially if the goal is "ultimate goal is seamless cross-device experience.", which involves those other apps
Otherwise not much to look at, the screenshots are bog (sub)standard designs a lot of email apps have, no polish despite the claims
> We’re polishing the essentials: a clutter-free, easy-to-read inbox layout paired with a clean,
"from" and "to" and big gaps is clutter, wasting precious space on small even screens
(The logos on the sign in screen are also misaligned, but maybe that's not a polished "essential")
> modern editor that lets you format messages smoothly without getting in your way.
Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.
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...
I’m using subadressing, would be lovely to have a mobile app that is aware of that and fills it in automatically and also lets me edit/pick the subadressing part of my email in the from field.
Apple Mail completely breaks when you have 100.000+ mails in an IMAP account. Even on MacOS it‘s unusable (search, index) while Thundebird works flawlessly.
The Finder on MacOS breaks when it has to deal with more than about 10,000 of anything. The MacOS Finder is chock full of O[n] and perhaps even O[n^2] algorithms that have been there, unfixed, since System 7. Back in 1996, a user with more than 100 files in a folder was unusual, so those algorithms worked fine. Nowadays not so much.
Proof: Copy 10k files from one hard drive to another with the Finder (not the same drive; you have to prevent COW). Now do the same thing with e.g. cp or rsync on the command line.
I also noticed a very slow refresh in Finder since like 5 years ago. Apple clearly needs to fix those issues, maybe using some LLM if they can‘t do it by hand anymore.
I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don't want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.
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.
There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
There is too little in modern "nice" designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.
I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?
Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.
But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won't distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.
edit: just checked, and the most disgusting thing the extra internal horizontal top border of the text contents of the tab titles got removed. Still ugly, but nor instant Alt+F4... now I can bear it until I find about:config.
I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.
It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.
I think his point is that, even if you think it’s ugly, the nature of a web browser makes it irrelevant. The web browser is a window, 99.9% of the surface area goes to the website. Which is good. We could have prettier browsers which showed off more chrome, but that would be bad because we want to see the website.
Also, the UX of most browsers is basically the same. Browser UI has converged on one layout that works, and Firefox has it. It’s really indistinguishable from chrome.
The new sidebar design was unnecesary, a waste of space, and the rounded corner cutting into the website is flair with no functional purpose.
The fact that I've historically needed to monkey patch the Firefox chrome CSS (and will have to again to remove the unnecessary bar left of tree-style-tabs) would to me imply poor design.
I'll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I'm at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It's mediocre at best
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)
Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'm a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don't know how to navigate. Which is understandable
What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
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.
There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.
For those seeking a non-profit alternative that syncs between iOS and Mac OS, give Marco a try. We support proper offline-first behaviour and instant push notifications, among many other features.
I built this for myself out of frustration with Apple Mail and cover all operational costs. Privacy and speed are two of our most important pillars.
> why the hell would I sign up for a service that does what email/IMAP does in the first place?
I don't know nor use the app promoted by GP, but in general the problem with apple is that they don't support the standard email/IMAP push, and only some 3rd parties have approval to use the non-standard apple email push (Fastmail I think). So people have come up with ways to get around apple's arbitrary restrictions.
I recently switched to Fastmail. When I was asking an LLM about using it with the native Apple apps, it mentioned this approval that was needed, and that it didn't always work. I'd be interested to hear some first-hand experiences.
My dad has been using his own domain for email for about 25 years and has bounced around to various hosts... random hosting providers. He uses Apple Mail and hasn't ever mentioned having an issue. Though I'm unsure if he uses push of fetch. I guess I always assumed he was using push, but maybe not.
It's pretty reliable. I'm actually quite amazed that it's been this long and Apple hasn't opened it more widely. We just happened to be in the right room at the right time to get a custom contract with Apple to have a signing key. The underlying tech is in a couple of open source projects.
Of course we're all hoping that clients move to JMAP at some point, where push is first-class citizen and we don't need the very custom hack that Apple uses to receive pushes right now.
That's good to hear. There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time.
I've been using the Fastmail app to get started, which has been working great and the migration tools worked really well. Once I'm fully migrated I may want to set up the native apps for some added OS integration.
> a service that does what email/IMAP does in the first place?
Haven’t dug into this yet, but are you saying it isn’t a pure eMail client? That it’s a service to which you bodily hand off all your eMail passwords, and therefore the keys to your digital kingdom? That it’s someone else’s computer that’s retrieving your eMails for you?
