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Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

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Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#271

Post by Karunamon »

ultramancool wrote: post #266
Karunamon wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways: - FAST. Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) i…

How well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed more cumbersome than Alpine for that.

That I'm not 100% sure of. I know for receiving, you'd just configure OfflineIMAP to deliver each account's messages into a different folder, and just switch between them in Mutt, but I don't know how it would work for distinct from-addresses, contact lists, etc.

Some quick googling[1] makes it look like you indeed do that first thing, and then set up a hook to load a different configuration file when you enter the folder for a different mailbox.

[1]: https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_...

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#272

Post by agentgt »

hga wrote: post #242
agentgt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree it was a bad idea to do the rewrite but rather the company (Netscape) was on a downward spiral regardless (it didn't help but I don't think it was the sole reason).

Definitely wasn't the sole reason, their server software generally sucked, e.g. a lot of people happily switched to Apache once it was perceived as being sufficiently trustworthy. I could see the latter happening in the 1995-6 period. One thing I've read about the rewrite is that Netscape accuihired? (back before that was a word) a failed company, and put its failed managers in charge, who I guess were good at what r…

Its funny (and ironic to me given the topic) you mention Netscape and Apache. One of my first jobs out of college was rewriting an old LiveWire application (yes ... the original server side Javascript) to a JSP Tomcat application.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#273

Post by gsnedders »

emidln wrote: post #190
janvidar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not entirely irrelevant. Given that there are more developers familiar with HTML development, it may lower the barrier to developing plug-ins, or providing patches.

I was poking at the non-standard portion. Lowering barrier to development of plugins, patches, etc is fine, but being standard doesn't help or hinder that. Popularity and ease of introduction help that. Javascript (that is, the dialect of ECMAScript that is implemented by Firefox) itself is non-standard and Mozilla isn't throwing that one out for exclusively ES2015.

FWIW, there are real intentions to standardise all the JS extensions or drop them.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#274

Post by islandtech »

ultramancool wrote: post #262
jccc wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser. (Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.) EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.

I'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts. If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.

I understand, but send these guys an email. One of the founders will likely respond to you.

I used to run all my own stuff, but when my children came along, I didn't want to spend all my time chasing issues with servers.

Look the Fastmail guys up. If anyone is doing email correctly, it's Rob, Bron, and the guys at Fastmail. They actually write some of the code for the Cyrus IMAP server, so if you were in doubt as to how talented these guys are, don't fear. I would now NOT trust my email to anyone else. They are that good. Yes, I know, I'm some random guy on the Internet, but I'm an IT guy, which in itself says nothing, but I'm nothing if not extremely picky about my own IT. These guys can fix any issues you may have and probably give you some awesome suggestions. They are approachable, something you will never get from any other company. They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US. Worth a call if you value good service and top-notch know-how from guys who know email better than anyone else I'm aware of. They routinely post in the Email Discussions Web site forum.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#275

Post by [deleted] »

ultramancool wrote: post #262
jccc wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser. (Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.) EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.

I'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts. If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#276

Post by lmm »

ultramancool wrote: post #226
shmerl wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.

How's the support for it on Windows and OS X?

I don't know about support, but my experience is it works fine on Windows.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#277

Post by jcurbo »

ultramancool wrote: post #195

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to h…

Thunderbird user for years here. I now use Postbox, which is (I believe) a commercial fork of Thunderbird. https://www.postbox-inc.com/

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#278

Post by pcwalton »

ultramancool wrote: post #193
espadrine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being nonstandard is completely irrelevant here It was meant as a pro. Since it was their own language, they could do anything with it. They could make a better HTML. But HTML caught up. Currently, I believe HTML is better than XUL, and making XUL great again is both a silly reuse of a political slogan and a waste of effort. I for one would rather see efforts made to allow CSS styling of all input elements in HTML.

Good luck - the main advantage of XUL IMO is that it looks and feels native to the platform. This is completely lacking in any HTML based UI I've ever seen. It's been a major advantage for FF extensions and I can't help but feel like it's a major step backwards to lose it.

> Good luck - the main advantage of XUL IMO is that it looks and feels native to the platform.

That you say that is a testament to how well the meticulous CSS styling of the XUL elements—which applies equally well to HTML (try it in a browser chrome shell!)—worked.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#279

Post by g8oz »

bovermyer wrote: post #188

Thunderbird is still a thing people use? That's probably the biggest news to me.

I suppose you use webmail supplied by a corporation. With all your old messages available for scanning when they or the government see fit. Some of us are not okay with that.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#280

Post by kuschku »

hmokay wrote: post #134
creshal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed. So, developer convenience trumps user experience? Who cares about your battery run time, how hot your PC runs, the bandwidth overhead, the massive attack surface from all the useless components shipped, how badly the webapp integrates into your OS,…

JavaScript programmers are truly delusional sometimes.

It’s not really JavaScript, I’d argue it’s a different reason.

node-webkit apps are cheaper to develop. Far cheaper.

Everyone can write a webapp, a native application requires professional developers. The payroll looks completely different.

And then the devs who have only worked with node-webkit don’t know how much better they could have it. I know devs who refuse to use map, reduce and filter, because "it’s black magic and we always used for".

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