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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

251–260 of 296 posts

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that Google wants to lock users into their ecosystem. Separetly, i think @brnt is 100% correct; an app password should do the trick for you. Well, at least for now...because @brnt said it best with the following: "...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."

Google has said already that they will be dropping app passwords for GMail soon. I don't remember the exact date, but it's not far off.

Ah, even more reason to leave the Google-opticon

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#252
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…

> A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client Isn't Thunderbird using some weird file based system? Wouldn't an SQLite backed client be a better idea in general? What would the advantage of thunderbirds local storage have aside from maturity?

If Thunderbird moves away from file based I will find a new email client. I already have to deal with the monstrosity that is systemd, don't want my email subjugated to a database. Databases are fine for data. I want my email in files so I can easily move away if needed, to another client.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#253

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.

Mobile and modern Web are dying and the Desktop is making a comeback, just going from sentiments expressed in various forums.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, the comment in question was > Note that Mozilla has nothing to do with Thunderbird anymore. which fails to claim anything about the Mozilla Foundation or Corporation in particular.

I agree that "nothing to do" is a strong statement but it's neither "Mozilla Foundation" nor "Mozilla Corporation". It's "MZLA Technologies Corporation".

But the page literally says:

> ... MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#255
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…

So if it won't change, what is the point of this? I get that Thunderbird (Mozilla corp) wants a mobile client, but if its just the same horrible app with a rebrand, what does it actually offer (since desktop thunderbird is still pretty awful and recently has got to the point where gmail is preferable)?

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What basis is there for your accusations? History >These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources. Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.

>> What basis is there for your accusations? > History That's all you have? They are baseless then.

Not really. It's more of a wait and see, "lets hope for the best, but plan for the worst" kind of scenario.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#257
post #140

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 existed as an experimental client alongside the original Riot, the intention was always to replace Riot with RiotX and this was made very clear (The original java implementation sucked, although what has become Element still has its many many problems)

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#258

Long time Thunderbird in Linux user, had to switch to Mutt a few months ago. Having 3 inboxes configured was taking, for some reason, +10Gb of disk and several Gb of RAM, plus being painfully slow and freeze pretty often.

With several 10s of thousands of messages (~70 GB) in my accounts, I also had issues with TB using tons of disk space even when set to not copy messages locally. The issue was TB's global search index. If you disable global search indexing in your config, then manually delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file, you can free up those 10+ GB. My fix for most annoyances was to copy mail locally, and run dovecot locally…

I didn't realize how many sqlite files there are, I ran "find . -name *.sqlite", I see Chrome related files, cookie files, a file related to storage? Time to look for a new email client which is sad to say after all these years.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#259
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…

Evolution is what I used for years until severl years ago when they greatly modified the way the email was stored. I switched back to Thunderbird. Now I discover TB is including more and more usage of sqlite (which is great for data, by my email is not data); my email is files.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#260
Not that it matters to most, but as a K9 and Thunderbird user, and a user who often jumps on the complain/concern bandwagon when acquisitions etc. are announced: I'm pleased with this news.

Wary of future problems? Sure.

But I don't think I could imagine a better set of news for my two favorite email clients. Well. Unless some big moneybags company started investing in DeltaChat. But let's do one pipe dream at a time!

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