Holy shite, how _stupid_ are people?
Like, holy MiTM exploiting, Batman. I would NEVER hand off eMail access to a third party. That’s begging to have your entire online existence destroyed.
Hate to break it to you, but it's a multi billion dollar TAM. Have a look at Superhuman. Yes, it's the definition of MiTM. Especially if your content is being chucked into OpenAI with no regard.
When I first saw the link, I thought, “Oh cool! A new platform using the Thunderbird name!”
Then I realized it was Mozilla’s app. And just like that, the excitement was gone.
I try not to bad-mouth products, but Thunderbird and I did NOT get along. Clunky integrations, a painful Gmail connection, and basic functionality issues made it one of the worst email clients I’ve ever used.
Of course, I’m also annoyingly picky about my tools, so maybe it’s a me problem.
Interesting. So far, Thunderbird has been the only mail client that "just works" for me. Then again, I self host my email & so no weird Gmail or Outlook bullshit.
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.
Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It's one reason that I'm not particularly fond of it.
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.
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
(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')
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.
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.
Netflix used to have codes you can search that were by category. I think it might work work on browser. Was a much better way to discover stuff (there's way more categories than you would expect)
Searching the same codes on an Apple TV is a very weird experience. It seems to sort of start to recognise what you're doing and then also give you a random assortment of the same crap it thinks your account wants to see.
What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can't vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a "first look". What am I missing that is so exciting? I don't understand what is going on here that is so neat. There's nothing here I can't pump out in a week or two at worst.
I'm confused at everyone's excitement because it's become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren't up to speed with modern practices, it's helpful to have an iOS app.
Am I talking like the guy that dissed Drew Houston, saying oh I can put together sshfs and a couple other things and build out Dropbox. Drew rightly corrected the engineer on ycombinator many years ago to say that end users want a finished product not a bunch of tools.
But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.
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?
I have been using K9 for a long time on Android. No complaints. I guess most Apple users will simply use the default email client, which works well and is probably better integrated and has a better UI than Thunderbird.
On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email/CardDAV/CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.
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.
It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.
IMAP is a horrifically insufficient protocol. Literally every mail provider just implements their own custom JSON protocol to use with their own proprietary apps. Fastmail created JMAP which was meant to be an open source standard but so far only Fastmail uses it so it's just another provider specific protocol and client.
I do think 2027 might be the year that JMAP finally gets wider adoption! Between Thunderbird using Stalwart for their hosted product, and the fact that the new agentic tools are very good at writing JMAP integrations, I expect plenty of much better JMAP tooling.
I'm also close to a much more releasable version of the proxy which was first written back in 2014: https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl/ -- which can wrap existing IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV/Submission infrastructure so you can access it via JMAP.
I use icloud and this does not match my experience ... apple mail search has been insufficient on ios and macos for 15 years or more at this point ...
I use icloud also and concur. Search in Apple Mail is poor.
Not sure what the difference is then. I use iCloud Mail and didn’t have problems with search on iOS or MacOS, I did however have plenty of issues with search when syncing my work Outlook email via Mail.app, so I assumed there was something special about iCloud (similarly to how Mail.app offers push email only for iCloud and FastMail). I’ve imported decades of email into my account so it’s not about a small email volume either.
Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven't set up an email client in 20 years
I don’t know what most do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps.
If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to Mail Accounts, click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.
Oh for sure. Huge assumption on my part. I just feel like 90% of people I work and interact with have a gmail account, and the last 5 companies I've worked at used gmail. I think the last time I setup Apple Mail was for my Grandma so she could see her old Cox account emails and Gmail emails in the same app.
The default Mail app still doesn’t support push Gmail, does it? That’s the only thing keeping me from using it. I otherwise strongly prefer Mail.app.
That’s Google’s choice, not Apple’s lack of support.
Source? I thought Apple gated XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE so 3rd party accounts on the mail.app fallback to fetch/poll.
Push works with Yahoo and Exchange. Google used to allow it, but stopped (apparently in 2013): https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-26-gmail-push-notification-...
Also with FastMail. (I don’t use them but they’re on the top of my list next time I decide to switch.)
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/push-email-now-available-in-io...
Mail does support it, but Google refuses to allow it. They used to, in the past.
