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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#291

Post by spopejoy »

TwoNineFive wrote: post #250
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…

People would be wise to look into the incredible amount of criticism thrown at K-9 in the last two years over the recent UI design changes. I personally see this as a way for cketti to get acqui-hired and maybe get away from K-9 Mail. The amount of hate directed towards him from the userbase (mostly justified, sorry to say) has been substantial and I can't imagine he really wants to continue dealing with that. Hopefu…

That's really strange. I think the UX improvements were fantastic.

Given that KMail is really the only true open-source non-janky Android email client it's incredible to me that people can be so uncharitable.

With the UX changes came long-desired fixes. KMail may be the only O/S mail client at this point with a fully working IMAP search (after Apple Mail screwed it up years ago). Plus they fixed a super-irritating power mgmt issue.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#292

Post by spopejoy »

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I actually stopped using K9 because it stuck to the ridiculously outdated, and honestly quite ugly, Holo interface.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

Agree. TIL that there was this "revolt" against KMail's UI change.

It actually made KMail usable with e.g. 5000 mail entries in a folder, whereas before 500 could cause it to lag on scrolling and be unusable at 1000.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#293

Post by spopejoy »

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…

Thanks to both you and KMail team. This merger makes tons of sense as both clients made it through some dark years and have both come out on top with amazing improvements. I'm really excited to see what the combined team delivers!

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#294

Post by ekianjo »

emodendroket wrote: post #178
ekianjo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The search functionality definitely could use work. But that’s my point. What other desktop email clients are you going to use instead?

Not GUI per se but there's mutt that has high performance. That's why GUI clients are not popular anymore either, because they perform very, very poorly.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#295

Post by ekianjo »

jfk13 wrote: post #75
ekianjo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have mailboxes with tens of thousands of emails in them, and it works pretty well for me.

Try a search and be in awe at how long it takes to spit results.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#296

Post by fnord123 »

autoexec wrote: post #269
LoveGracePeace wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, we're sticking with thunderbird in large part for their MBOX support and if they ever dropped it we'd move to something else. MBOX makes it dead simple to parse or grep through your messages.

But isn't something like SQLite fts (full text search, not full table scan, arf arf) more efficient than grep?
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