Live data from Hacker News

What’s New in Thunderbird 78

blog.thunderbird.net

191–200 of 230 posts

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#191

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…

> It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are.

It really is odd. I've tried a handful of clients, but the one I wanted to work the most was MailSpring. The UI was clean, it was supposed to be fast, and have great integration off the bat. I forget if it was my gmail, my student email (through gmail), or my hotmail account, but one of them would just refuse to connect. If I can only have 2/3 of my emails, I'm not going to bother. That was a few months ago, so maybe it's fixed, but damn.

Thunderbird works, but if they could have some easier customization, I think they could really take back some of the market.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#192
Calendar integration off the bat is essential for an email client IMO. Glad that it's being incorporated. Dark mode is also a nice addition. I'm rooting for Thunderbird, I want them to help bring back non-web email clients.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#193
post #114

Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.

I'm young and I really dislike slack. Sure, I agree email is shit but it is by far the best tool I have seen for this type of messaging. (Collaborative documents like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper being the other major async communication tool I value).

The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel). No other medium has the explicit "delete" (or archive or whatever) that email has. I find this way way way more useful than the "read" concept. Because read means nothing to me, even if I actually did read it (not that it was just present on my screen for a couple of seconds) it is incredibly likely that I forget about it.

Other things I like about email: - Multiple clients let me use email how it works for me. I can control how it notifies me, how it sorts my messages and everything else I care about. Slack is ok, but I don't really believe that one size fits all. And I'm not sure that it even fits many people. - I can send an email to anyone. I don't need to invite them to my workspace or channel or anything. Just enter an address and it is off.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#194
post #191

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…

> It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. It really is odd. I've tried a handful of clients, but the one I wanted to work the most was MailSpring. The UI was clean, it was supposed to be fast, and have great integration off the bat. I forget if it was my gmail, my student email (through gmail), or my hotmail account, but one of them would just refuse to connect. If I can only have 2/3 of…

I was a paid subscriber of Mailspring for a while, but it just completely grinds to a halt with large threads (>50 replies). It’s so unfortunate because the rest of the email client is very pleasant to use.

I’m still searching for a fast email client with great UX, but for now I assume they are mutually exclusive.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#195
I'm stuck on Thunderbird 60 because of Dorando keyconfig.

I like to read an email /then/ move them to folders.

Keyconfig lets me just tap a key and it manually runs the mail filters on that selected email. Otherwise I have to drag each email to its appropriate folder, which suuucks.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#196

Finally dark mode! Some Windows only add-ons could do it. But now Mac and Linux can too

Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers . What a pitiful regression it has been since then. [1…

To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling.

Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#197
post #18

Many of these UI changes seem like backward steps. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso... Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons. New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png Extra white space makes the window nea…

The old To/Cc design was really bad. If you have more than three addresses, then these three lines scroll. The only indication that there are more than three addresses is a tiny scrollbar all the way to the right. I recently sent an e-mail to more people than intended when editing an old message as new, because it had more To-addresses that weren't visible and I didn't notice the scrollbar. I'm very happy that it's b…

Seems like we won't need MRC Compose anymore?

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#198

To each their own but I find it hard to fathom using a non-cloud based email system. I regularly access my email from 7 computers.

On the other hand I can't understand how people can only use webmail. Do you only have one email account? I've got a personal email on a server I'm running, a backup gmail, a school/work account, and the root account for the email server. Even if I wasn't too lazy to set up webmail on my email server, I still wouldn't want to go to three different websites to check my email, I'd use a mail client to bring all of them into one place.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#199
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again Thunderbird's problem is and always has been a lack of resources. Mozilla infamously bungled…

What hurts Thunderbird extremely hard is Mozilla's inability to keep any embedding story live for more than a year or so. Originally, Thunderbird and Firefox lived in the same CVS codebase, and the only difference to build Thunderbird was changing one line in your config file. When Mozilla moved to Mercurial, the Thunderbird code was left out of the repository on purpose, and so gained the annoying split-repository.…

> Then XULRunner was killed off [...] Webrunner [...] killed off

Yeah, and just to point out: in a profoundly stupid move. I mean, it was stupid then, too, it's just that now we have the evidence for it.

The constant refrain was that niche being a dead end. But the rise and proliferation of Electron (to the point that people bring it up to complain about it in places where it's not even on topic) and the success of Chromebooks (compared the failure of FirefoxOS for mobile; which itself was a leadership/execution error) both mean exactly one thing: those calling the shots on that decision and their supporters were flat out wrong. And so where is that crowd now? Mostly with their legacy and influence still being felt in every decision—and where those decisions contribute to Firefox being more marginal every passing year. Even if you forgive the original mistake, how is this not outright embarrassing for Mozilla Corp leadership?

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#200
post #66

I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se. The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Great work Tea…

> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.

The OpenPGP support is based on Enigmail (ginally merged in!), which has been a wrapper around GPG all along. GPG does all the actual cryptography in this setup.
Post reply on HN