201–210 of 297 posts
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Hard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
You can take snapshots of the VM with the mail server. When the bug happens, identify the snapshot. Bingo.
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> 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,…
I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people where different people answer to different messages, gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads, only messenger-like conversations.
Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for threads is wrong.
You can put answers to same folder that message your answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not exclusion.
Update:
> smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting quirks more than once. It is solution in search of problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.
«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. Microsoft Outlook has a very large market share in the business world. There is an old and a new GUI design version, and you can run the app, or use it online. I don't like the presentation of the individual emails especially, I find the thread-view hard to understand, especially on mobile, but it works. Personal…
Also, when I was forced to use it (to be honest, about 10 years ago) it works terrible with IMAP (as opposite to Exchange) servers.
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The op is being facetious
Sometimes , treating a facetious/sarcastic request seriously helps disarm the facetiousness. Other times, it does not.
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_…
Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track down. There years of comments without people including system information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes." It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would you solve this use?
FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not being able to connect to the server and having to resend an email.
On the other hand, when using Apple Mail:
- messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB.
- Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through or ends up double sending.
- Searching will pull up emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching foo@bar.com).
- I can't even tag emails!?!?
- Do filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses you can't block because emails you need come from the same addresses?
- It straight up renders PDFs inline with no warning, helping spammers.
- There's no folders and everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does anyone find anything?
I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at email?
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Just because something is free certainly does not make it ethical, and it doesn't even mean it should be legal.
No, but they're rather limited in ways to reimburse you or offer "justice". Putting the Thunderbird team in jail doesn't help you out. Hell, what if the offending commit was 2 decades ago by someone who's cut off all contact regarding code since?
the fact that they choose not to, makes me perfectly OK with them being held criminally liable.
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if (!user_requested_mass_delete && delete_requests_past_second > 10) throw(“we sure seem to be deleting a lot of stuff from the server”)
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…
My point wasn’t that this is a great solution, just that it is very easy and almost certainly better than doing nothing for almost two decades.
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Because it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible and show that to the developers.
How about this bug, which I submitted 13 years ago and still isn't fixed. You can't search for "wedding" : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 I've been amazed over the years this has never been fixed -- it's very hard not to make jokes about the standard lifestyle of open-source programmers, that they don't consider this a priority (note: that's a joke, I consider myself an open-source programmer. I…
Worse though, in Apple Mail I'll search an email address because I got an email earlier in the week and the first thing it'll show me is an email I got from that person 3 years ago with the correct result a few down. I really need a better email client for my phone...
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_…
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.
> 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.
I think you've just made an assumption about a bug that was reported 17 years ago. Assuming nothing has been done since. It looks like they can't reproduce it, *making it impossible to mark as fixed* even if it was. But I wouldn't assume nothing was done.
Also remember that Gmail, Outlook, and others are in play here. They also maintain trashed items for 30 days, making it easy to recover. As the provider, they shouldn't make it easy to mass delete things either, right? TB is just the interface, frankly, I'm not sure I know how to permanently delete emails with it. I'm not sure I can. But the interaction here should result in multiple lines of defense.
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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.
That specific bug needs reproducible steps. How would you try to work it out if it does not happen on your setup?
This happens more often, for example when many services work together in an asynchronous way, and in some very rare situation, unwanted behavior occurs. To fix that, it is often easier to reason through the entire process, and to identify weak spots. It might even be a good idea to switch to a different paradigm to avoid certain bugs altogether.
For this particular bug, I would start by reading a lot, and ensurong that the bug is indeed not easily reproducible (by trying to make it reproducible of course). If that fails, I would continue to think about root causes for the bug, and possible workarounds that would work in theory. Then I would try to estimate the amount of work required, and the risk of breaking other things, and report that to those who like to decide on further actions.
And of course, as I know very little about the inner workings of ThunderBird, I would simply ask ChatGPT o3 or similar for advice. It comes up with a plan that seems reasonable.