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Great for a free email client and I love supporting opensource
December 29, 2023

Great for a free email client and I love supporting opensource

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Thunderbird

I have been using Gmail as my email client for about 10 years. But for some reason, starting about 2 years ago, certain emails just wouldn't download (using POP3, not IMAP). So I needed another email client to cross-reference, and make sure I wasn't missing anything important. I still use Gmail as my primary client for about 8 of my 10 email addresses.
  • Successfully downloads all of my email
  • Allows me to connect via IMAP so it's synced with my actual email server
  • Not nearly as clean or nice-looking as Gmail
  • Easy to navigate threading and search capability seems limited
  • Very slow and clunky. I am still combing through about 10,000 emails that I'm slowly trying to delete (mostly junk/spam/transactional emails) and if I highlight even just like 20 emails at a time it takes about 5 seconds to delete them so no way to do this efficiently
  • More efficient email navigation and answering = more efficient work time for me

Do you think Thunderbird delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Thunderbird's feature set?

No

Did Thunderbird live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Thunderbird go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Thunderbird again?

Yes

I like that it's free, I like that it's open-source, and the fact that it allows IMAP lets me have this on all 3 laptops and it's synced.

I would never consider using it as my primary email client, however; just too clunky and can't navigate around fast enough the way I do with Gmail. And not even close to having all the features I'd need that Gmail does: 30 second undo-sending, canned responses, easy-to-create signatures for each email address (I literally toggle over to Gmail, compose a message, and paste my sig into the body of Thunderbird emails, so clunky), all spam ends up in my inbox even after I've marked enough as spam that it should know, email labeling and filtering... Gmail is just way more advanced and feature-ful. But, Thunderbird does beat my ridiculous RoundCube webmail interface!