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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

361–370 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB. It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking." But quirk…

I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.

On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#362
“Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”

Neither of those are a concern to me. I prefer functioning software, I don't care that much how it looks. And I don't care about the rate of change.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#364
post #203

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 b…

Ex Mozilla here. > Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? I'm not saying using Firefox is the best thing, but there are arguments to be made: first, Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well. Then, like you said, an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed (and it's…

> Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve.

Criticizing the quality of something by saying it’s from “old ideas” is a total non sequitir. Old is not the same as bad (there are plenty of great ideas that are old) and modern is not the same as good.

The pointlessness of just saying XUL is old is underlined when you suggest replacing it with HTML. HTML is even older than XUL and a pretty good idea.

And by the way whatever you replace(d) XUL with will be an old idea soon too.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#366
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine? My issues were: - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing featur…

How does it "not support" Office365? No Exchange support? Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I…

>For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed? No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and…

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#368

There's one area where I've always thought Thunderbird should be a cross platform leader and example to everyone: setting Email Client Standards. I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing/anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they've since tak…

> I should probably publish this document at some point I'd be interested in seeing it. It sounds like a pretty good idea. It's incredible to me how effective even the worst phishing email/sites are and to me that's an indication that not enough is being done to point out clear warning signs to users. > Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargan…

I’ll see if I can dig up my original and convert it into a blog post.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#369

For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

You could just open a copy of the email in a separate window and tile them side-by-side.

I wish, but any open message window gets terminated and replaced when clicking the reply button.

Edit: Found the work-around: You have to hold the Option key when clicking reply to be allowed two windows. Just Mac things, I guess...

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance. For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings. Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that…

In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.

I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process

But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

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