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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#101

Post by mixedCase »

aidenn0 wrote: 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…

Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years, Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts, Mailspring is electron-based, TUIs are right out, Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird.

So yeah. For handling multiple e-mail accounts, Thunderbird works best.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#102

Post by thepangolino »

aidenn0 wrote: 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 fully agree with your comment. Thunderbird is just plain terrible.

Over the weekend I migrated to a 100% Linux/open-source environment. So of course I went through a series of alternative apps. While you'd never find feature parity (eg. with MS Office and the Adobe Suite) existing alternatives are mostly good enough.

Thunderbird has been tooted to me as THE alternative to MS Outlook. What I found was a total mess of a software stack needing countless addons and customization to even get close to Outlook. Then I discovered Evolution. It was certainly different but worked pretty much flawlessly out of the box.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#103

Post by avian »

cookiengineer wrote: post #71
pmontra wrote: 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.

> Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore.

Mozilla the non-profit owns the for-profit corp who owns Thunderbird.

In their own words from the footer of https://www.thunderbird.net:

> Thunderbird is now part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#104

Post by sph »

mid-kid wrote: post #49
javajosh wrote: post #25

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…

> written starting with a browser as a jumping off point That's thunderbird for ya. Really the only web-browsery thing a mail client needs is rendering of the email itself (if it's not just plain text, HTML email is an extension!), for which, sure, it's a better idea to use an existing webview. But for the rest of the interface and logic? No.

To be fair, if you're bundling a web browser to render emails, you might as well write your whole UI out of it. Of all use cases of Electron, an email client is probably the least offensive.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#105

Post by jraph »

mixedCase wrote: post #101
aidenn0 wrote: 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…

Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years, Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts, Mailspring is electron-based, TUIs are right out, Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird. So yeah. For handling multiple e-mail accounts, Thunderbird works best.

That's my experience as well. And I would like to use KMail since I use KDE anyway. I haven't tried Mailspring but I don't feel like running another Electron app when Thunderbird does the job amazingly well.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#106

Post by prophesi »

longrod wrote: post #82
prophesi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this proves Firefox is dying. A better indicator would be Chrome's past decade of 90%+ browser market share. It's also worth noting that a good amount of the features not implemented in Firefox are either Chrome-specific experiments, or features purposefully unimplemented for privacy purposes. If anything, it shows the damage of a browser-tech monopoly which Edge and Brave aren't helping with.

I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive. Chrome's huge market share is the very reason Firefox isn't trying very hard here. They are playing catch up. Take Manifest v3 for example; Chrome introduced it quite a while ago and made it mandatory for new extensions in 2022. Firefox just started catching up. This is bad for Firefox because developers will eventually (and some still do) wi…

> I don't think features such as Web USB, Web Bluetooth are privacy invasive.

Coincidentally, Brave believes they are privacy-invasive and don't support those features either (last paragraph in the article)[0].

Firefox, as with all other browsers aside from Safari, will remain with less than 5% market share for the foreseeable future. But I'd much rather continue supporting different browser engines than use a skinned Chromium to uphold the status quo.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-plan-for-chrome-c...

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#107

Post by aiisjustanif »

ekianjo wrote: post #35
emodendroket wrote: post #3

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I worry about a loss of focus when Thunderbird is one of the few in a dying category on the desktop, which is much less true on mobile.

its mostly dying because its so poorly optimized it chokes on mailboxes that have more than hundred emails and cant do search properly. One of the worst FOSS out there.

Are we talking about Thunderbird because it performs very well.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#108

Post by decrypt »

pmontra wrote: 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…

May I ask what Thunderbird local storage means? Does that mean that emails are delivered and stored on the device, vs on a cloud server?

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#109

Post by jraph »

thepangolino wrote: post #102
aidenn0 wrote: 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 fully agree with your comment. Thunderbird is just plain terrible. Over the weekend I migrated to a 100% Linux/open-source environment. So of course I went through a series of alternative apps. While you'd never find feature parity (eg. with MS Office and the Adobe Suite) existing alternatives are mostly good enough. Thunderbird has been tooted to me as THE alternative to MS Outlook. What I found was a total mess o…

I vouched for your comment.

Congratulations and good luck for your migration!

It's good you found a solution in Evolution. I don't use many extensions in Thunderbird, just one to show different colors in the new mail window depending on the account used to send the mail. I'd be interested in knowing which specific features of Outlook you needed that required extensions in Thunderbird (and that Evolution has by default).

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#110

Post by jeroenhd »

pmontra wrote: 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…

I actually stopped using K9 because it stuck to the ridiculously outdated, and honestly quite ugly, Holo interface. Holo worked as long as the entire system was consistent, but as soon as material design got fixed in Android 7 (took them a while to cut down on the margins!) I was over Holo.

I don't feel like setting up my mail client again but looking at the current design I'm pleasantly surprised. I'll probably give it a go as soon as the Thunderbird team and the K9 team have joined forces for an actual release.

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