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Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

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Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#41

Post by executesorder66 »

firebird84 wrote: post #9
cs702 wrote: post #7

Former Thunderbird user here. Much more important than shiny new UI, what I'd like to see is seamless out-of-the-box syncing with online calendars and contacts . (At one point, I tried all the available add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none of those add-ons worked well for me.)

This a thousand times. Thunderbird would have been great if it calendared well with exchange. As it stands, the available support is garbage and barely works when it works at all.

It works pretty well with Exchange if you use Thunderbird with davmail. But I would really like built in support that works well.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#42

Post by cpeterso »

As a heavy Thunderbird user, my biggest complaint is offline support. An IMAP sync will download new emails' subject lines, but not the actual message bodies. Clicking on an email subject line then requires freezes Thunderbird for multiple seconds while it downloads the message body for that single email.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#43

Post by zerokernel »

qznc wrote: post #10

A redesign is a great symbolic move to fight "Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant". Still, Thunderbird needs a bigger vision. What does Thunderbird want to be? The cross-platform Outlook? Then merge Lightning into core. The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view. The backwards-compatible, easy, and secure mailer? Then merge Enigmail into core or make SMIME easy to use or get s…

> The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view.

Thunderbird has had a ML/usenet-like conversations view forever.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#44

Post by otakucode »

I would be very happy with Thunderbird if it continued functioning as it already does, but without opening up a desktop notification listing emails I received 2 weeks ago... emails it notified me were new every time I clicked on the application and then off of it for the past 2 weeks. I have yet to figure out the logic behind what messages it chooses to show there.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#45

Post by esfandia »

I don't really care either way about the colors and the fonts. I care more about functionality, and the current version still has a very annoying bug, where there's a type of spam email that Thunderbird will choke on when trying to download it using POP. I have to use webmail to go manually delete the offending email so that Thunderbird can download the rest of the emails. Last time I investigated this, it seems that others have reported this problem, but nothing's been done about it. I'm very close to moving to Outlook now (which would also help with calendaring, but that's a whole other can of worms), and a simple re-design isn't what's going to keep me as a Thunderbird user.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#47

Post by johnchristopher »

SyneRyder wrote: post #24
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that even mean? What mail column?

Presumably the column with the list of emails in the currently selected inbox. (2nd column from left.) Some email clients have multiple rows of information in that column - the first row might have name & subject, the next row might show the first two sentences of the email. Or it might have the subject on a separate line, so the column can be kept narrow but still show the full subject line. Think of the iOS Mail or…

> Think of the iOS Mail or Android GMail interfaces, for example.

Or outlook 2003 https://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/office/images/editions/... which was released like 15 years ago. I remember because I made an office 2003 theme for thunderbird. I am never touching that 1500 CSS files clusterfuck again.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#48

Post by oconnore »

nathcd wrote: post #40
bhauer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, since this is a Mozilla project, that service should be self-hostable [1] to disintermediate the multi-device synchronization platform. It should not be necessary to have a third-party observe all my contacts and calendars. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/

No need for Mozilla to make server software for this; Thunderbird/Lightning do CalDav and CardDav just fine, right? Seems that cs702's problem isn't with Thunderbird, it's with Google supporting CalDav and CardDav for sync. If you want to self host, just host any CalDav or CardDav server software.

Thunderbird does not support carddav. Contacts + Thunderbird is generally a terrible experience. I switched to Zoho’s webmail because of this (at least I can get bidirectional sync to my iPhone).

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#49

Post by CJefferson »

How about fixing 6 year old bugs, which mean you can't search for the word "wedding"? This kind of thing is why I left thunderbird.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844

At the least do a pass over old bugs and let us know if they will ever be fixed, or close them.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#50

Post by jimktrains2 »

qznc wrote: post #32
Silhouette wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant" Some of us spell that "stable and reliable" and consider it the single most important property of our essential day-to-day software. If it ain't broke...

I'd say the difference between dead and stable is if you encounter bugs all the time. I find Thunderbird stable (only triggers a bug roughly once per month and nothing critical) while the Lightning plugin for calender functionality is dead (fails to sync with Google for months).

I had to stop using Thunderbird because it became ungodly slow and just unusable. I consider that a bug.
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