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Thunderbird in 2019

blog.mozilla.org

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31–40 of 168 posts

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#31

Post by ForHackernews »

nocman wrote: post #10
StevePerkins wrote: post #5

The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email cl…

It is still a separate project. Mozilla is just collecting donations for them: "While Thunderbird is now an independent project separate from Mozilla, Mozilla has agreed to collect donations on our behalf" ( quote above is from https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird?utm_source=tb_b... )

I've set up a regular monthly donation specifically to support Thunderbird development because having a FLOSS email client I can trust is extremely important to me.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#32

Post by zmix »

superkuh wrote: post #20
RealDinosaur wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…

I use Thunderbird because it is an application. If it became a Javascript app I and many others would surely switch to some other application.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#33

Post by belorn »

As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome. The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose.

The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of context.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#34

Post by martinald »

monksy wrote: post #24
RealDinosaur wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…

Electron apps are usually pretty terrible. They have issues with: 1. Memory usage and cpu usage (you're running a browser to run your application) 2. Platform look and feel (doesn't exist in javascript) 3. Platform and windowing behaviors. I agree with the other commented to you.. if it changed to electronic, I would drop it as well.

Considering Thunderbird uses XUL and JavaScript, it has all the same problems.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#35

Post by ArrayList »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #29

Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156

Holy damn that's bad! The bug's been open 10 years too!

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#36

Post by anuragsoni »

shmerl wrote: post #14

I recently discovered this add-on: * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn... * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4... An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts. With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite useful.

I second the use of tbsync and the activesync plugins. I switched to thunderbird with these plugins after trying out the exchange support with Evolution-ews. In my unscientific observations, my memory and cpu usage was a lot higher when using evolution when compared to thunderbird. Although to be fair evolution had really nice integration with "gnome online accounts", but in the end I found thunderbird was good enough for exchange with these two plugins.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#37

Post by superkuh »

zmix wrote: post #32
superkuh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Thunderbird because it is an application. If it became a Javascript app I and many others would surely switch to some other application.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

By that definition would you call Firefox before version ~40 a javascript app? It obviously isn't despite using XUL and the elements implicit in that. The same is true of Thunderbird.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#38

Post by kuon »

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...)

Things I'd like to see improved:

- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).

- Native PGP.

- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).

- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.

- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).

- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.

- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#39

Post by RealDinosaur »

bertman wrote: post #23
RealDinosaur wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd…

> What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app Now this is something you don't read everyday on Hacker News...

With such downvotes, I start to think electron hate is a cult.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#40

Post by samspenc »

nocman wrote: post #10
StevePerkins wrote: post #5

The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email cl…

It is still a separate project. Mozilla is just collecting donations for them: "While Thunderbird is now an independent project separate from Mozilla, Mozilla has agreed to collect donations on our behalf" ( quote above is from https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird?utm_source=tb_b... )

Thanks, this was really confusing me for a while since their donation link points to Mozilla, but they have this text right on their application launch page: "Thunderbird is no longer funded by Mozilla."
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