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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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351–360 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#351

Post by pc2g4d »

I recently adopted Thunderbird as my email client (was using Gmail's web UI) and have really appreciated the power of it, enough that I donated to the project. NOT being like current designs has been part of the appeal. This development sounds high-risk, low-reward from my perspective. Could well end up nerfing the tool I just adopted. But c'est la vie, I guess. Probably the mistake was leaving Thunderbird without real governance back in 2012, so now as it's pulled from anarchy it's going to be painful watching "the law" of centralized development come down.

I would prefer if it were a more democratic process.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#352

Post by BoxOfSnoo »

jamiek88 wrote: post #170
yamtaddle wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?

Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native. It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.

I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy.

The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time...

Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#353

Post by timnetworks »

I read the last thing that made front page, didn't know that Thunderbird is developed by a dozen people, or that it's basically an add-on for Firefox.

I get that they need to chase marketshare and audience and can't stop lest the big guys win forever.

Still, I quite liked the old interface, the nested menus where everything is where it should be and doesn't take four 'steps' and an eventual search to find, the grey-on-darker-grey colorscheme, the hard corners that scream out 'this isn't the ephemeral interwebs, these are rock-solid time-stamped spf-checked emails.

Thank you for an amazing software package, regardless of the Dr-Who-like metamorphosis it goes through.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#354

Post by karavelov »

I am a Linux user, and I gave on Thunderbird due to terrible Exchange support - now I use Evolution, it has its own problems but my calendar is synced.

P.S. No my choice to use Exchange on the server side.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#355

Post by curt15 »

karavelov wrote: post #354

I am a Linux user, and I gave on Thunderbird due to terrible Exchange support - now I use Evolution, it has its own problems but my calendar is synced. P.S. No my choice to use Exchange on the server side.

Have you tried Davmail? There's even a container image for it which worked pretty well for me a few years ago.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#356

Post by Dalewyn »

I'm still using Thunderbird v11.0 and I have no plans of upgrading my install or even installing anything newer for a fresh install.

It's motherfucking email, for fuck's sake. That shit hasn't changed in the past 3 decades, let alone every fucking month. What the fuck is a Thunderbird 102 anyway? I don't need nor want a client that changes under my foot every god damn month, much less multiple UI redesigns that force me to relearn everything just to fucking read and fucking write my fucking emails.

If or when Thunderbird stops running on some version of Windows in the farflung future, I will probably find some other client worth my time and migrate to that; not Thunderbird version 348719 or whatever it's up to at that point.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#357

Post by mixmastamyk »

_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.

Lots of screens are getting squarer again. Macs are 16:10+, my framework and MS surface are 3:2. And a few portrait folks.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#358

Post by tguvot »

powersnail wrote: post #241

Maybe the problem is IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but I feel like email clients in general are just slow. I have time to manually open every separate email account in the browser, and have all of them ready to read, before Thunderbird (or KMail, etc.) finishes loading new emails. And I don't even have a lot of new emails every day, like 5~10, so I'm not quite sure what exactly is taking so long to sync. I can download a 500MB vid…

do you have imap idle/push enabled on server/client ? i use kmail for past 20 years or so, and it's been just fine. thunderbird that my wife uses feels much slower in comparison to kmail

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#359

Post by ranger207 »

autoexec wrote: post #255
ranger207 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect it's a large number, because I'd expect that most of the people who like the old UI also turn off telemetry. When Ars Technica did a redesign a couple of years ago, they didn't launch with a dark mode because their telemetry didn't indicate that many people used it. There were a bunch of comments from users asking for dark mode, so they polled subscribers and the numbers who used dark mode were massively h…

It seems more and more like telemetry is mostly good for seeing only what your most clueless users are doing. It's a problem when your userbase is largely technical and has no problem finding the "don't spy on me" checkbox. Projects with highly technical users would be better off listening to forums. It doesn't seem like the folks in /r/Thunderbird are overly concerned with the UI

Forums have their own problems. Most turn into echo chambers where one particular opinion is dominant pretty quickly. There's plenty of topics where one subreddit will be broadly positive about a subject, and another subreddit will be broadly negative about the same subject.

I'm not sure there's currently _any_ good way to get unbiased feedback from users. Ideally you should probably cross check a few different methods, but that's hard

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#360

Post by tguvot »

freedsoftware wrote: post #266
boplicity wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the m…

Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance. Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.

kmail imap support was somewhat rough around 10 years ago, but it been totally stable for me ever since. i have push/idle enabled on server/client, it been working just fine. the only problem that i have it's when letsencrypt certificate rotated at night and at morning i get few hundreds popups asking to approve new certificate
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