Unfortunately, I dislike thunderbird with a passion. In my anecdotal experience, its search is terrible - not to mention that there are two of it: a search option in the top panel that misses about 50% of relevant messages, and a very featureful search option buried within the menu bar that misses about 20% of relevant messages. Out of necessity, I've trained myself to just reboot to Windows any time I really need to find a particular email that I know I have somewhere. I also don't particularly like Thunderbird's UI, but that is something I'm able to compromise on.

Not meant to be a rant, but rather: please, someone, is this really the best we have?

Yea :(

Most everyone has moved to webmail implementations, since it's good enough. I think even folks with the tech know-how to self-host a webmail client have done so. Personally, I use RoundCube.

Wait, what? I found thunderbird search to be a super power, so much more reliable (and fast) than outlook.

I'm in the same boat. I've even installed Thunderbird and synced a mail account just to be able to find a specific mail that neither webmail nor the Android app were able to find.

12 years ago I reported you can’t search for the word wedding, as it find any email that was sent on a Wednesday: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844

Did it ever get fixed? Wasn’t fixed when I tried about 2 years ago.

Interesting... you're right, this is giving me lots of wednesdays.

Search is still as bad as it ever was, unfortunately it remains the most feature complete alternative (and free).

And of course, Microsoft makes it impossible to use their services with it. Or so difficult you just give up after it breaks for the 5th time in a month.

> There exists no mail client that is as full featured as outlook

Possibly. It may also be the most feature-bloated unintuitive UI. Using Linux myself, but always astounded when helping my non-technical mother with the latest murky weirdness thrown at her by Outlook. Some people just need simple mail facilities, not a Rube Goldberg 'ribbonware' cube. And on Windows maybe most people want easy & simple.

> Some people just need simple mail facilities, not a Rube Goldberg 'ribbonware' cube.

Fortunately for those people, mutt still exists.

2nd for Thunderbird, I like it alot

I have really tried to like Thunderbird. I can't. Its search is broken, it's very slow, it inserts awkward formatting in emails (Ie space below and above each line), the reply functionality is awk etc. I know it's time to go when I have to switch back to fastmail's web client to do anything "serious".

I still have it installed because I want to like it, but.. No. This post has inspired me to delete it.

Have you maybe configured it to search online or something?

I have used TB for years and still use it daily, daily getting some 30+ emails, that I tag and sort into folders and all that. My TB profile is several GB in size. Search is instant for me, on all my hardware, including older laptops and even an old X200, with some upgraded parts.

I am not sure how it could be slow, so I am guessing something like your search needs to look for things online maybe, instead of in small inboxes and local folders.

>several GB

I have all of my mail going back to 2001..

I have all my email going back to then too. Many GB. I always download all of it locally. The global search bar (which searches all of it) appears instantaneous. It must be well under under 200ms. Every time I've verified the result with grep the results are accurate. I have no idea how they get it so fast.

Searching within a folder is different. It does a linear scan. If you don't search the body it's fast enough - a few seconds I guess on a big folder. If you search the body of the email in a big file, then yes it can take a while.

The Spacing isn't that weird. It just wraps paragraphs inside of paragraph tags. If you use Shift-enter you get a new line w/out a paragraph. The only real change I've had to do there is just hit enter once, where I used to hit twice.

Evolution.

I would add though, that TB has features, that Outlook does not have, so it is not like TB only implements a subset of functionality that Outlook offers, but rather it implements different features and, at least for me, it is way better than Outlook ever was.