Absolutely not. I see a huge number of iPhone users for in person tech support and most use the Apple Mail app. These are ordinary people who know nothing about pocket computers.
Thanks for your data for sure. I used to work in customer facing hardware support, but only have my friends and coworkers to go off of now.
Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.
I recently switched from android back to iOS and tried to use mail.app for everything, as I rather like it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t sync properly with Gmail. I am in the process of de-googling my life so that’s okay with me. I use mail.app with my fastmail account and it’s perfect.
> Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app?
People here are discussing email apps, not Gmail apps.
Gmail apps only work with 1 provider (gmail), while email apps works with all email providers.
You can add other emails to the Gmail app actually
I think you can actually add other providers to Gmail, but my comment was about how most people I know only use Gmail, and they have no need to configure their os-of-choice's mail app. I guess that was kind of implied. Sorry if I was ambiguous!
I might be an anomaly. I've ran iPhones before and have an iCloud email address presumably, but have only ever used the Gmail app for email on my iOS devices. And on my other machines I just use the web app. This seems to be the same for most people I've worked with in the last 5 years or so. Obviously it's super anecdotal and just from observation.
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.
Isn't a lot of that just the suckiness of the IMAP protocol? Mozilla is pushing to add JMAP support to Thunderbird, and they're planning on using it in their upcoming Thundermail hosted email service.
Having to retype the search phrase is just a plain old ux bug
I get this, but most email is through Google and Microsoft in NA, at least, neither of which seem to care to support JMAP at all, on fact they are getting locked down more and more.
Obviously they want you to use the web interface so they can show you ads and gather more data about you (for ads).
JMAP support turns out to be a strong signal for the business model of an e-mail provider. IMAP they have to have, JMAP is for those who actually care about supporting local client software.
No, it starts by searching the emails that it has loaded locally first, and then there is a button if you want to search on the server.
> K9 and Thunderbird on Android suck.
Is there anything better though?
https://email.faircode.eu/
I'm sorry but fairemail has easily the most convoluted UI I have ever had the misfortune to gaze upon in my life. Like seriously what the hell is going on there.
It's quite cluttered UI for sure but it actually works and you actually get notifications when new mails come in, which is more than could be said about k9 the last two times I tried it.
Not free, but I've been an AquaMail user on Android for years. IMHO there is nothing better out there.
And for mac OS, there is MailMate (also not free}, which has it's quirks but damn is it good. I gave up on ThunderBird more than ten years ago.
Email clients demand to have dedicated, paid developers.
I don't understand how scrolling is so bad. There's some kind of frame-in-a-frame effect where both frames try to scroll at the same time, and it just rapidly blinks one of the scroll bars on the edge.
Why would you ever need to search emails more than maybe a day or two old?
Because as much as I often wish that it didn't, the past exists...
Common use case for me is tickets for events/activities that have the email attachment as ticket.
You buy the ticket some time in advance but then need to show it to enter the event.
Search on desktop thunderbird sucks too. I wanted to find an email with file://foo/bar, but it ignored the non latin characters and still couldn't find it. I gave up and grepped the mbox archive instead.
You can also prop up the "advanced search" in TB (ctrl-shift-f).
I'm sorry, are you claiming that Apple Mail has good search? Like, the thing that had search so bad that they had to explain that they had once again fixed search in the latest OS on stage at WWDC?
Things are a lot worse than Spotlight on a number of platforms...
Thunderbird for Android is just a fork of K9, after having acquired it. They're maintaining it for the foreseeable future.
I bounced off of k9 several times. I could never get it to actually work reliably. I would get an email and never get a notification unless I opened the app to manually check. It was like the bad old days of pop3.
Awful, awful app. Fairemail was much better for a power user.
Standalone email has really been a frustration when it comes to using Linux. I was happy with Mailspring, but it doesn't really work with my window manager. Thunderbird does way too much and its default search behavior is unacceptably bad. I've tried a few other clients and been extremely unhappy with them for various reasons.
Ditto - another long-time K9mail user on Android.
Tried a couple of other clients from time to time (mostly when OAUTH logins for GMail and Outlook365 weren't implemented yet), but haven't been convinced to switch.
I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.
Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:
> Designed for growth
Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
what does being able to edit the from field enable you to do?
The official explanation is as follows:
My usecase: I have one email account with multiple aliases.
I added it to iOS mail with the main alias. I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more "neutral toned", also one I'd expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...
Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.
