I started using Thunderbird for the first time in many years a few days ago. I honestly really like it. I don't know what's motivating the many others to switch back, but privacy concerns have to be one of them.

Pros:

  * For times when I have slow or no internet, I can still read and compose email, and it will be quite responsive
  * It works with all the mail accounts I use, like my gmail account I'm trying to depricate, and the fastmail account that now hosts my own email address
  * The Enigmail plugin is probably close to the best UI one can create for GPG
  * While the UNIX romantic in me would prefer to use Mutt all the time, even my finely tuned Mutt setup can't seamlessly deal with things like HTML emails all the time.

Cons:

  * It's a huge software package, and often takes quite a bit of memory
  * I don't currently know how to make it tie into a keyring for storing passwords, so I either have to let it store my email account passwords in plain text, or essentially have a second master password
  * It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it's not bad either. the UI is at this point pretty unremarkable, so while it doesn't amaze, it doesn't confuse too much either
  * I don't know its keyboard shortcuts, or even if they exist, well yet, so I'm using the mouse a lot

> Cons: It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it's not bad either. the UI is at this point pretty unremarkable, so while it doesn't amaze, it doesn't confuse too much either

You can choose from hundreds of community-contributed add-ons to customize Thunderbird's UI, or you could write one yourself.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes...

> Cons: I don't know its keyboard shortcuts, or even if they exist, well yet, so I'm using the mouse a lot

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts

Thunderbird at this point is mostly maintained by community members. Feel free to get involved.

- Sane keyboard navigation between read, unread and mail threads next, previous

- Control over my emails instead of being behind a wall

- Supports all the features of SMTP instead of what the web application guy decided to provide

- Graphical representation of common text patterns used in emails since the early days

- Allows me to store all my contacts information without sharing it with whatever server somewhere in the internet

- Aggregation of multiple accounts

- A very cool feature of editing existing emails as new ones, instead of doing a copy-paste dance

- I favour native applications over web ones when given the choice

EDIT: Forgot to mention NNTP support

I can't speak for everyone, but I've experimented with Thunderbird because: (1) I didn't want to trust a third party with all of my emails, (2) I wanted a client that supported PGP, and (3) I wanted a client that would work offline when traveling.

I've since given up on PGP and offline access for the most part and have been using FastMail's web interface.

It works, I know it and it handles my several GB mail archive with 1000+ folders with grace, on top of that it's simple and does not do more than it needs to.

Having a client for all my mail accounts while keeping them separated. Offline functionality. Also, signed/encrypted mail.

local storage, multiple accounts, separate inboxes, doesn't try to be too clever

+1

Will add no adverts, no 1000s of ajax calls trying to show things unrelated to email, does one thing and does it well, works well on slow connections, does load one day and require me to understand the new UI moving mails to tabs or whatever that stupid thing gmail did a while back, No harvesting of my mails

Question is, why do people use webmail instead of thunderbird

Well except with the new auto-discover when configuring an e-mail account (workaround: work offline, it will skip the wizard).

Or you could just configure the email account manually.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manual-account-configur...

I use it to read mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP portal: nntp://news.gmane.org I wish there was an addon that synced my "read messages". It is difficult to keep up to date on popular mailing lists unless you look at them throughout the day (and that means different devices/locations for me).

I can write code to parse the Thunderbird email files, extract email addresses and upload them to my CRM.

I can backup my email. To anyone who thinks GMail will be around forever, Google "Ozymandias".

I like its RSS feeds management. I follow lots of blogs and discussion forums, and being able to organize them by subject into multiple folder levels is a major convenience for me.