Thinking of trying it, when Mozilla finally fixes the lack of XDG base directory support. There was some recent progress on that old bug.
Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
131–140 of 297 posts
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#132«Manual Folder Sorting» — first, they broke 3rd party plugin for that. Next, author (not member of official Thunderbird team or employee of Mozilla) of this plugin spent more than 1 year pushing this functionality into base.
Now they highlight it as big deal in new release without mention volunteer author of this BASIC feature which should be in mail client FROM VERSION 0.0.1!
It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Thunderbird is best what we have (Cross-platform), but still very bad, and after killing off XUL plugins cannot be easily modified.
They exists for 21 year and now announce manual folder sorting! There is no support for Sieve (3rd party plugin? Dead after removing XUL)! There is no way to store folder settings as IMAP properties, and if I have two installations (on laptop and desktop, for example) I need repeat same setting or folders again and again — including selection of identity per-folder (again, not native functionality but 3rd party plugin, thanks, it is alive now!). No true message templates (per-folder, per-action, per-identity), only lousy "signature", broken in-line quoting in plain text messages, etc, etc, etc.
And it is best what I can use cross-platform :-(
21 years of progress and now we are here.
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#133I have not used Thunderbird in 15 years, but I'm desperate for a decent email client. I've used Spark, Mailspring, Airmail...but I keep coming back to the MacOS Mail app. Any active users of Thunderbird who chose it over the default Mac mail client? Does it have a unified inbox for all your accounts? Dark mode looks neat, at least.
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#134Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating. I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.
> You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server But OP said it also deletes the message in the server, so it may be a different bug, right?
Note that this is why you use copy, check, then delete, instead of just "move" data, whenever it's important that the process works correctly
Even if the software doesn't have known bugs, I do it if the data is important enough and especially if I were to not have a backup (for example, because the storage provider takes care of backups and redundancy. I personally like to have another copy that I manage myself, but how many people have their IMAP emails or Spotify playlist data backed up for example? I do, but not many people I think)
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#136I 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_…
Thanks for linking that. I've tried Thunderbird a couple of times in the past and quite liked it, but that thread has put me off using it forever. Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce, you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
Its not unlikely that similar problems exist with other mail programs but since they are closed source you dont see it
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#137Whenever 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…
I don't have any of those issues, besides perhaps crashes but the last one must be two years ago (I remember because we're always watching for exploits coming in). Maybe nobody else has these issues you mention either. If you want them to be fixed by the next time you install, have you considered reporting the issue and seeing if there is a volunteer is willing to fix it for you?
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sometimes you want to delete a whole bunch of mails, don't you?
I've updated my comment for clarity. The bug (which I've never encountered in more than 20 years as a Thunderbird user) is that users move messages to a local email folder, but the messages are deleted from the server without actually downloading them. At a minimum they should disable that operation. The guy that originally reported it worked at Sun and lost hundreds of work messages as a result of this bug. AFAICT the user wouldn't be affected if they did a copy of the messages and then manually deleted them from the server folder after confirming the copy was successful.
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#139I've been using a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird ( https://www.betterbird.eu/ ) on Linux, mostly because I want to be able to minimize it to a systray icon. I know there are extensions like systray-x and birdtray, but I was having issues with these on Wayland. I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added systray support on Linux/Wayland.
> I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added systray
I'm waiting for this feature since when I used Thunderbird in Windows XP. At the time I used the MinimizeToTray addon...
Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help fixing them in the future.
Kinda off topic, but I've been searching for good introduction and best practises for defensive programming, but never really found much. Any recommendations?
I don’t know of any real posts on it, it just ends up being kind of a “assume it’ll go wrong,” then figure out how you know something has gone wrong and track it down. Your starting point is, after an issue is reported, add a load of logs around places that seem like candidates for the flow. Over time, you get a sense of where things can break and you add that telemetry ahead of time.