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Thunderbird’s Future Home

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Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#121

Post by ionised »

pavement wrote: post #43
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.

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)

So absolutely noone, not a single person uses GMail on Android?

Interesting.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#122

Post by ionised »

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 Postbox with my three webmail providers.

Logging into the webmail separately honestly seems like a pain. Why do that when I can just fire up Postbox on my desktop and have all my mail right there?

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#123

Post by ionised »

kiliankoe wrote: post #69
neuronexmachina wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?

The comment above wasn't specifically about Thunderbird, but any native non-webmail client.

I'm still not following. It sounds like he is saying everybody uses a phone browser to check their webmail, which is obviously not true.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#124

Post by tripzilch »

chrisseaton wrote: post #104
statictype wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to search through old emails and conversations. Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now. Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

But searching seems like something that is definitely don't better as a web service with people like Google and their extremely sophisticated and proprietary searching and natural language analysis algorithms. That's a reason to use web services rather than local clients.

Google's biggest trick has been convincing people that "search" is something that is much too hard and sophisticated to do locally.

see https://notmuchmail.org/ your email archive just isn't that big

as for natural language processing, I'm not aware that Gmail does this for user search? maybe it does, but I haven't noticed more than some basic stemming. and given the choice (is not hidden), even most basic users prefer exact/stemmed keyword search over "cleverly" second-guessing returning noise results you didn't ask for.

also there's many non-proprietary search result sorting and filtering techniques that do a great (and predictable!) job, locally, without having to go all deeplearning about it.

remember that a lot of the sophisticated NLP analysis stuff Gmail does, is for the benefit of targeted advertising first and user experience second.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#125

Post by tripzilch »

jldugger wrote: post #88
tjoff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client. I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

GMail seems fine? The threading & quote collapse feature is a godsend compared to godawful attempts by offline clients.

threading, agreed. but the way quote collapse features and is pushed in Gmail basically created or greatly exacerbated the very problem it's a solution for. People used to clean their quotes for relevance, but now they're hidden out of mind, and every mail contains nearly the full conversation, collapsed. it's useless extra data quietly dragging along every mail in a thread, hardly any human ever sees it, but I bet it's super useful for their machine learning (targeted advertising) priorities.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#126

Post by finnjohnsen2 »

karussell wrote: post #48
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).

These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy? 'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not imp…

Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN.

But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.

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