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Thunderbird’s Future Home

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Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#21

Post by iMerNibor »

mrweasel wrote: post #17
Vinnl wrote: post #5

tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC). Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.

I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox

I assumed they already were since it does offer you to create one in-client (gandi.net for me currently)

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#22

Post by jabl »

frik wrote: post #6

A Bright Future The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies Mozilla dumps…

> how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable?

Last time this topic came up on HN, someone linked to a thread on tb-planning where the post-XUL future was discussed. IIRC the "slow rewrite" was considered unworkable, and the proposed plan was to restart from scratch using "web technologies" while continuing doing basically security updates for the classic XUL TB until the replacement is ready.

As an aside, what "web technologies" exactly meant wasn't discussed. Is it electron? Or something mozilla-based like the servo + browser.html experiment? Or running a separate server process and connect to it using a normal browser (like e.g. mailpile does)?

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#24

Post by nickcw »

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job.

I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now.

In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#25

Post by jerf »

clishem wrote: post #15

> A Bright Future > The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies

While I understand what you're getting, bear in mind that in the context of a discussion about Thunderbird specifically and not just in general that Thunderbird is currently best described as being built on "A now-very-deprecated vaguely web-esque technology stack with no future". Moving to web technologies is a step forward even if you don't personally like them much. (And I'm at least sympathetic to that viewpoint.)

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#26

Post by brightball »

NoGravitas wrote: post #14
finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #2

I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).

I also like that Thunderbird exists, I don't use it, but my wife does. That said, if you want a web-hosted client for standard email, why not give self-hosting RainLoop a try?

After reading about rainloop I could see wanting to run it locally, but as soon as you put it on a VM somewhere you're create a very public access point for all of your email accounts if that server gets compromised aren't you? Seems like creating a weak link on purpose.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#27

Post by vog »

nickcw wrote: post #24

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job. I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent. I use lots of plu…

> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway.

Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file:

    text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#28

Post by vog »

ChefDenominator wrote: post #19
emodendroket wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the search is really terrible.

I'm thinking when Windows 7 expires in 2020 and I have to migrate to Linux because Microsoft hates having paying customers such as myself, I'll probably move to either Mint or Ubuntu and install a local Sphinx Search server specifically so I can search Thunderbird emails.

Why waiting so long? Move now and give yourself a smoother transition.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#29

Post by acemarke »

jabl wrote: post #22
frik wrote: post #6

A Bright Future The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies Mozilla dumps…

> how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable? Last time this topic came up on HN, someone linked to a thread on tb-planning where the post-XUL future was discussed. IIRC the "slow rewrite" was considered unworkable, and the proposed plan was to restart from scratch using "web technologies" while continuing doing basically security updates for the classic XUL TB until the replacement is ready. As an aside, what "web…

I would assume along the lines of using writing the core logic in Javascript, using NPM packages to help implement things, and using UI libraries like React, rather than building everything in C++/XPCOM/XUL.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#30

Post by Twirrim »

vog wrote: post #27
nickcw wrote: post #24

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job. I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent. I use lots of plu…

> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent. Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway. Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file: text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to…

It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support.

I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.

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