I played with the beta for a bit and while it's a marked improvement over the old UI, it still feels remarkably old and outdated to use.
1. There still doesn't appear to be a threaded email view. Emails are grouped, but I don't see a way to view them in a thread. Just one at a time
2. Rich text emails that are just text look remarkably bad. They're just black text on white background with limited padding. If you use dark mode, it still displays with a white background; many email readers have moved away from that
3. If you click an email group, it opens a summary view instead of an actual email. In order to open the actual email, you have to expand the group by clicking a tiny arrow
4. Having a landing page for an account still seems odd. It just means I have to keep the account open and click Inbox instead. Each of my 4 accounts have about 30-50 folders each so my sidebar is basically impossible to navigate unless I switch to the Unified folder view which has a separate list of issues
5. Going back to #2, if I reply to such an email in dark mode, the quoted text appears as black on dark gray.
6. The composer definitely needs some love
Basically, it still requires 3-4 clicks to do a ton of things that other clients can do in 1 click. Postbox, which forked Thunderbird like 15 years ago and I used for close to a decade, is also looking dated at this point but is much easier to use than Supernova.
Some of these things can be improved or changed, but I couldn't find a good combination that created an experience worth switching to.
It's unfortunate because I had been planning to switch to Thunderbird from Spark v2 since it was announced last year. Instead, it prompted me to re-evaluate Spark v3 which seems to have resolved most of its early issues. I'd prefer to use OSS, but not at the cost of productivity.
Negativity aside, it does look much better than it did previously and I can see the makings of a worthwhile client in there. It's just not ready for me yet.
1. There still doesn't appear to be a threaded email view. Emails are grouped, but I don't see a way to view them in a thread. Just one at a time
2. Rich text emails that are just text look remarkably bad. They're just black text on white background with limited padding. If you use dark mode, it still displays with a white background; many email readers have moved away from that
3. If you click an email group, it opens a summary view instead of an actual email. In order to open the actual email, you have to expand the group by clicking a tiny arrow
4. Having a landing page for an account still seems odd. It just means I have to keep the account open and click Inbox instead. Each of my 4 accounts have about 30-50 folders each so my sidebar is basically impossible to navigate unless I switch to the Unified folder view which has a separate list of issues
5. Going back to #2, if I reply to such an email in dark mode, the quoted text appears as black on dark gray.
6. The composer definitely needs some love
Basically, it still requires 3-4 clicks to do a ton of things that other clients can do in 1 click. Postbox, which forked Thunderbird like 15 years ago and I used for close to a decade, is also looking dated at this point but is much easier to use than Supernova.
Some of these things can be improved or changed, but I couldn't find a good combination that created an experience worth switching to.
It's unfortunate because I had been planning to switch to Thunderbird from Spark v2 since it was announced last year. Instead, it prompted me to re-evaluate Spark v3 which seems to have resolved most of its early issues. I'd prefer to use OSS, but not at the cost of productivity.
Negativity aside, it does look much better than it did previously and I can see the makings of a worthwhile client in there. It's just not ready for me yet.