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Thunderbird in 2019

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#141

Post by baroffoos »

ben509 wrote: post #63
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…

A total rewrite almost sank Netscape[1] long ago. It's still generally a bad idea. There's an electron based mail client called Mailspring[2], and having used it for a few months, I definitely understand the antipathy towards electron. You might like it. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [2]: https://getmailspring.com/

Huge rewrites of firefox are saving it today. Seems like the best way is to rewrite in chunks allowing you to use new bits in the existing application.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#142

Post by shay_ker »

wpietri wrote: post #133
shay_ker wrote: post #132

An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone. Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021? 2022?

Could you say more about why that is? For me it's like a Swiss Army knife versus my full kitchen. I use a basic email client on my phone for on-the-go stuff (seeing what has come in, making quick replies). But for doing anything serious, I want a full keyboard and reasonable screen real estate. I don't think it's possible to have a particularly consistent experience, so I'm fine with using a different client on my ph…

I like special features of AirMail, for instance, where you can snooze certain emails. If they only had a desktop client, then I can't snooze on the go on my phone. And now I have to context switch and remember to delay certain tasks to when I get to my laptop.

Email clients also sometimes impose some level of formatting, and I'd like that to be consistent across mobile/web as well

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#143

Post by anuragsoni »

amaccuish wrote: post #77
amaccuish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Update: works really well, shame it doesn't do email at the same time, but I guess it's a WIP. Cheers!

As an aside, if using IMAP for the exchange account (as @shmerl suggests) doesn't work for you, you might have better luck with DavMail [1]. I've used it in the past before my workplace enabled IMAP access for exchange mailboxes.

[1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#144

Post by tya99 »

amaccuish wrote: post #72
kuon wrote: post #38

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 fu…

> Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). This would have been great about 5 years ago, and still would be useful, but I think we're going in the direction of unified protocols, like ActiveSync, JMAP, MAPI/EWS etc. IMHO x-DAV should have been there from day one. I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird, I've been missi…

> I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird

I used to use SOGo but found it used way too much resources. None of us really even used 'webmail' so I ditched SOGO.

I went with https://radicale.org most of my family either uses mail clients, Thunderbird, (with Lightning), Canary Mail (the mac user), DAVx⁵ (formerly Davdroid). Radicale allows for ldap authentication which was a must for us.

On a side note the SOGO Integrator plugin took AGES to be updated for Thunderbird 60. I found https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/ to be WAY better, particularly as it replaces the crufty-old Thunderbird addressbook.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#145

Post by tya99 »

tya99 wrote: post #144
amaccuish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). This would have been great about 5 years ago, and still would be useful, but I think we're going in the direction of unified protocols, like ActiveSync, JMAP, MAPI/EWS etc. IMHO x-DAV should have been there from day one. I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird, I've been missi…

> I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird I used to use SOGo but found it used way too much resources. None of us really even used 'webmail' so I ditched SOGO. I went with https://radicale.org most of my family either uses mail clients, Thunderbird, (with Lightning), Canary Mail (the mac user), DAVx⁵ (formerly Davdroid). Radicale allows for ldap authentication which…

On a side note I have been curious about https://www.etesync.com but haven't tried that.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#147

Post by tya99 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #90
kuon wrote: post #38

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 fu…

While we're writing a wishlist, native Wayland support wouldn't go amiss. That goes for Firefox too!

> While we're writing a wishlist, native Wayland support wouldn't go amiss. That goes for Firefox too!

That will happen after it makes it's way into standard Firefox releases as Thunderbird is based off ESR. It is happening.

See Martin's reply:

https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/firefox-on-wayla...

> Martin Stransky October 9, 2018 at 8:12 pm

> Unfortunately Thunderbird 60 is based on Firefox 60ESR which misses lots of Wayland patches.

> We can consider backport but I’d leave it on X11 for now and fine tune the patches on Firefox first.

Overall progress can be monitored here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

I have been wanting to switch from i3 to Sway for some time now and not have blurry fonts in Mozilla products. (That's what happens if you use them through XWayland).

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#148

Post by paulie_a »

kuon wrote: post #85
paulie_a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the search was excellent when I used it. At one point I had a 100k of emails. But I could find what ever I needed. Meanwhile Outlook failed with a certain local file size limit and caused endless problems. They were apparently okay with that and resisted change to something that actually worked.

The search is not bad when you know what you are looking for. It's fuzzy search that is missing, and a few UI adjustments.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far better than Outlook. And I have never once had to purchase recovery utils for Thunderbird, but to fix the fragile pst Outlook uses. I cant even count the number of times I had to do recovery for someone because IT was busy. Thunderbird never failed. At one point I just outright installed Thunderbird, changed the icon to Outlook and no one complained. I think I told them it was just the new interface.

Plus Outlook was a security nightmare anyways.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#149

Post by dzamo_norton »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #106
kuon wrote: post #38

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 fu…

>"Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars)." I use the TbSync and Provider for CalDAV and CardDAV add-ons. So far it works perfectly. But yes, I would prefer built-in native support.

It's in the works:

https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/issues/158

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#150

Post by Deebster »

Boulth wrote: post #62
jcranmer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders. Have you tried migrating to using maildir instead of mbox?

Not the OP but help pages seem to suggest Maildir support in TB is not necessarily production quality: > Maildir is disabled by default because there are still many bugs. It is not 100% ready for users. Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

I wonder how up-to-date that warning is, given that the feature was introduced in TB 38 and we're now on TB 60.

Edit: there's still 35 bugs tagged maildir (albeit all unconfirmed or new): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?classification=Clie...

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