I’ve been an Airmail (Mac) user for many years now. But it’s been really buggy lately and there’s no motivation to fix the issues apparently. So I switched to Thunderbird about a month ago after a lot of research. It’s … ok.

• Search is great.
• Seeing stats/charts on my last 20 years of emails is super interesting.
• Composing emails is not great, but I use a markdown plugin that makes it better … but it’s still pretty bad UX.
• I hate the way it quotes previous emails with “>” for each line instead of an indented block quote. Maybe I’m missing the setting to turn that off.
• I miss having an avatar/icon for each sender. It let me quickly visually scan my inbox for the person I want to talk to instead of parsing through all the text.
• The spacing of elements in certain places is weird and inconsistent. In places where it’s too tight it feels cramped and bothers me.
• You can’t compose a reply inline. You just have to use a floating window on top of the rest of the app.
• I miss the one-key shortcuts to label and archive emails. This was originally a GMail feature and Airmail also implemented it.
• Sending an email doesn’t happen in the background. You have to stare at a progress bar modal while it sends, and it seems to take forever. I just want to move on to my next email but I’m stuck waiting.
• The tabbed interface is really nice. It’s definitely an underrated feature.
• I wish it had super advanced rules like you get with MailMate. But what it offers is fine for 99% of users.

Again, I might be missing some settings to correct some of these issues, so take it all with a grain of salt. But these are my takeaways after about a month of usage.