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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

91–100 of 296 posts

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#91

My favorite mobile email app now working with my favorite desktop email app. Love it!

It does not support IMAP at first glance. The wizard has only POP3 config option.

Ah, nope. Manual config has it. I wonder whether IDLE command is supported, but we'll see.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#92
post #84
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird is built on top of a browser. Most code for it's functionality isn't C++. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Last I checked (which was a while ago), while the UI is in XUL / JavaScript, the bulk of the mail handling (POP/IMAP/SMTP, MIME parsing, etc.) was still in C++ that was extremely complex and hard to port to JavaScript. There was an attempt to rebuild a mail client in JS for FirefoxOS (the mobile phone thing that is now mostly KaiOS), but that's not used in Thunderbird as far as I know.

The backend stuff is being (slowly) ported to JS from C++. SMTP should be implemented in JS now, I don't know about the other parts.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#93
post #38

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbi…

From Mozilla's previous attempts to jettison Thunderbird, and the period where the community kept it maintained while Mozilla allocated no resources, the relationship between Thunderbird and Mozilla these days is more akin to that between something like GNU or ASF and their projects than a company and its direct project.

While yes Mozilla could theoretically enforce its trademarks and appoint its own team to start making more direct decisions, we've seen how that goes with various ex-GNU projects like libreboot or ASF projects where they don't have the community like OpenOffice

> If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?

On my phone currently, this applies to the following apps:

* Element

* Free Now (European taxi app bought out by BMW/Daimler, formerly mytaxi, formerly hailo)

* Google Hangouts (Was installed as Talk)

* WhatsApp (now Facebook owned)

* A local cinema chain bought out by a UK + Ireland chain

* Pocket Casts (independent -> NPR -> Automattic)

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#94
I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1].

It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are going to be different, it should be to some purpose, but after 6 months of using it I still don't see any purpose. There are still some vestiges of its previous Eudora-like interface, but everywhere it is different from Eudora, it is to no purpose I can fathom.

1: The other two I could find are Evolution and davmail (which bridges EWS to imap). There may be more now; I last looked about a year ago. I can unreservedly say that using Evolution is better experience than Thunderbird, though its underlying architecture is a bit bizarre.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#95
post #66

As a Thunderbird and K-9 user this is 51% good news and 49% possibly bad new. Good news because it should increase the chances that the two products will live a longer life. Possibly bad news because I'm one of the crowd that went back to K-9 5.600 because the new version destroyed the UI that was the primary reason why we picked K-9 over other apps. 100% self selection bias here. There was maybe an ongoing effort to…

Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. They abandoned Thunderbird and it's a totally separate community project these days.

I probably know less than you, but at least the linked donations page https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/k9mail/ has heavy mozilla branding and also talks about "Mozilla Thunderbird"...

thunderbird.net states at the bottom: Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#96
post #66

As a Thunderbird and K-9 user this is 51% good news and 49% possibly bad new. Good news because it should increase the chances that the two products will live a longer life. Possibly bad news because I'm one of the crowd that went back to K-9 5.600 because the new version destroyed the UI that was the primary reason why we picked K-9 over other apps. 100% self selection bias here. There was maybe an ongoing effort to…

Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. They abandoned Thunderbird and it's a totally separate community project these days.

[deleted]

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#97
post #94

I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1]. It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are g…

I don't know. I've been using it since 2005. Its UI is stable and efficient. Gets the job done and does not get in the way. And it's free software.

You are not actually saying what you don't like about Thunderbird so it's hard to oppose anything to your comment. Why Thunderbird should change its UI if it works okay? Gratuitously different from what by the way?

And to me, the UIs of Evolution and KMail don't seem that much different from Thunderbird's and from what I've seem from Outlook, same thing. There's a pane listing inboxes and folders, there's a pane showing the content of the selected folder and there's a pane showing the selected email's content. ?

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#98
post #45

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

I don't personally find Thunderbird to be bloated, especially compared to e.g. KMail (which even a few years ago was still buggy and unstable for me). "Complex" might be reasonable but I expect a lot of that comes from email protocols themselves being convoluted and weird. In fact, I think email's own complexities are what destroy most peoples' motivation to make a shinier, more modern tool. I will say I do have a ma…

Same (edit: no permanent damage done yet but now I keep tbird minimised to prevent this kind of bad stuff from keybindings).

And I went back to webmail for 6 weeks because when tbird upgraded itself, the new OAuth (I think) stuff needed cookies, which I didn't allow so just couldn't connect and just kept failing without any explanation. That took half a day of chasing down.

And if I get a calendar invite it just tells me "all calendars are currently disabled. Enable an existing calendar or add a new one..." without 1) saying why or 2) saying how (and why would it not just use the one it's literally showing me while saying they're disabled).

And it doesn't recognise domains correctly, and it strips out inline attachments (yes, really), and fucks up formatting (turns html mails into messed up plain text), and it's caused me so much grief since its install, can anyone suggest a competent, reliable email client that has a focus on quality and not a focus on stupid UI crap that makes it feel like someone's personal side-project. I'd gladly pay .

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#99
post #94

I hope that someday I will understand why people like Thunderbird. It is unequivocally the worst e-mail client I have ever used, excepting some early, extremely buggy versions of alpine. I tried it again recently as it is only one of only 3 e-mail clients I found that could do exchange oauth2[1]. It's possible that its interface isn't as objectively terrible as it seems, but it is gratuitously different; if you are g…

[deleted]

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#100

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

> I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components.

Nope. Totally not interested in anything Electron...

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