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Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#81

Post by tzs »

Did Thunderbird ever get the major rewrite that was talked about several years ago?

I don't have any details. I just heard they were planning a major rewrite when I reported a bug a long time ago (over 10 years ago) and in the bug tracker the conclusion was that fixing it should be done as part of the major rewrite that was upcoming.

For anyone curious, here's the bug (from memory).

I had a host with a POP3 mail server running on the normal POP3 port. That host also had a second POP3 mail server on a different port [1].

I tried to set up two email accounts in Thunderbird, one for a POP3 account for user tzs on that host on the standard POP3 port, and the other for tzs on that host on the second port.

The second account could not be created because it said that I already had a tzs POP3 account on that host. Thunderbird was using user/host as a unique account key, rather than the more correct user/host/port (or the even more correct user/host/protocol/port).

I reported this as a bug, figuring that this would be an easy fix. At worst somewhat tedious but no challenge. Soon someone marked the bug as a possible duplicate, linking to a bug from a couple years earlier that was also due to user/host being assumed unique.

In the discussion one of the developers said that the user/host as key assumption was hardwired into the code in too many places, but that was one of the things being redone in the upcoming rewrite.

[1] The second server wasn't actually on that host. That host was using an SSH tunnel to make my work POP3 server appear on my LAN.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#82

Post by graton »

tajen wrote: post #69
bhauer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Especially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).

You can archive your email by using something like this: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#83

Post by titanix2 »

bad_user wrote: post #60
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

Your comment is incredibly mean. Mozilla isn't competing with other "charities", they are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest corporations. The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, t…

They are not competing against Google, they live mainly from their funding.

With the rise a Chrome and the fall of Firefox, I wounder why Google is still giving them money. Maybe the PR loss from pulling the plug would still be too big?

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#84

Post by gus_massa »

asmosoinio wrote: post #25
jordigh wrote: post #7

Huh, I was going to post this story, but I thought it was not allowed because it's a job posting and I had to wait until the Who is Hiring thread. So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client, Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier: https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ I currently use Evolution for emai…

I think the original article is ok, since it is generally interesting (news about Thunderbird, opens discussion about Thunderbird, Mozilla, their technologies) and not just a job ad. I don't know of a rule against job ads in general. I would guess generally such would be mostly just not interesting. YC company job listings are a special case though, they appear on the front page without voting possibility. This had b…

Jobs post are not allowed. From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Can I post a job ad?

> Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.

> A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. [...]

> The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. [...]

But IMHO this is an special case that deserve an exception. (Usually following the rules the 100% of the time blindly is not optimal.)

This is a very big/popular project, and it is the first hire, so the are changing the internal organization of the developers. (The #87 hire will not be interesting.)

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#85

Post by the-dude »

titanix2 wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is incredibly mean. Mozilla isn't competing with other "charities", they are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest corporations. The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, t…

They are not competing against Google, they live mainly from their funding. With the rise a Chrome and the fall of Firefox, I wounder why Google is still giving them money. Maybe the PR loss from pulling the plug would still be too big?

The best way to control your opposition is to organize it.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#86

Post by izacus »

confounded wrote: post #77
bhauer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this. I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients. I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them. Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their…

Well good thing your personal experience translates to all other 25 million people using Thunderbird.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#87

Post by epicide »

bhauer wrote: post #36
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Most people use personal email for newsletters and when they forgot their password.

In the professional world, you either use some form of webmail or Outlook.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#88

Post by dlandis »

carussell wrote: post #4

The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.

> The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM.

Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#89

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #50
tomc1985 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :( XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM

It's not that XUL was bad, exactly. But priorities have changed to security, battery life, and multi-threaded performance. The weight of XUL cruft that has built up over time was holding the project back.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#90

Post by imglorp »

tajen wrote: post #69
bhauer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Especially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).

Fetchmail?

https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail

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