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Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

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Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#71

Post by johnchristopher »

plopz wrote: post #58
SyneRyder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hope they don't go in that direction, I like my emails compact on 1 line.

I am pretty sure we could come up with something like a switch in the option.

It's not doable with CSS only anyway, so it won't happen if they just design a new theme on the current XUL toolkit (correct me if anything changed about that lately).

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#72

Post by notatoad »

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…

Thunderbird's problem, i think, is that their userbase contains a large portion of people who value thunderbird for it's stagnancy, but at the same time get angry if you suggest that thunderbird might be stagnant.

Thunderbird is the email client for people who want email to work exactly like it did ten years ago. that's their value-add, and it really should be their vision.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#73

Post by gkya »

dest wrote: post #65
gkya wrote: post #56

Do yourself (and to other e-mail users in the hacker community) some good and use something like Mutt or Gnus. Sth. like Thunderbird is not worth the hassle if you can edit a configuration file and read a man page (most folk here, I'd guess), and who can't is using Gmail and/or the app on their phones anyways.

can you read HTML emails with Mutt? with pictures?

IIRC you can use the browser to view them, i.e. a keystroke opens it in the browser. In Gnus I hit "K H" for that. Emacs also has SHR, a renderer for HTML, but it doesn't do all that good with complex documents.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#75

Post by nicolaslem »

I have the feeling that the Open Source community left the email world a while ago. There is almost nothing happening there.

You may argue that it's because email is a solved problem by now, but I don't think so:

Setting your own personal email server? Still a hassle to do correctly. Full text search a la Gmail? You can forget it. Threaded conversations across folders? Not for you. Hosting a webmail? Good luck finding a maintained one. Want a desktop client? The flagship Thunderbird is not the healthiest project right now.

I would really like to see the Redis or the Golang of emails.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#76

Post by hackbinary »

I see fair number of comments on here suggesting how to fix Thunderbird, or what additional features and services it needs. Well, Thunderbird is open source. Time to contribute more than just a some good ideas.

Or is the Mozilla development and contribution process broken?

It looks like it is realitively straight forward to compile from source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#77

Post by hackbinary »

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…

Looks like rust is a requirement for the build process:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#78

Post by hockley »

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…

This is just a focus group of one, but I really want to see two problems solved in email:

1) Trusted identity assertion: I want to know with confidence (at a glance) that the sender is who I think they are.

2) Secure communication: I want the visual metaphor of email (private correspondence) to match the reality of email.

How great would it be if Mozilla lead the way to for email clients to adopt open standards to do easily do these things.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#79

Post by pmlnr »

hackbinary wrote: post #76

I see fair number of comments on here suggesting how to fix Thunderbird, or what additional features and services it needs. Well, Thunderbird is open source. Time to contribute more than just a some good ideas. Or is the Mozilla development and contribution process broken? It looks like it is realitively straight forward to compile from source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Contributing to one of the largest open source projects is not a simple task at all, but you are right. However, they are asking for opinions and putting up a survey, so this may not be the place and time to start this argument.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#80

Post by dingaling »

luxpir wrote: post #69
dest wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you read HTML emails with Mutt? with pictures?

Feature, not bug.

Why do so many geeks insist that markup is good for web documents but not for e-mail?

E-mails can benefit from headings, bulleted lists and tables just as much as a web page. It's all about communicating information in human-digestable format.

OR PERHAPS ALL EMAIL SHOULD BE SENT TELEGRAM STYLE WITHOUT PUNCTUATION SINCE THAT IS JUST A DISTRACTION STOP ALSO ONLY IN ASCII CAPS STOP

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