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Thunderbird’s Future Home

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Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#31

Post by zeveb »

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…

> And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail.

Gnus nnimap provides a threaded, conversation view. It's almost definitely not what you'd consider a 'modern UI,' but I like it quite a bit.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#32

Post by doughj3 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #18
ChefDenominator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, I like that Thunderbird sorts without conversation. It is the primary feature I look for in a MUA. The only feature I find annoying is the search feature, which seems to be a universally accepted weakness of Thunderbird.

I'm confused by its two search bars. It doesn't make sense to have two.

One is a global search, the other is a simple filter for the currently opened mail folder. I use both for their respective use cases all the time.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#33

Post by E6300 »

brightball wrote: post #26
NoGravitas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#34

Post by zlynx »

tangue wrote: post #8
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…

The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".

Well it won't seduce me.

Who wants an email client that uses 600 MB RAM just to open and that eats 100% CPU to animate your email folders?

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#35

Post by elipsey »

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?"

I think that was almost 10 years ago.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#36

Post by lftl »

Twirrim wrote: post #30
vog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

It's been a long since I used mutt regularly, but I recall that I had my mailcap setup to pipe the HTML straight to FF when I couldn't read the text version. It worked pretty well as long as images weren't embedded in the email.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#37

Post by TeMPOraL »

elipsey wrote: post #35

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons:

- it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place

- it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far

I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain.

Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#38

Post by bad_user »

lorenzhs wrote: post #16
emodendroket wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird supports conversations but they're off by default. But really I prefer the way it works now.

There's also https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con... for those that have become used to seeing the content of all emails in a conversation.

Doesn't work well. I personally like GMail-style conversations, but I couldn't use that plugin.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#39

Post by singlow »

E6300 wrote: post #33
brightball wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.

I don't think that's true. A home computer can be firewalled with no incoming connections allowed. Your VM in the cloud has potential attack vectors through your own control interfaces (http/ssh/pop/imap) as well as the hosting control panel. In addition it may be listening for incoming smtp. I might trust myself to configure all of those securely but I'm not sure.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#40

Post by Consultant32452 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37
elipsey wrote: post #35

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons: - it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place - it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain. Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!

There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
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