• daddyjones
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    -177 months ago

    How many people still use an email client? Genuine question.

    I use either my phone or a web interface.

    • @[email protected]
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      547 months ago
      • offline access and archival
      • use with multiple providers
      • seamless integration with contacts and calendar of any provider
      • better keyboard shortcuts
      • multiple windows
      • end2end encryption via PGP keys, can use same keys as the rest of the system
      • more lightweight on system resources
      • themes, I guess?
      • @TCB13
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        27 months ago

        ^ Boils down to not being hostage to a single provider and whatever it offers.

    • @[email protected]
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      297 months ago

      I only recently start using it after also being a browser email user all my life.

      Kinda wondering what took me so long Thunderbird is great! don’t have to relearn questionable Ui between different email providers or re-login to check two mailboxes on the same provider.

      Only annoying thing is not supporting ProtonMail out of the box.

      • RBG
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        137 months ago

        That annoying thing is more on Protonmail though and I don’t mean that as a negative, just more difficult to connect when the provider wants to keep things secure.

        • @TCB13
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          27 months ago

          just more difficult to connect when the provider wants to keep things secure.

          Proton could’ve just implemented everything they did with IMAP/SMTP on Thunderbird + OpenPGP with the same level of security, but they decided not to. Yes, their solution is convenient but also close to everything else.

      • @TCB13
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        47 months ago

        Only annoying thing is not supporting ProtonMail out of the box.

        That’s Protons fault, they’re the ones that decided to ignore all the open and standard e-mail, contacts and calendar protocols out there and built their custom-everything stack to keep you vendor-locked into their interfaces.

    • @ceiphas
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      297 months ago

      And your Phone is not using a Client?

      • daddyjones
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        -27 months ago

        Of course it is, but I clearly meant a desktop client.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 months ago

      Web interfaces are so much worse than local apps IMO. And that doesn’t just include email, I always choose a local app over anything that runs in my browser.

    • @[email protected]
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      137 months ago

      Your phone’s email app is a client, but I digress… I hate using the browser to access emails. I use many different email accounts with multiple email providers to compartmentalize my emails and avoid spam. I used Thunderbird for years before switching to Geary and now back to Thunderbird.

    • @[email protected]
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      87 months ago

      I do, i dont want to have to access 5 accounts using the browser on 3 different websites

      Unfortunaly protonmail is not possible local (afaik) so i have to check there in the Browser.

    • @TheEntity
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      87 months ago

      How many email accounts do you have? It might be a huge factor. I have about 7 accounts I need to check regularly and I cannot imagine doing it manually for each. I can see it working for one or maybe two though.

    • @[email protected]
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      57 months ago

      If you self host your E-mail it’s way more recourse efficient not to host a web interface

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      I use a client because I don’t want microsoft to remember me when I go on other microsoft site besides their web email client.

      I guess I can use a dedicated browser for email, but that is pretty much just a email client using more resources.

    • @Olap
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      57 months ago

      Me. Outlook on my windows work box is hard to beat imo. Personal? All android’s default and web-ui

      • daddyjones
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        27 months ago

        Which is obviously not what I was saying at all…

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          That’s exactly what you’re saying.

          Your “genuine question” indicates that you have no capacity to understand that others may have different use cases to your own.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 months ago

      I have several mails for different projects. Also private + university mail. Then I have my Google mail that I exclusively use for everything related to android/app store.

      Checking all those mail accounts at once, managing folders/filters and signatures is all way easier with a desktop mail client.

      Some years ago I was like you. I only needed to read mail and I have to admit that a desktop client is not really necessary in that case.

    • @[email protected]
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      -87 months ago

      I want to, but none work properly. KMail is broken on NixOS, Evolution doesn’t work well with KDE, and Thunderbird was just a broken mess last time I used it a few years ago when I was distro-hopping. Email is really not that important to me anymore either. Check it on the shitter or before bed and that’s it.

      Anti Commercial-AI license

      • 2xsaiko
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        57 months ago

        I use KMail on NixOS (though, still the Qt 5 version) and it works for me. What’s the problem with it?

          • 2xsaiko
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            7 months ago

            Huh, I haven’t encountered any of these (adding address book works for me too, the last comment on that post seems to have a solution if it doesn’t for you) and I’ve used KMail on NixOS for probably about as long as that first issue existed. Weird.

              • 2xsaiko
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                17 months ago

                Not at all, given we’re running probably significantly different configurations. With the same configuration we’d get the same results, and NixOS never claimed to eliminate what is essentially packaging bugs related to runtime dependencies. KDE stuff (and especially anything Akonadi-related) right now needs a lot of plugin path environment variable mess to work with NixOS’s file structure because it loads a bunch of stuff at runtime from other packages, which can break in strange ways like this if you don’t add a specific package to your system packages for example, it’s definitely not ideal the way it is right now but it’s also pretty hard to get right.

                • @[email protected]
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                  17 months ago

                  Not at all, given we’re running probably significantly different configurations. With the same configuration we’d get the same result

                  The same argument can be made for any OS. Same packages, same hardware, same configuration, and probably it would be the same.

                  NixOS never claimed to eliminate what is essentially packaging bugs related to runtime dependencies

                  https://nixos.org/

                  it’s also pretty hard to get right

                  I saw the work k900 and other contributors put into KDE and Qt stuff. It’s admirable. I’m not saying it’s their fault things are the way they are.

                  Anti Commercial-AI license

                  • 2xsaiko
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                    7 months ago

                    The same argument can be made for any OS. Same packages, same hardware, same configuration, and probably it would be the same.

                    Only if we’re talking about 1:1 disk image clones or installing stuff on a fresh system.

                    https://nixos.org/

                    That is clearly talking about build-time dependencies and the build process given the context (maybe the word “work” here is misleading though, also because some packages don’t even have parts that can “work” or “not work” like wallpaper packages). It is impossible to automatically ensure all runtime dependencies are met, because that would require analyzing what the program actually does. I can write you any number of Nix packages that will only run on my computer (simplest case is because they load a file from a path from my user directory or something), but the thing that Nix ensures is that you can reproduce the package contents on your system as well.

                    That said, in a lot of cases, nixpkgs does actually (manually) patch runtime dependencies to use store paths which sets up that dependency relation, but with KDE PIM stuff this would lead to dependency cycles if done the typical way, for example KMail depends on Akonadi to build, but Akonadi loads plugin files from KMail when it is installed. This is not something you can do, so to resolve that cycle, you need another package which depends on both and links them together so they can see each other at runtime. Right now the entire NixOS configuration (or rather, whatever the environment.systemPackages option affects) assumes the role of this third package, but it would be nice if was done in in a more self-contained way, so that you could also reasonably use this stuff outside of NixOS.