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Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#171
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not unlikely that similar problems exist with other mail programs but since they are closed source you dont see it

People would still complain about them on forums, often ones run by the company who makes the client! I'm often reading threads of issues on Apple's public support forums. Being open or closed source has nothing to do with hearing about problems.

Closed software doesn't have open bug trackers, so there's no systematic way to find out.

An acquaintance of mine were twice hit with a bug that corrupted Word documents stored on iCloud if editing on her iPad. Searching online yielded others with the same problem from more than one year ago...

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#172
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.

> But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening. No, not at all. It's very easy. This bug involves taking an inappropriate action under corrupted conditions. You don't need to know how those conditions arose. All you have to do is check whether they currently obtain, and - if so - refrain from taking the inappropriate action. For this bug, that looks like this…

[deleted]

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#173

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_…

> On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or sender info. They are empty messages.

Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders.

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#174

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 was a thunderbird user many years ago. Seeing the article made me want to reinstall, and then this comment instantly changed my mind. Insane bug for an email client to have…

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#175

«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 en…

> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients. You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time. It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address). It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB). Worked from any computer (when POP…

You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.

There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.

Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients. You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time. It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address). It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB). Worked from any computer (when POP…

> You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time. It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filt…

How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.

Gmail:

- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content

- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive

I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.

I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening. No, not at all. It's very easy. This bug involves taking an inappropriate action under corrupted conditions. You don't need to know how those conditions arose. All you have to do is check whether they currently obtain, and - if so - refrain from taking the inappropriate action. For this bug, that looks like this…

So…do it. Sounds like it’d make a great case study that would get a person tons of attention and praise on HN, a real feather to put in one’s cap. Literally nothing stopping anyone in this thread from opening a PR with this reportedly “very easy” fix that’s eluded developers for nearly two decades, and is so terrible folks swear off Thunderbird forever because I guess for email very basic rules for backing up data do…

Did a developer ever try? Reading the issue, found only one person asking for test cases and trying to close it.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#178
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You add more and more diagnostics (e.g. logging) in that area till you manage to track down the bug. Over several years this should be possible. At that point you can either fix the bug directly or do it properly by first reproducing the bug (in a test) and then fixing it.

How do you close a bug you cannot reproduce? Said another way - If they can't reproduce it, they can't close it. They may well have fixed it already, but without a way to reproduce it the only prudent behavior is to leave it open and wait for the next diagnostic file to be uploaded.

That's not the only prudent behaviour, as the OP said, the prudent behaviour is to add more diagnostics and guards against the conditions that lead up to the bug.

Re: Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”

#179

Thunderbird is still the only calendar software I'm aware of with a "Multiweek" view instead of the awful "Month" view all others provide. The only calendar to have caught up to 20th century technology (Apple almost gets it, but not quite).

It really hasn't though, doesn't even have multiple time zone support for events. They really need to fix that.
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