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Thunderbird in 2019

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#121

Post by jcranmer »

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I was once told by a Mozilla policy person in DC that Thunderbird was outdated and people should use webmail.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…

There's a wide spectrum of people at Mozilla. It can range from "oh, I broke Thunderbird? Here, let me fix it for you." to "Thunderbird? Why haven't you died yet?"

In terms of who fit where, a few of the people at the head of the Mozilla Foundation were definitely strongly supportive, but I think most of the upper-tier management levels tended to be against Thunderbird as too much of a distraction from fixing issues [1]. This resulted in a lot of mixed messaging about how much Mozilla was or was not supporting Thunderbird. By the time you get down to most of the development staff, there was usually a desire to be kind and helpful towards Thunderbird but utter confusion as to whether or not they could be so due to the aforementioned mixed messaging.

[1] I'd argue that this was strongly short-sighted. To me, Mozilla deciding to ultimately screw over embedding, and a lot of the issues with Thunderbird would have been solved with a big push to a new, stable embedding. I even made arguments to that affect nearly a decade ago, but to no avail...

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#122

Post by sydney6 »

xte wrote: post #92
sydney6 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"-Native PGP" - Take a look at this talk and be careful what you wish for: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to-end_email_...

While valid and interesting (good to know, and to share) for most people GNUPG-signed+encrypted emails are nice as a privacy protection tools against mass data mining. Even in today's society I't a bit hard to imaging Alphabet, Yandex, Microsoft etc do such kind of attacks...

Yes, but i believe tools/features like these advertise a sense of a level of security to the user which is, evidently and also to the protocols involved inherently, not what they might be led to believe. Given it's usually sensitive context, this can be quite dangerous.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#123

Post by jcranmer »

xte wrote: post #100
sciurus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the languages used in Thunderbird source ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tree_Rules/comm-central#Thunderbird ): $ cloc build/ ldap/ editor/ mailnews/ mail/ 3938 text files. 3848 unique files. 949 files ignored. github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.80 T=6.01 s (497.6 files/s, 127309.9 lines/s) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ------…

Mere line count does not tell a truth, simply because you can do more thing with a SLoC in a language than another, also sometime to be on certain platform you need an enormous amount of code only for them that's have no other purpose that boilerplate for a platform. Too simplistic :-)

Most of the backend is written in C++. This is the mail protocol suite, the message database store logic, most of the internal account glue stuff, and even the bits that drive the main message listing (although that's moving to JS because Mozilla is killing off nsITreeView, a move which I fear for the performance implications of). The parts that are in JS are most of the code that drives the actual display. Of the MVC for the display, essentially the main model and view are both implemented in C++ whereas the controller is JS.

The largest pieces of the backend that are in JS are the RSS functionality and gloda (one of the search backends), as well as half of the MIME parser.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#124

Post by gsich »

favorited wrote: post #118
sneakernets wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content

No they don't.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#125

Post by favorited »

gsich wrote: post #124
favorited wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content No they don't.

If they want users they do.

I get more HTML emails than plain-text. I won't switch to a mail client that can't render the majority of my inbox.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#126

Post by setr »

favorited wrote: post #125
gsich wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content No they don't.

If they want users they do. I get more HTML emails than plain-text. I won't switch to a mail client that can't render the majority of my inbox.

I don't think I have any HTML emails that require more than web 2.0 stylings, which isn't really much more than lynx would support, plus images.

Its not clear to me you need anything resembling a modern web browser to render HTML emails. Do they even commonly use HTML5 features?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#127

Post by stallmanite »

pessimizer wrote: post #115
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is not Firefox the raison d’etre of the Mozilla Foundation? It seems ridiculous for them to lose sight of that.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#128

Post by gsich »

favorited wrote: post #125
gsich wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but modern email clients need to be able to render rich web content No they don't.

If they want users they do. I get more HTML emails than plain-text. I won't switch to a mail client that can't render the majority of my inbox.

Then your term "modern" is wrongly used here. I haven't seen any substantial change in the last 10-15 years in regards to HTML mails.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#129

Post by jammygit »

pessimizer wrote: post #115
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't realize they offered web services to any significant degree. Any prominent examples besides MDN?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#130

Post by jammygit »

shock wrote: post #83
Fnoord wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS. [1] https://getmailspring.com

Only part of it is FOSS (the UI basically), the sync engine is closed source and using Mailspring requires creating a Mailspring account FWIW.

I wonder what's in their privacy policy. I don't mind paying but wish everyone didn't use the same semi-copy pasted privacy policies for liability reasons.

Edit: typical 'your pii is an asset we transfer when we get acquired' clause

Information Shared with Third Parties. We may share aggregated information and non-identifying information with third parties for industry research and analysis, demographic profiling and other similar purposes.

Information Disclosed in Connection with Business Transactions. Information that we collect from our users, including PII, is considered to be a business asset. Thus, if we are acquired by a third party as a result of a transaction such as a merger, acquisition or asset sale or if our assets are acquired by a third party in the event we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, some or all of our assets, including your PII, may be disclosed or transferred to a third party acquirer in connection with the transaction

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