In the last year or so Thunderbird has decided to use many more processes to do its thing and it seems to use more memory than it used to. That makes it seem to lock up and /or makes the machine swap on a machine with 2g..
Number of processes it can use is a setting you can change.
I was not reading the email clients discussion closely. I use Thunderbird. I don't know if anybody mentioned Claws. Either it or Evolution would probably be my second choice.
Previosly I did find this on the internet
Our hires are already addressing technical debt and doing a fair bit of plumbing when it comes to Thunderbird’s codebase. Our new hires will also be addressing UI-slowness and general performance issues across the application.
This is an area where I think we will see some of the best improvements in Thunderbird for 2019, as we look into methods for testing and measuring slowness – and then put our engineers on architecting solutions to these pain points. Beyond that, we will be looking into leveraging new, faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird as well as working toward a multi-process Thunderbird.
/Steve
-- Steven Greenberg Email: steve@ssgreenberg.name 251 Holland Rd. Phone: (774)241-0095 Fiskdale, Massachusetts 01518-1231 Web: www.ssgreenberg.name Other Email: s.greenberg@ieee.org ssg@alum.mit.edu