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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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161–170 of 473 posts

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#161

Post by mixmastamyk »

boplicity wrote: post #50

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the m…

Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#162

Post by yamtaddle »

oaiey wrote: post #63
Veen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UI isn't a fashion show. Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.

Also for the users. For my part, I appreciate if stuff looks modern. I understand the whitespace madness complaints, but a software which looks like 1999 is not something I want to work with. There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved, iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which Thunderbird looked like the last years.

Meanwhile, the only major website my elderly dad, who didn't really start using the Web until something like 2015, can use unassisted with a fair amount of confidence, is Craigslist.

I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does, but I'm not convinced it's them.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#163

Post by mixmastamyk »

mardifoufs wrote: post #125
zelphirkalt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In that case I will probably only use the older version as a lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them into something else. Or I stick with an old version of Thunderbird.

I mean thunderbird is already running on an entire browser stack. Wouldn't electron be similar to what thunderbird is already using?

I thought XUL had been removed?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#164

Post by masterof0 »

Thunderbird used to be a Native email client, that was awesome. I want an native email client, contacts and calendar. That's it. I dislike the browser tabs inside Thunderbird (I already use Firefox), either make a web version or keep the native version native. Most of the Thunderbird user base, are the ones that preferred the OG version. Not everything have to be a webview. Maybe they don't want users like me anymore. And that is fine. Is just feel sad, I miss the old Thunderbird.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#165

Post by gnabgib »

cookiengineer wrote: post #141
neilv wrote: post #139

The highest priority IMHO is security . Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset. The mindset of one necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again. Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for s…

I wish we would have more intelligent email clients, that can be as "dumb" as remembering the email addresses and geolocation routes from their senders. It literally could be a simple ASN lookup, and you would prevent 99% of targeted phishing emails. Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs. Microsoft is kind of not giving a damn about security and I dont understand why they…

> Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs.

Lots of emails come via mail delivery services.. random domains (sendgrid, amazonses, mailchimp)

Many phishing attempts can be defeated by SPF[0] (the servers that are allowed to send email for this domain), DKIM[1] (proof that it was sent from a domain, and not tampered with), and DMARC[2] (what to do if the email fails SPF/DKIM). Many virus scanners, spam filters pay attention to these, but your mail service can filter mail by it too.

The other piece is seeing `FROM` (just a mail header, spammers will set this to what they're pretending to be) vs `Reply-To` (if you reply this is the address the message will be sent to, for spam this is often unrelated to the content eg random1222@example.com) vs `Return-Path` (who sent the email). This is sort of like the `raw domain` vs `internationalized domain` (allowing UTF8 similar characters to spoof a domain) vs `hiding the URL` problem in the browser.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#166

Post by user3939382 »

Liquidor wrote: post #22

I hope they focus and improve on search. It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad. There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).

It's crazy looking at their bugtracker, it's just years and years of accumulated issues. I ran into one the other day with a time zone setting on invites, and sure enough there is the bug report in their tracker buried in infinity.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#167

Post by tlamponi »

Thunderbird had already a good email UX, what it now doesn't really has (anymore!) is performance, this post makes me honestly worried that the project will go in the totally wrong direction, alienating all power users.

Swapping out the C++ pop/imap/... implementation with a JS one is bogus IMO, yeah JS engines are fast nowadays, but still order of magnitude slower than compiled code.

Not to go for the meme, but what I really don't get is why not go for rust if a rewrite is anyway planned and your share the codebase with the product that caused the invention of that language, and showed that its possible to integrate it for subsystems?!

Fact is that my whole Thunderbird hangs and freezes completely ~15 times a day, on my 128 GiB DDR5, fast, PCIe 4 attached TLC NVMe storage and a Alder Lake top model i7 CPU. Look, a input text field, configured for plain text, just must not hang on such a machine, even not on a 15y old one - it's a god damn text input field, if that hangs you just make some things horribly wrongs, it's so irritating and just not healthy for anybodies blood pressure - save local in sync and save to drafts async.

Then there are the crashes, resize some reply window while it loads something in the main one? boom, crashed.

Mail is a big topic add work, for one we got a product that handles mail and for another we use mail in our development flow _a lot_, just like a lot of other Open Source projects. I know quite a few people that use, or well, used, Thunderbird as their mail reader, and more thanks to CalDav and Matrix implementation, ... basically only touching git send-email besides Thunderbird for mail related stuff.

None, literally zero, of them complained about the UI or UX from a few years ago, like never. Well a few that tried out recent betas did about adding some odd side bars, hiding down menus, making a lot of things harder to find.

To conclude my, already cut short, rant (sorry, this one was brewing since a bit): Now I got the aerc client set up, waiting on stand by for the final blow of sensless UI shuffle-around-and-make-unuseable-for-power-user updates; as then I'll have to say good bye to the (former) GOAT mail client - never thought this would happen :-(

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#168

Post by mplanchard »

toomim wrote: post #145
david_draco wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the web keeps changing. Firefox is trying hard to remain relevant and needs to be flexible with their code-base. So Thunderbird does not live in a stable world.

Strange comment. Thunderbird is for email, not the web. Are the people who want it to change confused about the difference between smtp and http?

In TFA it says that Thunderbird is built on top of Firefox, which makes it difficult for them to keep up and causes a lot of churn and bugs. I imagine that’s what the parent poster is referring to.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#169

Post by mauvehaus »

yamtaddle wrote: post #152
mauvehaus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?

You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#170

Post by jamiek88 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #152
mauvehaus wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? ... is Mail not OK?

Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native.

It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.

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