When this type of stuff starts happening, I take it as a sign that the software has reached "critical mass", is now in a runaway cycle of increasing abuse of its users, and migrate away as quickly as possible.

Thunderbird, years ago for me.

If a human acts abusive towards me, it is logical to end the relationship, even if it is years old.

I am a tolerant person, so once or twice I may accept excuses and justifications, but after that, it's time to distance myself.

I don't see why it should be any different from software. If I feel like I am dependent on it and "can't" move away, all the more reason to prioritize finding alternatives.

It is irrelevant whether the causes are incompetence, malice, or "accidental", the result is all the same, and I cannot allow it.

There is still, somehow, nothing I've found that's better than Thunderbird for an open source desktop GUI email client. Little choice but to allow it for many users like myself.

Worse still - even many of the proprietary ones now rely on 3rd party servers for "cloud" features, or are bloated and ugly electron apps.

KMail is pretty great IME.

Sounds like a pretty reasonable personal choice to me, I don’t know why you’re being downvoted without any explanatory comments.

There's not much in the email clients landscape; almost nothing in Linux, actually. I suppose that this is because nowadays almost all the users read email from web clients.

For me TB just works (especially because I'm locked at the ESR version, 68), however, I've never been extremly happy of it.

"I know I shouldn't stay with them, but they are a good person, and even if they beat me, I just don't know if there are any better options out there."

No offense intended, that's what your comment sounds like.

If you start looking, I bet you will find some options.

There is a variety of desktop mail clients, but the vast majority (of cross platform _and_ open source) is small-ish unkown-ish programs. The plugin system is in my opionion important (like for browsers) functionality, so popularity of a client is a significant factor, in order to have plugins available.

Evolution is possibly the only valid competitor, however, it's not cross-platform as Thunderbird.

I did start looking, and I didn’t find anything’ better. It seems most of the people who cared about local mail clients moved to either:

- online services, which are way worse Re: auto-updates, they do not even ask.

- mail clients with limited HTML support, which are not usable with many online stores I want to use.

Which mail client are you using?