Our plans for Thunderbird on Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#221

Post by efreak » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

decrypt wrote: post #108

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?

It sounds like they want k9 to be a client for thunderbird, so when you read email in k9, thunderbird marks it as read; when you fetch email, it goes through thunderbird. Thunderbird would be a caching proxy as well as an email client.

If you keep your desktop on 24/7 as many people do, then you might keep your email client (thunderbird) open in the background, checking for mail every 5 minutes so you know when you get new email. Since your storage quota is only 250mb, you delete email from the server automatically on download. Now suppose you want to take an email with you to a community meeting. You can print it out, or you can email it to yourself at a different address. Or if you were able to link up your phone with your computer's storage, you can just search up the email on demand, find related messages, and make changes to drafts for your community mailing list.

If you could connect to thunderbird with an IMAP client, then this would be possible.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#222

Post by betwixthewires » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:25 PM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #13

I'm curious how Mozilla feels "Thunderbird on Android" aligns with their mission statement. Thunderbird was practically the de facto alternative to Outlook back when desktop clients were the standard for email. But there have been plenty of quality email clients on Android for a long time. Does buying a popular competitor and re-branding it as Thunderbird really help to "ensure the Internet is a global public resourc…

I can understand Mozilla wanting to employ someone that works on possibly the most popular Foss email client for android, so as to keep it maintained. That goes in line with their mission statement. The rebrand, I'm sure it's a requirement for the funding, and it makes sense they'd want that.

I'm just wary of Mozilla products these days. I'm tired of important tools I use just losing functionality while blog posts pay lip service to power users and internet freedom.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#223

Post by pmontra » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

decrypt wrote: post #108

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?

I don't use IMAP because I don't want to leave my email on my email provider servers. I download messages over POP3, filter to folders (one per person or customer) and backup as any other file. I use K9 to read those messages over POP3 before I download them with Thunderbird. I delete notifications and anything that doesn't have to be stored forever. The obvious downside is that I can't access old mail when I'm away from my laptop (example: now.) Surprisingly this never turned out to be a problem for the last 30 years. Of course I didn't use K9 unless I had an Android phone in 2011.

However I see two ways to let my phone read old mail

1. Set up my own IMAP server at home and deliver email to it, then program some filter system to mimic what I'm doing in Thunderbird.

2. Access Thunderbird directory on my laptop over IMAP. That IMAP server would be on my laptop or (better) on some always on server at home that uses the same file format as Thunderbird. I would rsync it with my laptop.

I admit that number 2 is weird. Number 1 is the proper way but I have so little incentive to do it that I'll probably stick with my current setup forever.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#224

Post by tomcatfish » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

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…

I had the strangest issue with Thunderbird during the last big upgrade, where it took my PGP key out of gpg (deleting the key from the store in the process), and stored it in Thunderbird with no protection. I must have read an encrypted email for it to have used the password, but I have no idea how this happened, and do not click "Yes" on boxes without reading them thoroughly. It took me a month of my PGP key apparently sitting unprotected before I noticed.

The fact that Thunderbird does stuff like this to me really weirds me out, despite mostly loving the program.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#225

Post by zbuf » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

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…

> software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it.

I feel like we've lost some of the point of open source. My rose-tinted glasses are probably in play, but I used to be able to use software, build it and modify it.

Today, the idea of being a "casual" contributor seems to be lost. Things need a huge build process, and some kind of management organisation. The emphasis used to be on contributing patches, not funding.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#226

Post by betwixthewires » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:30 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #185

rvz wrote: post #118

So adding two disasters together makes it magnificent news? Oh dear. I don't think Thunderbird is that relevant today since that it's essentially abandoned and still no Android or iOS app for decades. I'd say that ship has already sailed and it would be a long way to go to support iOS. It has gotten this bad that they needed something like K-9 to have Android support, and you would have thought that even with Google'…

Can you please stop posting snarky/fulminatey comments? It's against the site guidelines, and unfortunately nearly everything you've posted recently has this quality. HN is for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think it's snarky at all. Very frank and forward, sure, but just a persons opinion about two pieces of software and the company that maintains them.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#227

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #226

dang wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please stop posting snarky/fulminatey comments? It's against the site guidelines, and unfortunately nearly everything you've posted recently has this quality. HN is for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think it's snarky at all. Very frank and forward, sure, but just a persons opinion about two pieces of software and the company that maintains them.

I'm talking an entire series of comments, not just this one. The GP was just the place to hang the reply.

(The first bit probably does qualify as snark though.)

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#228

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #165

I get skeptical about acquisitions, but from what I can tell this actually seems like decent news. Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can increase its development speed and then put their name on it. That seems to me like about the best acquisition goal that they could have -- basically saying, "what exists is good, instead of building our own thi…

> Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can

THunderbird is buying or acquiring K-9? Isn't K-9 FOSS? The OP says only, K-9 Mail officially joins the Thunderbird family (unless I overlooked something).

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#229

Post by ape4 » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

subsection1h wrote: post #65

ape4 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email clients need to display full html/css/js now

Which email clients don't block JavaScript by default? I quickly searched just now and couldn't find any.

yes by default, which means it can be enabled

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#230

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Jun 13, 2022, 11:36 PM UTC

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…

> all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products.

What evidence is there for your version of events?