They forgot the lifespan of the monkey, those thought experimenters.

I can tell them for free: its 42.

Because how could you sell contact data to google and apple if they already have it?

Just took the opportunity to try Thunderbird again and had to downvote myself :) I guess my previous frustrations were related to initial sluggishness while downloading and non-compacting loads tens of thousands of mails from gmail. It still takes some time, but after downloading and compacting my data, search seems to be very responsive.

I am using eMclient for several years now. I would have loved to use open source, but experience of using Thunderbird was unbearably sluggish and glitchy. Other options for windows were simply lacking. EM is far from perfect too, but still better. I hope to retry Thunderbird in upcoming years to check if things under the hood changed much.