What’s New in Thunderbird 78 • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#151

Post by upofadown » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:07 PM UTC

AnonHP wrote: post #43

The integration of GPG into the client was a great move. The addition of dark mode is also good to keep up with the times. After all this while, the best thing I love about this release is the simplification of the To (and also CC and BCC) list into one field instead of being multiple rows (it was always painful to scroll). I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for person…

It is OpenPGP capability that is being integrated into the client, not GnuPG. You will have to import your keys from any existing GnuPG installation. Any new keys you add in Thunderbird will not be accessible to other things that use GnuPG.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#152

Post by scoutt » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #133

scoutt wrote: post #73

I love Thunderbird and I use it since forever. I welcome this update and changes, but they really have to fix Search .

Interesting, TB search works a million times better for me than Outlook. What are your main issues?

It can't search for exact strings. Double quotes don't work.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#153

Post by elbows » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #129

I had an IMAP account that, when deleted from the server (the company closed and closed their GSuite accounts), was rendered impossible to access from TB. But afaik the emails where there, given the space that the TB folder occupied on the hard disk. I saw some conversations about how if you want to have a local copy of emails and be sure that server errors (or server dissappearance, as it was the case) won't affect…

I use OfflineImap to backup all my email to a local maildir: http://www.offlineimap.org/

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#154

Post by GordonS » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

Can I ask what it is you don't like about Outlook?

I've been a regular Outlook user for many years, and honestly I'm pretty happy with it. My only real pain is the lack of ability to easily export/import my mail accounts between machines, but that's something I do only every few years.

I did run Thunderbird on a low-power laptop some years ago, and did like it, but at the time it was nowhere near feature parity with Outlook.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#155

Post by CannisterFlux » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

dijksterhuis wrote: post #145

kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

Out of interest are you hooked up to an Exchange account or IMAP? Exchange email accounts are the bane of my email set up at the moment.

I use http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ running locally and connect Thunderbird to it for Exchange email and calendar. I used to use the TB add-ons for this directly but they broke a couple of years ago with the XUL addons removals. The davmail solution means I just use lightning for calendar and the rest is all standard TB.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#156

Post by tomrod » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #111

kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

Why are you sending emails with tables in them? If you really need that much formatting maybe you should link or attach your document.

Not the OP. Several east coast-style execs I've worked with won't open attachments, but rather forward correspondence with attachments to their team. So for them to ever see the info, it has to be in an email body.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#157

Post by davb » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

jmpeax wrote: post #25

Dark mode still needs some work. It doesn't detect black text, and keeps it black on the dark background.

I found the same. It would be useful if you could enable dark mode on all UI elements but the message pane.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#158

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

aembleton wrote: post #138

jsilence wrote: post #50

I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients. Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.

Wouldn't it be better for it to store it in a Sqlite file so that it is easier for third party programs to query it?

Then you're creating a new format (sqlite is well known, but the schema won't be), which third parties can add support for; depending on your exact goal, this is probably worse than using an already-supported format.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#159

Post by davb » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:29 PM UTC

I just switched Linux distro last night (Ubuntu to Fedora) and downloaded the latest Thunderbird (v78). I thought the oversized, cartoonish UI was something inherited from the Gtk or Gnome version shipping with the new distro (which oddly didn't affect other applications).

Now I can see it was a change in Thunderbird, and I hate it. It's so clunky, that when enabling Large Text in Gnome (to make things more legible on the 1080p 14in laptop screen) Thunderbird looks disproportionately large compared to every other application.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#160

Post by s1k3s » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 12:33 PM UTC

kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

I think Outlook itself is a big reason for why other email clients seem so behind. As a user, Outlook is great and I have absolutely no complaints about it. As a developer that occasionally has to work with the technical side of emails, Outlook is the biggest source of frustration due to its “proprietary” standard of content presentation, address book management, contacts etc. I have to write plenty of code specifically for emails to work with Outlook because they do not follow any open standard and they’ve created their own. And we can’t stay away from it because it’s definitelly the most used client in our field.

Seems like Microsoft is leveraging their position in the same way Google does with browsers and Apple does with hardware.