171–180 of 243 posts
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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)
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I find the opposite to be true. Apple Mail and Thunderbird give me a lot of false positives, and usually leave spam right in my inbox. Google—whom I'd assume look at what other users do with an email to figure out what's spam—always manage to filter out unwanted mail and keep legit emails in my inbox. Both Apple Mail and Thunderbird are so dumb that they can't figure out I don't speak Chinese, and even after I mark 1…
Google—whom I'd assume look at what other users do with an email to figure out what's spam—always manage to filter out unwanted mail and keep legit emails in my inbox. Unfortunately, your personal experience doesn't change the fact that Google do classify significant amounts of legitimate mail as spam. It appears that at some point in the somewhat recent past, they may have decided that literally anything new sent fr…
I don't know, it's not happening to me using Google Inbox (not Gmail, have no idea about Gmail).
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.
Then, when sending mail, if there's a public key for the recipient, then encrypt it. No user interaction is required.
So it'll be a self-hosted webmail service with a custom web server that runs locally?
That doesn't seem to be what they're aiming for here. The goal is supposed to be a new UI that looks and functions very similar to today's. That's too bad, in a way. One thing I'd really like that Thunderbird doesn't offer today is to separate the mail receive/store/send functionality from the reading/writing UI, so I could run the former on my own server and access it from any device on my network. Obviously there a…
Uh, that's exactly what an email server does. Thunderbird is just the client used to access it from any device.
Hmm, I thought Mozilla had pulled financial support from Thunderbird? This would be an exciting new chapter for the product, but the article doesn't address whether it makes financial sense for Mozilla to invest this much in Thunderbird's future. For most of the last three years I've worked on Nylas Mail ( https://github.com/Nylas/Nylas-mail ), and it hit 2.0 yesterday with Mac/Win/Linux support. It's entirely open s…
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In gmail right now I have 50 emails in the spam folder. About 3 are actual spam. The rest are from automated mailing lists where most of the mails go into the inbox, but it rejects some at random. That's a terrible way for a spam filter to behave. Several of these I specifically have incoming mail filters for, and they still go to spam at random.
I don't know about Gmail, I only use Google Inbox and I get 0 false positives.
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.
It needs end-to-end encryption. This isn't hard to do. Add a field in the header for your public key. When receiving mail, store the sender's public key in the address book. Then, when sending mail, if there's a public key for the recipient, then encrypt it. No user interaction is required.
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.
(protip don't subscribe to LKML)
They've already neglected Thunderbird for years, and now they want to start from scratch? Doesn't sound like a good idea. Sounds more like another project they will shut down after a while. I used to use both Thunderbird and Firefox a few years ago as my main mail client and browser. Since then, Mozilla started spreading between too many projects, chasing the failed phone thing, and both Firefox and even worse Thunde…
I think Thunderbird is fine how it is. I think a lot of the projects Mozilla takes on are stupid (Rust being a giant exception, I love Rust). You know what I want? NWJS/Electron but using Firefox/Spidermonkey. I want to package desktop apps with Firefox. They almost had this with xulrunner but killed it for some reason. And I want them to build crosswalk ( https://crosswalk-project.org/ ) for mobile, but with Firefox…
IMHO, one of Mozilla's greatest failures was its decision to more or less give up on embedding (for both SpiderMonkey and Gecko). They effectively killed off embedding in the process of moving to the train model back in 2011, 2012, but back then, the expectation was that they would have their 2 years of "let's kill our broken architecture." Instead, it sort of ended up dragging on how long it would take them to stabilize some APIs for embedding, and they certainly never bothered to try to maintain any documentation (I briefly attempted to maintain some client application that used SpiderMonkey in 2011, and it was a headache trying to find any sort of documentation on how to fix each incremental bustage, since everything that was found on MDN was woefully out of date).
First, there was to be some sort of IPC-based embedding mechanism in Gecko. Then that idea was nixed in favor of just XULRunner. Then Mozilla decided it didn't want to maintain XULRunner anymore. For a period of time, they had a XULRunner-like setup called something like webapprt (which was basically a Firefox sans normal Firefox UI), but that too was killed off within a few years.
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.
But to answer your question, I and several others I know whom use Thunderbird consider it a "least awful" choice. It's less complicated, opinionated, and buggy that Outlook. It's cross-platform unlike some of the other top-tier options. And it's less centralized, surveilled, and inverse-productized than third-party web-based email such as Gmail. It supports multiple accounts, through add-ons it supports GPG, it blocks bad HTML in messages, and for the most part it works well enough.
However, yes, I do have a lot of problems with Thunrderbird, ranging from daily annoyances to minor pet peeves. Reviewing my Bugzilla votes would be exhausting, but some highlights:
As others have pointed out, the search functionality is poor. It's slower than alternative clients (e.g., Opera Mail) and less accurate. It also opens to a low-value "search results" view rather than a list view. ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580252 ) It's not easy to quickly execute a search on the current folder only. The full search is so frustrating that I am in the habit of using the quick-filter bar (control-shift-K) because it works as I feel an e-mail search should work, but woe to the user who has "Body" selected in that UI control since the filter function does not use the search index. Also, why does ESC hide the quick-filter bar?
Addressing is slow even on extremely fast workstations, to the point of routinely causing me to need to correct addressing errors. However, they recently fixed bug 1012397 so that resolution will occur after a blur of an addressing field. Yay! ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1012397 ) Though other composition / addressing quirks such an improper initial focus on the composition pane still remain. ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329482 )
The email composition window is often slowed by activity occurring elsewhere within Thunderbird. If Thunderbird is working on moving a bunch of messages, for example, it can sometimes struggle to keep pace with typing in a composition window, on workstations with 8 or 16 modern CPU cores and NVMe SSDs.
All told, I would also be more or less happy with ongoing improvement to the existing product. But I understand that may not be viable if the underlying technologies start fading away.