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Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

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Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#81
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.

[deleted]

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#82
I think everyone needs to take a look at Evolution[^1] - it's native looking, with a clean interface, with working contacts and calendar sync.

If that was combined with the surprisingly comfortable keyboard shortcuts of Rainloop[^2], that would be brilliant, but the world doesn't need yet another electron-looking app.

[^1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution/ [^2]: https://www.rainloop.net/

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#83
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.

And/or prioritize PGP support

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#84
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well structured text is both readable and has a very long life as it is. There are prime examples at textfiles.com, eg. http://textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/lod-1

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#86
As I entered into the survey, on the 'ooo nice' and 'getting shit done' spectrum, the proposed redesign sits too close to the 'ooo nice' end.

So far I'm really happy with Postbox, basically a fork of Thunderbird with loads of modern features. I absolutely hate Outlook.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#87
post #85

Great. Can we have multiple lines per mail in the mail column or is that still not possible ? /rant

I can't find the bugreport. Can you please link it, if you have it?

Sure. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

Reported: 15 years ago Modified: 28 days ago

How the years go by.

edit: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Thunderbird:2.0_Product_Planni... Users were talking about it for the 2.0 release.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#88
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...

Why is that significant?

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#89
post #70

Great. Can we have multiple lines per mail in the mail column or is that still not possible ? /rant

This is the exact reason I stopped using Thunderbird.

Have you tried https://www.postbox-inc.com/ ? It's a commercial version of thunderbird from an older thunderbird core dev and it comes with multiple lines. And other niceties. $40 with volume discounts.

Re: Thunderbird Starts Working on Improving Its Interface

#90

I get it that Thunderbird looks unhip but I feel like the heavily padded lines waste too much space. The gmail "compact" setting is a much better compromise between space and legibility. But unless they move Thunderbird to WebExtensions (which would be a total productivity disaster) it can always be modded. Although an UI update is always welcome there are more important issues to address in Thunderbird, like better…

It looks like web extensions are coming https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57
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