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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#191

Post by donio »

ryanleesipes wrote: post #70
xg15 wrote: 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…

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve…

Why not keep the K-9 name though? Arguably it's a stronger brand for the target audience than Thunderbird.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#192

Post by Groxx »

tjoff wrote: post #143
Groxx wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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)

Content providers can require app signatures, approval, whatever they want. So... no? Unless you build something that allows everyone to read your email. But don't build that if you don't want that.

As far as "why": why not? Some apps do some things better than others. You can already do this with IMAP, it'd just be deduplicating the download cost / connections / etc, which is generally a good thing for mobile use.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#193

Post by cookiengineer »

avian wrote: post #103
cookiengineer wrote: post #71

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.

> 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.

... which is in conflict with the Thunderbird FAQ [1]:

> Who makes Thunderbird?

> Thunderbird is developed, tested, translated and supported largely by group of dedicated volunteers, plus paid staff. Thunderbird is an independent, community driven project. Therefore its paid staff, budget and fundraising are entirely managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community. Thunderbird development is made possible by funds donated by the Thunderbird community. (Mozilla Corporation, the makers of Firefox, and Mozilla Messaging no longer develop Thunderbird. But Mozilla still supports Thunderbird by hosting many of the Thunderbird resources.)

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-m...

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#194

Post by Groxx »

tjoff wrote: post #153
kroltan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, android's "accounts" thing really has not worked out in practice. It always felt half-complete and strange, and it's still a very rough experience.

In principle it... might make sense? A system-provided-and-presumably-more-secure login method isn't inherently a bad idea. But without a deeper commitment from them / a better way to actually trust it / more consistent updates from OEMs (lol, yeah right), apps really have ended up generally better and more trustworthy.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#195

Post by jeroenhd »

rollcat wrote: post #151
jeroenhd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Material done well looks quite attractive.

The problem is that very few developers seem to read the Material Design guidelines on offsets and such and the offsets often look cobbled together. Not even Google themselves can consistently follow their own design guidelines.

To be fair, as long as I can keep basic features (i.e. an app drawer and placing my icons and widgets wherever I'd like) I'd be fine with a Cupertino styles phone as well, as long as the damn thing is consistent. Back in the Holo days everybody but the game devs followed Holo because it was quite easy to follow, there weren't a lot of subtle details if you used existing components. Looking back at screenshot it looked a bit clunky, but every app looking nearly platform native was a huge plus that we don't seem to get on Android anymore.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#196

Post by johannes1234321 »

dizhn wrote: post #112
cookiengineer wrote: post #71

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.

It's still part of mozilla the company and has a special advantage in that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project.

> that they can actually receive donations directly, unlike the browser project.

I would love to donate to the browser, while my small donation won't make it independent from Google's money it might be a small step towards it.

I don't especially mind their political agenda, however that's not what I want to donate to, I have other political orgs I prefer.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#197

Post by GekkePrutser »

Macha wrote: post #140
GekkePrutser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RiotX? I don't remember that. There was a TelegramX, maybe this is what you mean? However there was a couple years that I didn't use it much so perhaps I missed it.

But it did go from Vector -> Riot -> Element and various UI and branding changes along the way yes :) Part of this is also that the app was not really "finished" back in the Vector days. It only really came into its own during the Riot age. For example E2E encryption didn't yet exist at the start, and the underlying support in Matrix was missing as well. It's still a protocol and toolset that's evolving rapidly.

However the benefit of Matrix is that you can choose any client you want, there are several for mobiles.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#198

Post by password4321 »

mqus wrote: post #95
cookiengineer wrote: post #71

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.

Ha, Firefox should move out too!

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#199

Post by oblib »

jraph wrote: post #97
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 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…

I've been using it for a few years now. The UI is outdated and a bit clunky but it's worked great for me on my old Mac Mini and the old Apple Mail app is pretty much unusable now. My next best option is Roundcube Webmail, and it's pretty good too.

I have a hard time with complaining about free software. I either use it or don't, but I won't complain about it.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#200

Post by rjzzleep »

folkrav wrote: post #155
conradev wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are not the same thing.
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