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Thunderbird’s Future Home

blog.mozilla.org

51–60 of 126 posts

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#51

I use thunderbird because my work uses gmail. I guess (maybe) I could add the secondary work gmail account to my regular gmail. Not sure, the other alternative is to keep a separate incognito window or keep work email open in a separate browser. I just use Thunderbird instead.

You can log into multiple Google accounts at the same time. You then get a user switcher in the top left, which as far as I know does not invalidate existing sessions.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#52
post #36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally use sup, but that's exactly how I did it. All you have to do is add a small hook, explained on a multitude of Mutt wiki pages. What issue did you have with images? I just have images set to xdg-open my picture viewer.

https://dev.mutt.org/doc/manual.html#mailcap

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows

"X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course.

Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1].

So essentially if data is indexed your able to.

I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this.

So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be

1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data.

2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest.

Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature.

[1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first...

edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example.

"Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2]

then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!)

[2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#54
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to put it in the cloud. Just run it from inside your local network. If you want to access it from outside, you can setup a VPN.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#55
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.

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy . (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

The story happened 10 years ago. But also, yeah, I kind of stopped worrying about offline email clients when I realized how much I check from my phone. The only thing I'd use them for on a desktop is mailing lists.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#56
Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years.

Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird already provides today. Plus the extensions system needs to be revamped as well (similar to what's happening on the Firefox side with XUL ones going out). Getting Exchange calendaring done is also not a priority because of the complexity and the effort needed. So it looks like we will get a better maintainable product after some years. I'm not sure if that's going to appeal to many people to donate.

I'm happy with Thunderbird and some extensions that I use regularly, with the only exception being calendaring support for Exchange being very poor and unreliable (even with the Exchange EWS Provider extension or with external solutions like DavMail). Since I don't like taking risks with email client alpha or beta releases because of the fear of data loss (and with huge mailboxes, even detecting data loss would be a chore), I'll just stick with the current version and hope that the new revamped one comes in a stable form sooner (of course, I will donate periodically). I'm excited and afraid!

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#57
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!

The desktop Outlook client still has a lot of features that the Outlook (Office365) web client still doesn't have. Some of those features are critical to handling large volumes of mail.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows "X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course. Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1]. So essentially if data is indexed your able to. I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this. So steps to find the oldest…

I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#59

I hope Thunderbird lives on for a long time, but in the FOSS world, one should never depend on a single piece of software for their day-to-day functionality, thus here are some alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?lice... You must also keep in mind that desktop mail-clients make the (otherwise) complicated PGP-encryption of emails a bit more user-friendly.

I keep forgetting that I intend to give Geary a try.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#60
post #15

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

What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services: accessible from nearly any device, access to your data with minimal complication wherever you happen to sign in from, and a lightweight, instant-response, zero-install interaction model. If we value "native clients", we need to address the things that make web clients more convenient.
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