After 20+ years on Outlook, I recently switched to Thunderbird. Not quite as full featured and a little slow at times, but it’s finally a viable replacement for Outlook.
My Thunderbird profile folder is 22GB in size. I have hundreds of thousands of emails in it. The fact that it can handle all my large mailboxes is why I still use it.
If you are on Windows, the antivirus might have something to do. It used to be slow for me too but I added an exception and now it's really fast, or at least fast enough so I don't perceive any significant lag.
I'm curious, you used the outlook desktop client for personal email? I feel like that use case is very unusual. My biggest issue is that we use O365 so are kinda forced into using outlook to get all the benefits, of the tight integration, but outlook is becoming less and less usable, I just don't see how thunderbird is a better alternative for O365...
yes, I used Outlook desktop for both work (2 O365 accounts with different organizations) and personal email (multiple gmail accounts). With a job change, I am no longer on O365 (new company uses hosted gmail), but I understand there is a plugin for Thunderbird to work with O365.
I much prefer having the same client for all my email accounts, and Outlook worked for that purpose. It was better for O365 calendaring within the office, but it did not play well with google calendar. Thunderbird plays well with both (with a plugin for O365).
Welcome to the fold! I've used Thunderbird since it was released. It's always been a great product imo. The whole time I've had outlook provided by whatever office or institution I was associated with for comparison. Given the choice, even almost 20 years ago I'd have taken t-bird head to head.