I report a bug in the app, and the way it happens: it throws up an email editor, with debug info attached to a partially pre-filled form mail. However if its sender is not the alias I set up at the bank, it will get rejected, and will have to do lots if identification turns etc...
Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I'd need to log in twice to the same account to be able to do this. Also apple mail is a piece of ... modern outlook, to be really rude, so I'm interested in alternatives.
In iOS Mail aliases aren't available only with the email providers that you can pick directly on the Add Account screen. But if have an account with someone else and had to add the IMAP/SMTP servers manually, you can add an alias in Account Settings -> Email -> Add Another Email.
If you have my-personal-domain.tld and you have 57 catch-all addresses then to send mail from them you have to add 57 email addresses in there. People know this “feature”. It’s just not what it is being discussed here.
Use whatever identity you want. A server that you don't personally own will not normally allow that however. One more reason to self-host email.
If you ask me for a contact email I will tell you something like jaksmit5@basilikum.monster. Editing the FROM field allows me to write an email to you.
If you ever start sending me spam I can just block that address. Especially helpful with companies.
You can also use it for sorting emails.
It's honestly a basic feature of an email client. Even if you don't have your own domain stuff like the plus sign for aliases exists with many providers (or at least with gmail).
Just noting that the thundermail email service (not to be confused for the app) - allows setting up a limited number of custom domains and subdomains with catch all aliases - so I could move my s.hypertekst.net domain over.
https://support.tb.pro/hc/en-us/articles/51338950680467-How-...
You can enter any email address in that field:
any-user@any-domain.any-tld
Can be an alias, can be a catch-all email on your domain. Select the right email account (here, email account ≠ email address) with the right pre-configured credentials and that email will be sent, if not it will fail as it should.
It’s that simple and basic feature. But apparently email clients decided that’s not the right way and they make you pre-add every single bloody email address you ever want to use — this is specially painful for personal domains and catch-all addresses, especially the one-off ones.
If you use subadressing you need it to reply with the same address.
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.
If by "input box" you mean "drop down list" and by "anything" you mean "any of my account's configured email addresses" then yes.. but FastMail doesn't just let you put anything in the From field - on the web or Android as far as what my subscription shows me.
It definitely does for me in both web and android. You can setup specific hardcoded aliases for routing purposes but I have a wildcard/catchall and I can put anything in the From when I compose or reply to an email.
So by "anything" then you mean "anything under a domain I have a catch-all configured", which makes sense since you've proven you own that.
Ahh yes. Anything in the user section of the email, not the domain. This was not possible to do on protonmail.
The Thunderbird from field is free text. You get a warning about your server having to support it though.
Ahh yeah it was probably a protonmail limitation then. Or maybe needing to manually add to both proton and Thunderbird was the friction I remember.
I'd guess it has something to do with Proton Mail's End to End Encryption. They might generate separate keys for each email address or add DNS records for autocrypt.
The only other client I've seen that in is Claws. (Which is part of why I still use it, despite the various warts.)
Oh no, thunderbird for iOS lost one potential customer. They are doomed.
I'm on Android, but tbh I'm quite happy with Thunderbird mobile. It's not fancy, but generally works well. Though I'm not an email junkie on mobile, mostly use it to check some info like MFA code, magic link etc.
Me too, I just want to read my emails sometimes. And it works.
I like that ios keyboard is able to read OTPs from the native mail app. Wonder if this will work with Thunderbird but I’m guessing it won’t.
AFAIK it works with the Gmail app on iOS, so hopefully yes.
That would be very neat of course. Out of reach for me since I use 3rd-party keyboards that don't provide that.
I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.
Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!
So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?
I use FairEmail in Android.
I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It's been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn't buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.
> $99.99 for a lifetime license
Yeah, just a small hiccup. I can buy a whole phone with a hundred dollars.
Isnt K-9 Mail supposed to join forces with Thunderbird? K-9 Mail works fine for me.
Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc
Thunderbird for android is K9 just rebranded afaik.
I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org's on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)
I use ProfiMail on Android. Loving the app since Symbian era. K9Mail is ok too.
K9 with the old interface, the original one.
I picked K9 among the other clients because of that interface so I was in that 50% of users that were pissed off by the new UI. Luckily email protocols did not change and I can still sideload the APK on all my devices.
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.
It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.
