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Thunderbird’s Future Home

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Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#101

Post by nucleardog »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #63
elipsey wrote: post #35

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

Students don't have office jobs. Get a real job and suddenly things like Outlook or TB make a lot of sense. Webmail is ultimately overly limiting compared to a native client for many common work-related use cases. Not to mention, your phone email app is an email client. I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook…

Nine year veteran of "real office jobs". There was a one or two year stint with Thunderbird, but otherwise it's all been Gmail's web interface and Android app.

Exactly what work use cases have I been missing out on?

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#102

Post by lucideer »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #96
tjoff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client. I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

For me, it's search. Search is absolutely terrible in every email client I've ever tried, except Google.

Two observations:

1. Search was better in Opera 12 than in any email client I've ever used (Gmail included). That has never been surpassed.

2. Gmail used to have excellent search, until recently. Recently I've observed many very glaring bugs with it, where swathes of matching emails are completely omitted from search results. This is something that may have gone unnoticed if I'd not begun to use the search function to regularly recall emails I knew existed, but it's become a repeated, almost reliably testable phenomenon with my own account.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#103

Post by statictype »

chrisseaton wrote: post #90
tjoff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client. I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?

Being able to search through old emails and conversations.

Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now.

Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#104

Post by chrisseaton »

statictype wrote: post #103
chrisseaton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?

Being able to search through old emails and conversations. Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now. Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

But searching seems like something that is definitely don't better as a web service with people like Google and their extremely sophisticated and proprietary searching and natural language analysis algorithms. That's a reason to use web services rather than local clients.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#105

Post by oridecon »

statictype wrote: post #103
chrisseaton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?

Being able to search through old emails and conversations. Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now. Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

Gmail covers almost everything I need. I still use Thunderbird to create temporary IMAP backups (so I have another backup besides Google Takeout) and also to transfer e-mails from multiple providers just by drag and dropping from their inboxes or the file manager. Or when I want to edit the header of an email so that Gmail doesn't group them up in a conversation, this is a very rare / edge case that allows me to still use the conversations feature.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190

Plus labels and filters allow me to automatically "tag" messages based on sender/domain/wildcards/other variables

I don't have a huge amount of emails but I manage 3 Gmail accounts using a single client (with inbox delegation) and also older Ymail and Hotmail accounts as POP3.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#106

Post by whahjdjdj877 »

statictype wrote: post #103
chrisseaton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing that's so complicated with email? I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments. What else is there that you need in a client?

Being able to search through old emails and conversations. Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now. Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

Gmail has filters to search that have yet to fail me. I can typically find whatever I need in a 13 year old gmail with tens of thousands of messages

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#107

Post by pavement »

neuronexmachina wrote: post #66
pavement wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy . (or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?

Dare to dream! Maybe such a thing will come to pass with all these changes afoot!

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#108

Post by u801e »

Twirrim wrote: post #70
xaa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam. Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form. Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and a…

I use the view message as plain text setting in Thunderbird for both my work and personal email and have never really had a problem with it.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#109

Post by bzbarsky »

zlynx wrote: post #34
tangue wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".

Well it won't seduce me. Who wants an email client that uses 600 MB RAM just to open and that eats 100% CPU to animate your email folders?

To be clear, Thunderbird is currently implemented in XUL and JS. Moving to HTML and JS is not going to significantly change its performance characteristics, mostly. There are some details that will need to be done right, like needing to create a good HTML replacement for , of course.

Re: Thunderbird’s Future Home

#110

Post by agret »

newscracker wrote: post #56

Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years. Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird alr…

I switched to using EM Client for Exchange stuff, it's got an impressive feature set.

http://www.emclient.com/

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