I don't particularly hate it (I'm used to it after years and years and the changes have been very progressive, probably) except for the change in the "Get Mail" button. It used to be a big clear button with text, and now it's just a small arrow.
Old: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/uploads/gallery/images/2021-10-11-13-20-13-5076f8.png
New (upper left corner) : https://149677182.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/thundebrird-planned-redesign.jpg
Looked at the staff list for a product manager, or a UX designer ... eventually found "product and business development manager" (and "product design manager" and almost everyone else is an engineer. I'm guessing the product and design people are super overstretched and don't have a lot of sway. So that would explain why the UX is what it is.
It's quite functional but the UX is poor. I had to Google how to add a second account. That should be very intuitive to locate for a newbie. It feels very much like other FOSS: built by developers, for developers. I think they could unlock a lot more customers if they employed a designer and product manager.
Yeah, the UX could do with some improvement but IME once UX people have their claws in they change the design every 6 months to give themselves something to do. Anyone who works in the industry surely shares this pain.
Huh, I've always really liked the Thunderbird search; it's really fast, and the clickable date filter is so much easier than any other such UI I've tried. But maybe I search more by date-ranges than most people :)
Agreed on all points, and yet it's still terrible. It does a 2000s-era "fuzzy search" which is infuriating, and just straight up misses exact matches all the time.
Indeed I end up using the date filter as a fallback. It is definitely fast so I can't live without it.
What aspects of the UX do you think that needs improvement? For me the default layout (sidebar for email accounts and folders, upper frame for email list and lower frame for single email) looks very good. The pain is in finding the setting that I need to adjust and specifying criteria for searching emails. However if the improvement is only about making it look better, then I wouldn't buy it because "modern" designs consume more screen space and GPU. Better to have Hacker News than Discourse.
How odd. I think Thunderbird's search is it's most amazing feature.
Maybe that's because I'm a programmer. It can do a multi keyword stem search on literally gigabytes of emails, and return the results in 10's of milliseconds. It looks instantaneous. It's genuinely shocking to me how fast it's inverted index is.
And ... the results are accurate. It's so fast I sometimes have doubted it, and checked the result with grep. It's always right - and grep is much slower. Outlook in comparison, which is one of the few other desktop email clients remaining standing, is just terrible - it's search is slow, inaccurate and so feature bloated you never can be quite sure what corpus it's considering. And it corrupts itself regularly. But I guess comparing it to Outlook is setting a very low bar.
im curious which features you find powerful? as email clients go, it seems to be almost as basic as it comes, with many before it having far far more features.
It's really powerful in many ways but god it's UX is still awful, especially the configurations. The search if pathetic!