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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

#341

Post by islandtech »

ultramancool wrote: post #293
islandtech wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They are based in Melbourne, Australia, but use NYI here in the US. Mhm, 2 of the "Five Eyes" countries. Yeah, you're really selling me on this one. I'll admit I'm being a bit ridiculously paranoid, but it's cheap paranoia for me, Thunderbird works well as a client and I spend maybe 5 minutes per month doing mail server admin stuff. I'm really not willing to switch to any hosted solution for this. Just looking for…

Well, for Webmail, then, I would say Tutanota or ProtonMail, both of which are good.

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

#342

Post by chei0aiV »

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 has been forked. http://www.fossamail.org/

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

#343

Post by ajross »

bkeroack wrote: post #332
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…

"didn't DPI scale properly", "strange behavior with my IMAP server", "consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system", "handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages". If you have enough rigid requirements nothing will ever be a good fit.

This is true, but sort of specious. The point is that for the grandparent (and me) Thunderbird meets all these requirements, and other stuff doesn't. Could we adjust our decades-mature workflow to accomodate other tools? Sure. But it would suck. So we use the tool we have that does what we want until something unambiguously better comes along.

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

#344

Post by agopaul »

islandtech wrote: post #334
agopaul wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to, say, Gmail enterprise? Well, apart from the whole Google Apps. I'm curious because we'll have to migrate to a better email provider in a month or two, and Gmail enterprise seemed to be the best fit for us (price, storage, good iOS app to leverage push notifications, etc).

Google's rendition of IMAP isn't following any standard but their own. Fastmail uses Cyrus IMAP server, which most certainly follows standards. I've been a Fastmail user for almost 10 years. Never an issue that was not solved in very short order and most professionally. Fastmail offer a modern product with old world service and charm. A win-win.

We use either Postbox, Thunderbird or Apple Mail and all of them should work with Gmail like every most common mail client. So the point about IMAP doesn't have a practical impact for us. Am I missing something? Good to know about their strong reliability though

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

#345

Post by johnsonjo »

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…

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

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

#346

Post by ultramancool »

bkeroack wrote: post #332
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…

"didn't DPI scale properly", "strange behavior with my IMAP server", "consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system", "handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages". If you have enough rigid requirements nothing will ever be a good fit.

Of course! But Thunderbird does a pretty good job of all these requirements, it's the only reason I feel like I can be so stringent with them. Only reason I've been trying to leave is everyone else telling me it's bad or it's going to stop being maintained properly.

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

#347

Post by jcurbo »

gosukiwi wrote: post #336
jcurbo wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)" Wow why does it need so much RAM.

Not sure, but it's currently using just over 200 MB of RAM here (on Windows 10).

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

#348

Post by hyc_symas »

bshimmin wrote: post #36
parennoob wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say, "Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird, we're probably going to abandon it". Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements…

It's long, it's rambling, it uses phrases like "laser-focussed" (twice). Fine, it's not corporatese at its absolute worst (there isn't a "synergistic" in there), but it's also not going to win any awards for clear communication; it could be every bit as diplomatic whilst also losing about 70% of the words. I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.

This is the real message, to me.

  Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our
  leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox
  that can have an industry-wide impact.    With all due respect to
  Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years
  that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.

  However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live
  with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is
  increasingly unstable.
So, their stated goal is market dominance for Firefox, period. Nothing else really matters. Clearly they are failing at this goal, so they are focusing their resources on it and discarding anything else.

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

#349

Post by nickpsecurity »

pcwalton wrote: post #338
nickpsecurity wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and brows…

Opera and IE were no different in architecture.

Wasnt aware of that. Interesting.

It was just faster, better looking, and skinnable. Plus malware stayed hitting IE so there was that too.

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

#350

Post by chei0aiV »

silon7 wrote: post #101
simpleigh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML. Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting). https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Killing XUL has the potential of killing Firefox. I bet the last good XUL version will be forked.

It essentially already has http://www.palemoon.org/

The Palemoon developers understand the folly of ditching the flexibility of the XUL interface. They won't be removing it.

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