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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#431

Post by pythux »

newscracker wrote: post #384
HNAbusesUsers wrote: post #328

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…

> 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? It’s been a while since I used Thunderbird and looked at its internal files. But I remember some .dat file inside the profile that stored the filters and could be copied across. Edit: Found it. The filter rules are in a file…

Only tangentially related but I wrote some code to manipulate these filters with the hope that I would help manage/centralize them more easily: https://remusao.github.io/posts/parsing-thunderbird-msg-filt...

Leaving it here in case that’s useful to anyone.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#432

Post by ttctciyf »

chefandy wrote: post #397
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

Hard to quantify because you'd have to take account of what actual improvements they might have made instead of spending dev hours on UI, settings and defaults tweaks that mostly served to alienate their core users (IMO).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#433

Post by slondr »

bigbluedots wrote: post #294
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…

Is it ported over to Rust yet?

Yes, as it is based on Firefox, which Rust was invented for.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#434

Post by Aleksdev »

“Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.”

Interesting, I have been using it this whole time and I never noticed this.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#435

Post by Aleksdev »

Thunderbird has been one of my go-to email clients for years now. Its open-source nature allows for a lot of customization options, and the addition of extensions has made it even more versatile. I especially love its user-friendly interface and how it integrates well with other tools like calendars and to-do lists.

The recent updates to Thunderbird have also been impressive, particularly the improved security features and performance enhancements. Overall, I believe it's a fantastic alternative to proprietary email clients, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you haven't already.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#436

Post by neogodless »

userbinator wrote: post #374
neogodless wrote: post #83

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…

A mail client taking up to 0.2% CPU doing nothing (I assume you're not interacting with it, nor is it trying to download/upload mail or similar), on a "high-end desktop", is itself a little surprising.

I'm watching it now, and it's sitting at 0%. Considering it does poll for emails from time to time (maybe 1x minute) I don't thinks it bad that it ramps up to 0.1% to do so.

Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#437

Post by asdajksah2123 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…

The issue is indeed "Why Thunderbird takes so long to change" (the visual representation of this development problem is it's old looking UI).

If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved.

The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky.

And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#438

Post by sdnas211 »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #322
formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…

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…

Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop. Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop. Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#439

Post by ashwagary »

geokon wrote: post #370
lawgimenez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

I prefer email sitting in the outbox for a short period of time before send/receive completes, it has saved me from mistakes enough times that it is worth the delay.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#440

Post by Liquidor »

Accacin wrote: post #285
Liquidor wrote: post #22

I hope they focus and improve on search. It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad. There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).

I also hate search. The other day someone gave me a tip though, which has helped quite a bit. The global search and the other search you get in your inbox suck so don't use them. The actual search that works "okay" if when you right click on a folder and select 'Search Messages'. Sorry if you know this already, but I didn't know and it's so much better searching through this interface as opposed to the other two.

I did not know that. Will try it out on Monday. Thanks :-)
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