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Thunderbird in 2019

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#111

Post by gerdesj »

amaccuish wrote: post #16
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.

Oh thank you! I really wish Thunderbird would support EAS/MAPI over HTTP/EWS. They're so widely used and it's irritating to have to use the memory hog that is Evolution.

Are you sure? I'll grant you neither are particularly small but on this laptop a TB with no accounts set up uses more memory than the various Evo processes with several Exchange mailboxes open. Nothing scientific but a quick look at memory % in "glances".

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#112

Post by pix64 »

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.

Email clients need an html engine, so all that added baggage kinda comes with the territory.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#113

Post by gerdesj »

com2kid wrote: post #66

I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some emails not being discoverable with search. Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker. Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up eventually.

Not really a good reason for switching. Make sure you regularly rebuild your search indexes in Outlook because I have several helpdesk calls that were fixed that way (partial results, last seen in OL 2016) ...

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#114

Post by jcranmer »

andris9 wrote: post #93
jcranmer wrote: post #60

It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it. One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly impla…

Issues with large (as in message count) mailboxes is a common thing nowadays. Don't know about client side as I've been working on the server side for past few years (see https://wildduck.email/ ). Clients with large mailboxes cause a lot of issues both server implementation wise and operation wise. For example some widely used IMAP server software dies if an IMAP client tries to SELECT a maildir folder with >320k me…

I'm not terribly surprised. It's easy to forget that mailboxes are actually databases, and at the scale of GB databases, you're going to start stealing ideas from the database community on how to manage databases rather than relying on the filesystem to act as a database for you.

Thunderbird itself does a nastily poor job of scaling to massive folders, since it assumes that it can do UI-thread-synchronous operations like "get a list of every message in the database." (And fixing it is hard... as I have way too much experience with).

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#115

Post by pessimizer »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #88
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…

I was once told by a Mozilla policy person in DC that Thunderbird was outdated and people should use webmail. They liked Gmail better and didn't see the point of using an IMAP client. It was a weird conversation. I understood it was just their personal opinion, but finding myself advocating for Thunderbird against someone who works for Mozilla was a little strange. My take away was that Mozilla doesn't really know wh…

I've gotten the impression that Mozilla people haven't liked Thunderbird or Firefox for a very long time, and would rather be Mozilla Web Services or something.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#116

Post by jmiserez »

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... )

The disclaimer at the bottom of the donate page is strange:

>Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, (...) to support Thunderbird. Mozilla reserves the right to find another use for the funds if it determines that Thunderbird is no longer furthering Mozilla’s mission.

Is that true if it's now a separate project?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#117

Post by slondr »

RealDinosaur wrote: post #19
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…

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…

Thunderbird is a XUL implementation with a lot of JavaScript being used for its UI. It's as close as you can get to being the Electron of Firefox without being in a PPA.

The most recent version (Thunderbird 60) introduced sweeping UI changes that went much deeper than even Chrome 69's.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#118

Post by favorited »

sneakernets wrote: post #104
RealDinosaur wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's due to a majority of those who have been around the block a few times knowing a trainwreck of a fad when they see one. At the end of the day it's basically taking a web page and throwing it into a container without browser controls. Remember when Windows 95 IE4 enhancements got so much flak and jeers from hackers due to MSHTML? Electron feels even worse than that. The Web still sucks, and we don't need t…

> we don't need to shove The Web into native applications

90% of the time I'd agree with this sentiment, but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content. A browser engine integration is just the reality, at some level.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#119

Post by arkh »

ben509 wrote: post #68
classichasclass wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141 : "This bug has lasted this long because there is no reproducible test case, so thus no way for an engineer to diagnose the problem and test a patch." I sympathize, but I'm not sure what you expect the team to do. The bug seems highly intermittent even when it does occur and there doesn't seem to be anything in common between the systems that are affected.

Normal troubleshooting for intermittent issues is to add logging and diagnostics around possible areas it's happening and have users send in traces when it bites them again.

Got biten by this bug. One time after more than a decade of Thunderbird use.

The mails were still on the server but having to create a new profile and redownload everything and retrain the spam filter was not fun.

It is not what I'd call an intermittent issue: it is a black swan. Happens very rarely but with huge consequences for the user. If it happens a second time thunderbird is being uninstalled and put on a blacklist of software to avoid.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#120

Post by monksy »

pix64 wrote: post #112
monksy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Email clients need an html engine, so all that added baggage kinda comes with the territory.

They need a stripped down HTML engine for rending incoming emails and composing emails. With an electron-based app how are you going to prevent HTML from rending in the view?
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