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Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#61

Post by wsmwk »

tredre3 wrote: post #55
tim-projects wrote: post #54

I know it'll never happen, but it would be great to have a Thunderbird headless version that runs in the tray and handles sending and receiving. I.e. a low memory solution so you can leave it going and only open the client for actual interactions. Thunderbird is pretty bloated to leave open all day and sending and receiving shouldn't need a web browser attached.

> I.e. a low memory solution so you can leave it going and only open the client for actual interactions. Thunderbird is pretty bloated to leave open all day and sending and receiving shouldn't need a web browser attached. I agree with you. Having my mail client still use ~800MB of memory when in the tray is not great (and I have very few emails, so one cannot blame the index or whatever). Unfortunately since Thunderb…

You may be confusing IMAP+js with pop+js. Pop is running as js, but the IMAP rewrite was abandoned early. IMAP will likely be rewritten in Rust in a future year.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#62

Post by wsmwk »

tim-projects wrote: post #54

I know it'll never happen, but it would be great to have a Thunderbird headless version that runs in the tray and handles sending and receiving. I.e. a low memory solution so you can leave it going and only open the client for actual interactions. Thunderbird is pretty bloated to leave open all day and sending and receiving shouldn't need a web browser attached.

Tray implementations are actually on the horizon - recently taking shape with the help of community developers. For example Bug 2023000 - Implement Linux system tray: hide-to-tray

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#63

Post by [deleted] »

BoppreH wrote: post #41

I tried Thunderbird recently, and was baffled that there seemed to be no way to see received emails grouped with my responses to them (aka threading or conversations). Even grouping incoming emails that have the same subject seemed like an experimental feature. Surely I'm missing something? How are people using it? If someone replies to you "I think there was a problem with your attachment", do you search for your se…

[deleted]

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#64

Post by PurpleRamen »

BoppreH wrote: post #58
sylens wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been there for a while https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thund...

I had tried this, but the grouping only happened among messages of each folder. And Sent is a separate folder, so it doesn't get included. Or did I miss something? Do you see your replies in the threaded view?

Thunderbird has a folder-based organization, so out of the box can it only group mails per folder. What you want is a GMail-view/organization, where all mails are in one folder. But this will probably not work well with bigger amounts of mails, because Thunderbird is not optimized for this, especially when the mails are on a remote server.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#66

Post by BoppreH »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #64
BoppreH wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had tried this, but the grouping only happened among messages of each folder. And Sent is a separate folder, so it doesn't get included. Or did I miss something? Do you see your replies in the threaded view?

Thunderbird has a folder-based organization, so out of the box can it only group mails per folder. What you want is a GMail-view/organization, where all mails are in one folder. But this will probably not work well with bigger amounts of mails, because Thunderbird is not optimized for this, especially when the mails are on a remote server.

Which one do you use? I'm really curious if there's an alternative workflow that is just as good as GMail-view, or people just learn to accept the limitations.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#67

Post by PurpleRamen »

BoppreH wrote: post #66
PurpleRamen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird has a folder-based organization, so out of the box can it only group mails per folder. What you want is a GMail-view/organization, where all mails are in one folder. But this will probably not work well with bigger amounts of mails, because Thunderbird is not optimized for this, especially when the mails are on a remote server.

Which one do you use? I'm really curious if there's an alternative workflow that is just as good as GMail-view, or people just learn to accept the limitations.

I don't use threads, because people in my business are very active in sending the whole history in EACH mail, and others communications have a web-frontend.

But if you need threading so much, you could also just move your send mails with the rest of the mails, there is a setting with the server-confg, which defines what is to be done with send mails, which by default saves a copy in the Sent-folder. You could also check out filters and labels.

And looking at the roadmap of thunderbird, there is some plan about a global database, which reads as if this might allow a Gmail-style frontend somewhere in the future. So maybe next year threading might a more solved problem..

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#68

Post by BoppreH »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #67
BoppreH wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one do you use? I'm really curious if there's an alternative workflow that is just as good as GMail-view, or people just learn to accept the limitations.

I don't use threads, because people in my business are very active in sending the whole history in EACH mail, and others communications have a web-frontend. But if you need threading so much, you could also just move your send mails with the rest of the mails, there is a setting with the server-confg, which defines what is to be done with send mails, which by default saves a copy in the Sent-folder. You could also ch…

> because people in my business are very active in sending the whole history in EACH mail,

Unfortunately that quoted history is not easily navigable and doesn't include attachments.

> there is a setting with the server-confg, which defines what is to be done with send mail

I looked into it, but it unfortunately only applies to future messages sent. Typing this I just realized that I could maybe move my existing sent messages into the uber-folder, I'll give that a try.

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#69

Post by grayhatter »

fragmede wrote: post #39
llbbdd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good encapsulation of why the year of the Linux desktop is perpetually fifteen years away.

The year of Linux desktop will come after the desktop is no longer relevant, but I'll be honest, I've been AI-pilled, and it's never been a better time to run a Linux desktop. Instead of going sleuthing every time I hit a papercut that previously I'd have spend hours consulting a how-to or a wiki to find the subsystems and config files to fix the problem, I can now just describe the problem to an AI agent that runs a…

I'd love to see a screencast of this working if you're so inclined one day to make a walkthrough. If it's mostly walking away, that's even better because you could show the prompt and a before/after of it working. (Just a casual observation, and less of a request, not trying to assign work :)

I've seen so many people claim this is the future we're living in, but I've never seen it actually work as described. It's always more hand holding than I'm willing to put into an llm

Re: Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

#70

Post by bad_username »

BoppreH wrote: post #41

I tried Thunderbird recently, and was baffled that there seemed to be no way to see received emails grouped with my responses to them (aka threading or conversations). Even grouping incoming emails that have the same subject seemed like an experimental feature. Surely I'm missing something? How are people using it? If someone replies to you "I think there was a problem with your attachment", do you search for your se…

Create a virtual folder (saved search) that includes all messages from sent and inbox. Enable threading, and you will have conversations.
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