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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#201

Post by throwawayapples »

_cenw wrote: post #194
mixmastamyk wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me. And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes. Hopefully won’t happen this time.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me. I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality. Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.

I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it be also great if there was a mail app that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#202

Post by throw0101a »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #185
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #174

So much negativity in this thread, jeez. I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04. Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one be…

Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me. And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes. Hopefully won’t happen this time.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And even if we do, having an interface that can work as a square, or a rectangle but vertical (for screens that can rotation 90˚), is also useful.

Not all of us run our apps in full screen (which seems to be quite prevalent in the Windows world), but rather 'tiled' or stacked, sometimes with different windows of different apps overlapping (handy on laptops).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#203

Post by imiric »

I'll add one more negative sentiment.

> Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point.

No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional browser tab.

This approach simply inherits all the security issues from the insane complexity of modern browsers, just to reuse some common components that should've been extracted and separated from all the browser baggage.

Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use, without sharing any of their core dependencies. What a concept!

I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird. I'm curious to know what the userbase for it is, but I can't imagine desktop email clients have a mainstream audience anymore.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#204

Post by VyseofArcadia »

toss1 wrote: post #87
squarefoot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for UI designers who put aesthetics before usability.

IOW, for most UI designers on current software products. Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries. If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another ent…

> Just don't mess with the organization.

And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#205

Post by quicksilver03 »

ajot wrote: post #89
quicksilver03 wrote: post #47

I'm dreading the redesign, even though at the moment I have no idea of how it will look like. What webmail can one use to read and write mail for multiple accounts? I will need to have a sort of unified inbox for at least 5-6 accounts, and to see the folders of all those accounts in the same window.

It seems Roundcube [0] has a 3rd pary plugin for that[1]. There's also cypht [2], I like it's modular concept but I think it's still in alpha state. [0] https://roundcube.net/about/ [1] https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch [2] https://cypht.org/

The Roundcube plugin seems to implement a form of quick account switching, which isn't exactly what I'm after.

Cypht looks more like it, and I've found that there's a paid version of AfterLogic Webmail [1] which claims to implement a unified inbox.

[1] https://afterlogic.com/webmail-client

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#206

Post by WorldMaker »

capitainenemo wrote: post #142
derefr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the…

Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact. Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients. I feel like just switching to maildir acro…

Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.)

The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not allowed on Windows.

(ETA: The obvious idea here to me would be to do something like a bare git repo as a Maildir-like with content-addressed storage.)

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#207

Post by einpoklum »

Many of us have tried to struggle against the gradual destruction of TB's UI, under the excuse of modernization. But all this gets you is derision and sanctions. This also reflects major problems in how the project is managed, which is a very sad tale way beyond the scope of an HN comment.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#208

Post by super256 »

david_draco wrote: post #137
super256 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on TB68 because Enigmail was *broken after, and I think the UI is convenient except adding new accounts and managing SMTP servers. *I send emails in plaintext, don't tell me about S/MIME.

Enigmail functionality is now built-in, it's quite nice!

When TB78 was introduced, the only supported S/MIME and did not allow inline encryption in plaintext. Has this changed now?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#209

Post by einpoklum »

ape4 wrote: post #41

The UI doesn't look that old fashioned to me. It doesn't look like a website - it looks like an application (which is appropriate).

A big part of the problem is that the people in charge of TB UI are basically anti-application, and want everything to look like a pretentious web page or a mobile phone app page. A lot of TB's usable UI has already been spoiled by such changes.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#210

Post by narag »

jraph wrote: post #177
narag wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all. After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing. Suggestions very welcome.

My suggestion would be to wait and see. They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options. I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to a…

Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago, nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning going back to Linux so it's a logical move.

Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(

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