I don't know what you're talking about. As you said mail hasn't changed that much, I've been using Thunderbird all that time, and except for an improved default theme, they honestly haven't changed much about their core features. In that time I was able to remove several plugins that have been added to core thunderbird, like threaded conversations, google calendar and contact support.
I think the biggest change has been that people nowadays expect more from a regular email client.
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
GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device
Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways
I don't know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.
Historically that hasn't been my experience, but it looks like that's because I never enabled the Solr-based Full-Text Search! Thanks for mentioning this, as I'm going to turn this on right away:
https://doc.dovecot.org/2.3/configuration_manual/fts/
My ActiveSync app does server side search using server side indexes just fine.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
How long do you imagine it takes to fully index 100 emails? 1000? It's likely under a minute even for 10,000. And it's work that's only done once, they don't need to rebuild the entire index every time a new email is added. They absolutely could (and should if they don't already) index all locally downloaded e-mails. It's bonkers not to do it.
I would totally use TheBat on Windows
Never heard of it but will chekc it out, thanks!
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.
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.
On linux I read my mail in emacs, and use notmuch for searching/indexing. It's amazing.
On the go I use a web browser on my phone for gmail or outlook. No apps. I try to minimize doing email on my phone because it's so awkward to type.
If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I'll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account
I tried but got an oauth error :-/ Hopefully it works soon!
We'll look into it! We'd love this to work for our customers.
The Mail app that comes with iOS is plenty.
Yeah, the only thing it doesn't do is shared inboxes with Microsoft Office accounts. I would really like to uninstall Microsoft Outlook.
> it doesn't do
For a company focused on privacy, I'd love GnuPG integrated into the mail app.
It does have S/MIME, I think?
It does. But I have used S/MIME maybe a handful of times in my career. Whereas, GnuPG dozens of times a day, and in my personal life.
Do you use GPG for signing primarily or also for email encryption? Dozens of times a day puts you in rarefied GnuPG air!
Basically for delivering and receiving encrypted payloads programmatically or manually.
And once in a while using it for email. :)
You'd be surprised how much GnuPG is used out in the wild.
Oh, that would be awesome.
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
it's also much too trusting of the senders From field. I get emails all the time that look like they come from Apple or a bank, etc. I have to tap the name before it shows the actual from address.
Yeah that too! I've only had an iPhone for a few years but as soon as I used Mail I immediately understood why my parents got phished. Mail hid all signals people would normally use. Their spam detection is bad too. In my first week I got a PayPal used to buy bitcoin scam and neither Gmail nor Thunderbird showed it (both flagged as spam). Both also just showed it was an empty email with only a PDF attachment whereas Mail showed what looked like a normal email, including an address that looked like PayPal's.
I also notice it doesn't handle relayed emails well. I have a bunch of dummy emails and Mail doesn't show me the relayed name, which really hinders my ability to track and combat spam
I agree, I often find what I am searching for quicker by using the Gmail app instead.
I wish it could do something what should be seemingly incredible simple task - sync and download ALL the email. But afaik Mail iOS can’t do it, Gmail ios app can’t do it , and no other mail app I tried seems to be able to, which seems absurd.
All I want is all the mail and attachments downloaded locally the way normal desktop mail clients work. Not the last 90 days of it (Gmail ios max) - all of it, I don’t care if it’s many gigabytes or more, i just want the full mail, so that something as full text local search of the email would actually work…
Preside can. I thought spark could too
As a daily Mail app user, approximately every 6 weeks, I wish it had the ability to show the full headers and raw message source.
It has a few annoyances. For example it doesn't let you see which email address the sender used, or to which of your email addresses it was sent, instead it only shows the person's name. Also it can't attach pictures without having them inline.
When did Thunderbird suddenly become cool again? Suddenly I'm hearing about it in all sorts of contexts.
It's 20+ years old. Is this part of some broader trend relating to mozilla i missed?
> Right now, we are focused heavily on getting the core foundations right.
Are the core foundations not right in the rejected shared code? Why not fix that instead to get the core right everywhere?
Especially if the goal is "ultimate goal is seamless cross-device experience.", which involves those other apps
Otherwise not much to look at, the screenshots are bog (sub)standard designs a lot of email apps have, no polish despite the claims
> We’re polishing the essentials: a clutter-free, easy-to-read inbox layout paired with a clean,
"from" and "to" and big gaps is clutter, wasting precious space on small even screens (The logos on the sign in screen are also misaligned, but maybe that's not a polished "essential")
> modern editor that lets you format messages smoothly without getting in your way.
