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Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#111

Post by bachmeier »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #19

Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of them the are impossible to tell apart. It au…

My workaround for Thunderbird search is to open the Outlook web client, search for what I need, find it in a fraction of a second, do what I need to do, and close the web client. Terrible "solution" but the only one that works.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#112

Post by isaachinman »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #19

Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of them the are impossible to tell apart. It au…

Check out what we're building: https://marcoapp.io

Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#113

Post by davidmurdoch »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #16

I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it? [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_…

I too think they should drop everything else and work on this bug. But an example of how these kinds of bugs are tricky:

I have a similar bug at my job: Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database, or otherwise corrupt it. It's been an issue for years, but no one has been able to reproduce it. It's probably a 1 in 10 million bug.

I think it's a hardware bug. My "fix" was to backup a small, but key, part of the database to a separate storage mechanism browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to detect the missing data and restore part of the db.

BUT! If this is actually a hardware bug, there is a chance that this additional database write will cause this big to occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice as often!

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#114

Post by mattl »

jamespo wrote: post #76
jraph wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not want my email client to be relying on such brittle and incorrect heuristics. A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails around for some time so users have the option to restore them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk space management (your local drive is overloaded a…

Just do a complete rewrite in rust, that will solve all the issues

Is whichever part of Mozilla that runs Thunderbird going to rehire the rust team now?

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#115

Post by jimbosis »

throwaway7402 wrote: post #107

No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the "allow-downgrade" option.

(In case you haven't heard of it and it proves helpful to you and/or someone else:)

Have you heard of Epyrus?

Homepage: http://www.epyrus.org/index.html

(The download link is easily found there, as well as git repository and forum links.)

It's based on UXP (the Unified XUL Platform) and is thus related to the Pale Moon browser (which doesn't bother me). I've been using it on Linux as a way to have an "older Thunderbird" look and feel, e.g., I have real scrollbars, and the "Send" button didn't mysteriously vanish from the Compose window with no way to get it back upon some "from the ground up redesign" upgrade.

EDIT: Typographical error, phrasing.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#116

Post by mattl »

bachmeier wrote: post #108
jraph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I do think the thundebird team should investigate and fix this. But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.

You know what else they could do? They could disable a feature that deletes large volumes of email the user doesn't intend to delete.

I don’t remember the last time I deleted an email. I’ve marked things as spam, archived things but not deleted in a long while.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#117

Post by nosioptar »

dangus wrote: post #91
nosioptar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So please fellow developers, help spread the darkness to make the world more inclusive. He ought to practice what he preaches. Due to a combo of shitty eyes and dyslexia, I cannot read his site's dark theme without getting a headache.

I’m not sure what you’re asking for that person to fix, it’s just plain text and a plain dark background. You can also read the site in reader mode.

They could include a light theme.

It seems pretty hypocritical that they're claiming a lack of dark mode is an accessibility problem while lacking a light mode.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#118

Post by nosioptar »

throwaway7402 wrote: post #107

No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the "allow-downgrade" option.

If you want really old school Thunderbird, Seamonkey's still around.

I only use the browser portion, so I can't say how good the email is.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#119

Post by justinrubek »

Barrin92 wrote: post #77
Davidbrcz wrote: post #29

God, the dark mode change reading is a blessing ! See https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html why

The person in question has a relatively rare medical condition, for most people dark mode reduces readability as a darker screen leads to more pupil dilation which causes halation. (which you can test out yourself if you stare at dark mode text and then look at a bright surface, you'll likely literally see a halo of the text). This is worse in people with astigmatism, which is about 35-50% of the population. Dark mod…

Surely this can't be that universal, right? I will have to do this test at some point. I have astigmatism but I find the default bright version of websites frequently painful to look at. I have no clue why but I need the dark versions.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#120

Post by g105b »

Whenever Thunderbird makes its way to the front page of Hacker News, I always re-download it and hope that I can use it.

Every time I've ever tried it (spanning around 30 installs over the last 15 years), I've uninstalled within a week to a month, due to sluggish UI, phantom unread emails, crashes, and text formatting issues.

I do it because I believe that one day Thunderbird could be good. Today could be the day - I've installed it, added my accounts, and it looks like the developers have made some significant improvements. I'm not talking about fancy new features, instead I'm talking about the small nitpicky problems I've had whenever I've tried to use it.

For example, this time I installed, I didn't have to go into a hidden settings menu (here be dragons) to make new emails default to the top of lists. My replies are now made above the original message. Fastmail doesn't throw a wobbly when trying to add email, calendar and contacts with the same password.

Maybe today is the last time I install Thunderbird?

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