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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

131–140 of 296 posts

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#132
post #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 ma…

Element did not change ownership. They've just had a few confusing name changes. And the (same) people behind the client are trying to commercialise the client but not the network behind it where your data actually is.

I never understood why they dropped vector as a name. It wasn't a worse name than element. Riot was a terrible name choice however. Sooner or later it would have got caught up being used by people coordinating a protest or something and the press would have had a field day with it.

But your data has never left the matrix network or your own home server if you chose to have one.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#133
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.

I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.

I've just learned (one benefit of not automatically updating everything) that the app I've used for syncing music from iTunes to my Android phone [1] plus the associated music player app have been sold to some unscrupulous developers who have apparently proceeded to immediately re-add ads into the paid-for (!) versions, re-adding the the file sync limits that originally only applied to the free trial version and things like that and (instead of the former one-time purchase) are now demanding something on the order of 30 $ or so per month (!!) in order to unlock the former paid-for features again.

It'd be nice if there actually was a rule against something like that…

[1] The key features for why I didn't just use a simple file sync was that it supported bi-directional syncing of play counts, ratings and for podcasts also the playback position.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#134
post #9

I'll be certain to use whatever fork of K-9 is available rather than anything Mozilla. WHERE'S THE SAVE TO PDF OPTION on mobile Firefox?

Same way you have to do it on Chrome iOS; Share the page, select print, and zoom in on the thumbnail to have it generate a PDF you can save.

I don't see that option on mine...But I use Fennec from Fdroid, so maybe that's why.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#135

Does anyone know how to make gmail play nice with K-9 or FairEmail? Gmail keeps asking me to log in through a browser on my phone, and authorize almost every log in attempt, and not all authorizations are accepted! When I log in into my gmail account on a computer and authorize the "suspect" log ins, gmail still refuses (8/10 times) to allow use through 3rd party apps. My experience with 3rd party email apps has been…

Go to your Google account and setup an app password. Might have to enable 'unsecure' access in additionele (Google think standards bases interfaces are outdated, you see). Then you can add your mail account through IMAP/SMTP, *DAV.

As with all things Google, the only winning move is not to play. Long term I'm sure they'll axe this and tell you to use their app or bust.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#137
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…

Given how SMS on Android is basically just a database that's shared between all SMS apps... it does seem like there should be an email equivalent. Not having to plug my password into every email app would be a good thing.

Or does IMAP cover that sufficiently well, e.g. not requiring duplicating a ton of data? I haven't dug into the spec before, I've just always used it with "download everything all the time" configs, but I know it has remote searching and a few other things that'd fit reasonably well with a content provider.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#138
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thunderbird operates independently within Mozilla:

> There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#139
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.

> Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years

Indeed, my reaction to Geary was "wow, they managed to make KMail look good!"

> Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts

I don't like this about Evolution either; I haven't run a GNOME desktop for at least a decade, and (depending on the distro) it can be a tiny bit fiddly getting Evolution working without a GNOME desktop. It "just works" on recent NixOS versions though. Once it's installed though, it's a joy to use, while Thunderbird feels like a drag. I'm not a UI expert, so I can't put my finger on what the difference is.

> Mailspring is electron-based

I hadn't heard of mailspring previously, but I suspect we have similar views of what at typical electron-based app is like...

> TUIs are right out

I have no problem with TUIs, I use a TUI along side a gui mail client, but the latter is necessary when dealing with non text-only messages (particularly responding to).

> Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird

Maybe I'm just old, but Claws is way more usable than me than Thunderbird. The only thing it lacks for me is an html e-mail editor, which is necessary for responding and quoting to non text-only e-mails. There are plenty of good TUIs that can handle text-only e-mails, so claws isn't really something I currently have a use for.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#140
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Element did not change ownership. They've just had a few confusing name changes. And the (same) people behind the client are trying to commercialise the client but not the network behind it where your data actually is. I never understood why they dropped vector as a name. It wasn't a worse name than element. Riot was a terrible name choice however. Sooner or later it would have got caught up being used by people coor…

No, but it did change name and appearence in the move from what was Riot Android to when RiotX was launched and rebranded to Element
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