The toolbar design is getting in the way
But why? What's the USP here?
Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.
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.
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...
I’m using subadressing, would be lovely to have a mobile app that is aware of that and fills it in automatically and also lets me edit/pick the subadressing part of my email in the from field.
Apple Mail completely breaks when you have 100.000+ mails in an IMAP account. Even on MacOS it‘s unusable (search, index) while Thundebird works flawlessly.
The Finder on MacOS breaks when it has to deal with more than about 10,000 of anything. The MacOS Finder is chock full of O[n] and perhaps even O[n^2] algorithms that have been there, unfixed, since System 7. Back in 1996, a user with more than 100 files in a folder was unusual, so those algorithms worked fine. Nowadays not so much.
Proof: Copy 10k files from one hard drive to another with the Finder (not the same drive; you have to prevent COW). Now do the same thing with e.g. cp or rsync on the command line.
I also noticed a very slow refresh in Finder since like 5 years ago. Apple clearly needs to fix those issues, maybe using some LLM if they can‘t do it by hand anymore.
I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don't want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.
was wondering the same. Mozilla seems out of touch
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.
There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
There is too little in modern "nice" designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.
I do not like the vertical tabs at all
Good thing you don’t have to use them.
I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?
Counterpoint: vertical tabs are way better
Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.
But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
Have you seen the new Nova theme? It’s horrible, especially with vertical tabs.
I took the screenshot with the nova theme enabled. That’s what it looks like. It’s a nothingburger.
That’s not how it looks in mine at all.
If that screenshot is of the Nova theme, then the Nova theme is very ugly.
No, it isn’t.
Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won't distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.
edit: just checked, and the most disgusting thing the extra internal horizontal top border of the text contents of the tab titles got removed. Still ugly, but nor instant Alt+F4... now I can bear it until I find about:config.
Nova looks great
I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.
It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t ugly for others. Or will you just not allow others to have this opinion?
It’s ugly.
I think his point is that, even if you think it’s ugly, the nature of a web browser makes it irrelevant. The web browser is a window, 99.9% of the surface area goes to the website. Which is good. We could have prettier browsers which showed off more chrome, but that would be bad because we want to see the website.
Also, the UX of most browsers is basically the same. Browser UI has converged on one layout that works, and Firefox has it. It’s really indistinguishable from chrome.
The allergy I have to some web browsers over others, even on iOS, makes that not a true assertion for me.
The new sidebar design was unnecesary, a waste of space, and the rounded corner cutting into the website is flair with no functional purpose.
The fact that I've historically needed to monkey patch the Firefox chrome CSS (and will have to again to remove the unnecessary bar left of tree-style-tabs) would to me imply poor design.
> some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous
With all due respect, what a low bar for beauty!
I'll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I'm at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It's mediocre at best
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)
These emails are hilarious - what is this screenshot from ?
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.
Zen is delightful to use, and based on Firefox. I just don't get what's going on at Mozilla.
Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'm a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don't know how to navigate. Which is understandable
What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
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.
GASP!
I don't care for the Material Design, even when Google did/does it.
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.
Here's the HN thread about the rebrand that "many people actually loved for its ingenuity" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425380
There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.
They're tools. I expect BM 085232, not the Book of Kells.
For those seeking a non-profit alternative that syncs between iOS and Mac OS, give Marco a try. We support proper offline-first behaviour and instant push notifications, among many other features.
I built this for myself out of frustration with Apple Mail and cover all operational costs. Privacy and speed are two of our most important pillars.
https://marcoapp.io
You might have the best intentions but why the hell would I sign up for a service that does what email/IMAP does in the first place?
Hosting is expensive too, free forever is another question in my mind.
Don't people remember what email IS anymore? Make me understand.
> why the hell would I sign up for a service that does what email/IMAP does in the first place?
I don't know nor use the app promoted by GP, but in general the problem with apple is that they don't support the standard email/IMAP push, and only some 3rd parties have approval to use the non-standard apple email push (Fastmail I think). So people have come up with ways to get around apple's arbitrary restrictions.
I recently switched to Fastmail. When I was asking an LLM about using it with the native Apple apps, it mentioned this approval that was needed, and that it didn't always work. I'd be interested to hear some first-hand experiences.
