Our plans for Thunderbird on Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#151

Post by rollcat » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #110

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I actually stopped using K9 because it stuck to the ridiculously outdated, and honestly quite ugly, Holo interface.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…

How I miss Holo. It was simple, consistent, basic but still elegant.

Personally, it was the transition from Holo to Material that drove me off Android entirely. There was no such thing as dark mode at the time Android 5 dropped; you had to set brightness very low to stand a chance at reading anything in the dark, and with many (almost all?) apps still using the dark Holo, looking at and using the device was jarring. I switched to Jolla, and later to iOS.

I'm happy Android users didn't have to suffer through another platform-wide redesign in the meantime, but I personally don't find Material appealing.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#152

Post by tssva » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

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.

Hacker News users are much more likely to have vast email archives organized into folders which must be regularly searched than the general public. Most people have no choice regarding work email. Web email clients and the default mobile clients meet most people's personal email requirements. In other words 3rd party email clients are dying because there is a lack of demand.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#153

Post by tjoff » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

kroltan wrote: post #148

tjoff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that more apps can snoop on your email? Why would you want to use more than one email-app for the same accounts ? (I get that you might want to use the gmail app for a gmail account, but then using the same account in K9 doesn't make much sense to me)

As far as I understand, there is still exclusive access to 1 app at a time, it's just that the accounts and sending/receiving is handled by the OS, and apps call into the OS to do operations, rather than maintaining their own credential stores and talking POP/IMAP/whatever directly to servers.

Not being forced to enter your credentials in android itself is a feature.

Back in early android-days many email-apps actually added an android account for IMAP/POP accounts. Which felt quite awkward. And I suspect that it was trivial for any app to list your accounts and get all of your registered email-addresses.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#154

Post by oblib » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

I use Thunderbird on my late `09 Mac Mini. Last week I was testing an html email that uses Bootstrap css for the design layout and it looked great in Thunderbird, Gmail strips any tags for links to css files, and so does Roundcube, so it looked like crap in those.

So then I tried embedding the css in the email and same thing. Thunderbird rendered it perfectly and the others ignored and/or removed it. I'm at a loss as to why CSS in an email is ignored or stripped out by Gmail. Sure makes it ugly though.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#155

Post by folkrav » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

conradev wrote: post #138

mqus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 succe…

Still a far ways from having "nothing to do" with it

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#156

Post by jacooper » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

Honestly I'm totally the opposite. I had a very negative impression on k-9 when I tried to use it a long time ago because of it's old interface.

However I recently needed an email app, I tried Fairmail but it has so many options, and its UI is very weird. I switched to K-9 and its perfect!, yes its not fully modern looking but its easy to use and simple to get started with. If K-9 stayed with the holo UI I probably wouldn't have used it.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#157

Post by Qub3d » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

As a user of Thunderbird on desktop and user/donor to K-9 on Android this is incredible news.

Super excited to see cketti's work get a major FOSS organization behind it. Contrary to some other comments, I have actually been really happy with the new interface updates and I think giving K-9 a light thunderbird skin would be fantastic.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#158

Post by sph » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

krylon wrote: post #128

sph wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do not appreciate good UIs enough. I think many software engineers might be UI-blind, actually. Thunderbird is ugly, atrocious on 4K screens, does not group messages by conversation like mail client have in the past 20 years, and insists on listing emails in side-by-side columns instead of using a more compact and space-effective layout like many mail clients in the past 20 years. It's got a menubar, 3 level o…

I like Thunderbird's UI. It doesn't get in the way, and more importantly, I have used it for a long time, so I know my way around it quite well. A lot of attempts to "improve" UIs end with things like Microsoft's Ribbon interface (which I really dislike). > does not group messages by conversation Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly i…

> Thunderbird can group messages by conversation. One has to ask for it specifically in the Sorting menu, which admittedly is annoying and should be the default. But it is there.

It's not a unified conversation view like Gmail or Fastmail. There's a plugin that does that, but it's not very pleasant either.

I'm on Linux, all other email clients are pretty bad or similarly stuck in 2005 in appearance. I am very happy with the Fastmail webapp, but Mozilla is against PWAs so I have to resort to using Chromium to keep it around as a standalone app. I would like to use Thunderbird, but I have tried getting comfortable with the UI a dozen times in as many years, and I uninstall it in frustration 30 minutes later. These days it is also very sad to open its extension store and see that most of its plugins are unmaintained and haven't been updated in years. There's a true feeling of abandonware every time I give it another chance.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#159

Post by ycombinator_acc » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

I hope they get rid of the dreaded hamburger menu and other Gingerbread-era design patterns and just generally make the app less ancient-looking and more usable on modern gesture-based Android.

Fairemail is much better in that regard, which is why I stick to it, but still quite dated.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#160

Post by mxuribe » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

subsection1h wrote: post #59

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…

> An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? I strongly prefer Maildir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

I'm not a Thunderbird expert...but I seem to recall hearing some where that some desktop mail clients - especially Thunderbird - who use Maildir tend to also leverage sqlite (as an over-layer) to aid with content indexing and search...? If my recollection is right, that's kinda the best of both worlds: separate files (maildir) but speedy content search. :-)