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Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

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Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#151

Post by subsection1h »

CJefferson wrote: post #93
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix. There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era. IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

Have you tried Expression Search?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#152

Post by jcrawfordor »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

Sending mail in the background seems to be broken. You can enable it behind about:config, but then, at least on two of my machines, it doesn't work.

I consider this almost a deal-breaker. It's such a simple theory that just about every other GUI MUA gets right.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#153

Post by hdhzy »

CJefferson wrote: post #93
cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix. There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era. IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

There is a plugin for Exchange [0]. It works.

The search is really weird. I had to install an extension to always filter by date but even then it's broken to the point where I have to open webmail to do real searches.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/exquilla-...

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#154

Post by nkkollaw »

Silhouette wrote: post #146
nkkollaw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main Thunderbird toolbar has get mail, write new message and quick filtering. It took me perhaps 10 seconds back when I first installed it on this computer to hide a couple of other buttons like chat that I don't use myself. That's not how it works. The authors have to take the time to study the situation, talk about it, make hard decisions and cut out features that are useless or barely useful, and have the bal…

The authors have to take the time to study the situation, talk about it, make hard decisions and cut out features that are useless or barely useful, and have the balls to ship a product with just the right features instead of all the features in an attempt to please everyone. Not the user. You're perfectly entitled to that view, and for someone who holds that view a product like Thunderbird is obviously not a good fi…

I've talked to you before about pretty much the same kind of stuff.

We have opposite views.

Of course I only talk about personal preference, I'm aware that not everyone sees things the same way I do.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#155

Post by mdaniel »

losteric wrote: post #126
CJefferson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix. There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era. IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.

It sounds like search needs a patch bounty, but it would be ridiculous to rewrite Thunderbird because search is naively implemented. I've never had problems with IMAP, nor do I use Exchange, so I can't speak to those...

And thankfully, there's a Lucene-in-C (which I haven't personally had a need to use, but Lucene as a project is awesome), so the patch might not even be terribly large unless their current search implementation is splattered all over the app

https://lucy.apache.org

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#156

Post by dammitcoetzee »

I really like my hosted email because it's not on my computer. I love offline software, but it all sucks for security. Dropbox, Evernote, Outlook, etc. They all just dump my data in a folder anyone with physical access to my very stealable laptop can get at. Email is especially terrifying because there's just so much personal info in there. I have evernote and dropbox sitting in a bitlocker, so that's okay-ish, but the email thing is just too much.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#157

Post by hutzlibu »

dammitcoetzee wrote: post #156

I really like my hosted email because it's not on my computer. I love offline software, but it all sucks for security. Dropbox, Evernote, Outlook, etc. They all just dump my data in a folder anyone with physical access to my very stealable laptop can get at. Email is especially terrifying because there's just so much personal info in there. I have evernote and dropbox sitting in a bitlocker, so that's okay-ish, but t…

You have heard of this awesome new thing called "Complete System encription"?

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#158

Post by fattire »

gravypod wrote: post #123

I skimmed through this and saw no management of PGP, encryption, key storage, or key exhange. Is that not going to be one of the main focuses of this? I wish that PGP/encrypted mail would be a main feature post Snowden.

The one thing i'd like to see is some kind of integration of the Signal protocol-- preferably in a way that supports federation as (1) having OpenWhisper Systems as a single point of failure for all email is not a good idea and (2) having to tie one's email to a phone number is sheer insanity. It's bad enough with messaging.

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#159

Post by hutzlibu »

atonse wrote: post #99
problems wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (snoozing, send later, reminders, open tracking, etc.) None of that has any appeal to me, I'd much rather a mail system which doesn't require using someone else's server. Maybe this isn't a priority for other people, but just putting it out there. This is what's making me not use Nylas today.

He's already given you a good alternative – fork and collaborate with other devs on a version that doesn't touch their server. Seems sufficient.

I would consider forking a last option, instead of "a good alternative".

A good alternative in my opinion would be just to make some parts optional. Does not sound too hard, to implement (if the codebase is well done)

Re: Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies

#160

Post by bane »

cakeface wrote: post #11

Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.

I do. I'm only using it with about 7 mailboxes, none of which are terribly huge. It frequently stalls for an entire minute or two, has bizarre behavior and interactions with gmail when I'm writing long emails which gunk up conversations, configuration of mailboxes and SMTP servers are fractured all over the place, and search is only slightly more useless than reddit's search.

Based on some chatter here recently, I just recently switched to trying out Claw, it hasn't been too long yet, so I don't know all of the issues yet, but at least it was easy to setup and is really really snappy and uses about 1/3 of the RAM.

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