My dad has been using his own domain for email for about 25 years and has bounced around to various hosts... random hosting providers. He uses Apple Mail and hasn't ever mentioned having an issue. Though I'm unsure if he uses push of fetch. I guess I always assumed he was using push, but maybe not.
It's pretty reliable. I'm actually quite amazed that it's been this long and Apple hasn't opened it more widely. We just happened to be in the right room at the right time to get a custom contract with Apple to have a signing key. The underlying tech is in a couple of open source projects.
Of course we're all hoping that clients move to JMAP at some point, where push is first-class citizen and we don't need the very custom hack that Apple uses to receive pushes right now.
That's good to hear. There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time.
I've been using the Fastmail app to get started, which has been working great and the migration tools worked really well. Once I'm fully migrated I may want to set up the native apps for some added OS integration.
I (founder of Marco) also use a custom iCloud email domain, and have found Apple Mail to be an abysmal product. It belongs in the 2010s.
Local search should be single digit ms, for example.
There is a reason why the 3 big three are trying to phase out web/email standards, lets let them control the open web moar.
> a service that does what email/IMAP does in the first place?
Haven’t dug into this yet, but are you saying it isn’t a pure eMail client? That it’s a service to which you bodily hand off all your eMail passwords, and therefore the keys to your digital kingdom? That it’s someone else’s computer that’s retrieving your eMails for you?
Holy shite, how _stupid_ are people?
Like, holy MiTM exploiting, Batman. I would NEVER hand off eMail access to a third party. That’s begging to have your entire online existence destroyed.
Hate to break it to you, but it's a multi billion dollar TAM. Have a look at Superhuman. Yes, it's the definition of MiTM. Especially if your content is being chucked into OpenAI with no regard.
When I first saw the link, I thought, “Oh cool! A new platform using the Thunderbird name!”
Then I realized it was Mozilla’s app. And just like that, the excitement was gone.
I try not to bad-mouth products, but Thunderbird and I did NOT get along. Clunky integrations, a painful Gmail connection, and basic functionality issues made it one of the worst email clients I’ve ever used.
Of course, I’m also annoyingly picky about my tools, so maybe it’s a me problem.
Interesting. So far, Thunderbird has been the only mail client that "just works" for me. Then again, I self host my email & so no weird Gmail or Outlook bullshit.
apparently that is a native iOS application, I wonder whether they tried to use KMP to use same codebase with the android app
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.
Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It's one reason that I'm not particularly fond of it.
Thunderbird for Android is based on the 15+ year old K-9 Mail app while Thunderbird for iOS is a greenfield project.
Suggest keeping "A first look" in the title for clarity that this isn't a full release
Title: Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look
Should be: 2006.
(Not the headline. The announcement. Haha)
why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there's IOS app, maybe.
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?
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
What stops you from using these multiple addresses within iOS Mail?
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.
i feel i could die waiting for this. i am 54.
This still has some pretty glaring bugs.
On any desktop system I am able to have it connect flawlessly to any of my IMAP accounts.
On iOS, the exact same settings produces an auth failure, and I cannot move past account set-up.
Are you guys using emails?
About as often as I check my physical mailbox.
Magic login links tho…
Now does it come with that oh so annoying "Sent from my iPhone?"
But can it do IRC?
It's been 14 years since I reported you can't search for "wedding" in Bugzilla, have they ever fixed it, they hadn't last time I checked:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')
That thread is both hilarious and sad. Incredible that nobody has forked the project simply to implement a working search.
Betterbird exists actually and they fix bugs like that, which Mozilla just refuses to address for whatever reason
https://www.betterbird.eu/
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.
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?
Netflix used to have codes you can search that were by category. I think it might work work on browser. Was a much better way to discover stuff (there's way more categories than you would expect)
Searching the same codes on an Apple TV is a very weird experience. It seems to sort of start to recognise what you're doing and then also give you a random assortment of the same crap it thinks your account wants to see.
What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can't vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a "first look". What am I missing that is so exciting? I don't understand what is going on here that is so neat. There's nothing here I can't pump out in a week or two at worst.
I'm confused at everyone's excitement because it's become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren't up to speed with modern practices, it's helpful to have an iOS app.
Am I talking like the guy that dissed Drew Houston, saying oh I can put together sshfs and a couple other things and build out Dropbox. Drew rightly corrected the engineer on ycombinator many years ago to say that end users want a finished product not a bunch of tools.
But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.
There's much more to a good app than the code.
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?