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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

#181

Post by ams6110 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #95
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.

Hum, it would be interesting to know how you use it (with respect, I'd suggest you have very basic email needs). For me Thunderbird is badly broken. This is not the place to list bugs, issues, limitations etc. in any detail but there are very many indeed (so I'll only provide a skeletal outline of them here). Frankly, on occasions, I find Thunderbird is unusable for some jobs and I end up using either an ancient copy…

I guess we all have our opinions but if you are composing long emails with intricate formatting I'd suggest you're doing it wrong. Email messages should be short, and preferably plain text. You have a little more leeway than in a tweet, but more than a paragraph or so and you lose the reader. I see this so often -- people will send me a treatise in email and I simply cannot comprehend that much text on a computer screen. So it's either print it, or skip it. Guess what happens most often?

If you need to write something lengthy and heavily formatted, do it in a Google Doc or blog post and put a link in your email.

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

#183

Post by Silhouette »

flukus wrote: post #174
Silhouette wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Uh, that's exactly what an email server does. Thunderbird is just the client used to access it from any device.

Assuming by "email server" you mean an SMTP server, that's not quite what I'm talking about. What I'm looking for is more akin to a mail store, an IMAP server, and functionality for sending and receiving via actual SMTP server(s). That's a separate set of responsibilities to reading or composing messages, which would just need something like an IMAP-compatible client. And all of those are separate responsibilities to a full SMTP server with all the administrative overheads that comes with.

You could do the back office part of what I'm talking about with tools like Dovecot and fetchmail today, running on a Linux server with a standard Maildir backing store, and then you could run Thunderbird purely for its IMAP client capabilities as a front-end, but setting it all up and maintaining it is a horrendous hassle and it's far too technically demanding for most users anyway.

However, separating the receive/store/send responsibilities from the read/write responsibilities would mean you could have a single store on any server with relatively straightforward set-up to actually send and receive mail, which you could then access from any device on your network (or over a VPN or the Internet if it's running on a remotely accessible box), without the risks and overheads of both running your own SMTP server and trying to get mail from it actually accepted anywhere else these days.

Now that everyone's got PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, and who knows what else, I think this is probably the single most limiting problem with traditional offline email clients compared to all the hosted webmail services, but it shouldn't be necessary to incur all the downsides of those hosted webmail services just to access your mail from different devices.

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

#184

Post by aqsalose »

nkkollaw wrote: post #82
copperx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Firefox that far from Chrome? I thought it was ahead in some ways.

Maybe with web standards (maybe, I'm not sure), but not the rest. Just the fact that the address bar font is the same size as the rest of the UI gives me the impression that they didn't think it through. Downloading files has the same problem, it's relegated in a small button, while it's one of the main features. The whole interface is one of the most unintuitive things I've ever used, considering how simple a browse…

>Just the fact that the address bar font is the same size as the rest of the UI gives me the impression that they didn't think it through. >.. >Chrome had search integrated in the address bar from version 1, every time I opened Firefox year after year and I saw that little separate input for searching I felt like using grandma's browser.

Most of these seem like opinion of aesthetics and fashion? Syncing and sandboxing seem to be the ones that are about actual functionalities.

Regarding those: I don't have many devices (actually only desktops), but syncing seems to work ok. Lack of sandboxing is actually valid point, but I don't remember any crashes in recent times. On the other hand, I block most of the JS, so there's less opportunities for things to crash.

The web standards and avoiding Chrome/Google Search-based monoculture are also important things for me, so I'm sticking with FF as long as it is OK.

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

#185

Post by wsha »

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.

A few years ago I thought it would be nice to be able to compose an email in a new tab instead of a separate window. I found a Bugzilla entry proposing adding this to Thunderbird that had been open for several years and had had a couple community members offer to address it, look into it for a while, and ultimately give up. The way Thunderbird's UI is implemented was just too intertwined with the code to let this happen without a major re-work. I feel like this kind of a change should be easy to do in a well-designed application and likely would be for something written with technologies.

I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.

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

#186

Post by Semiapies »

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.

Filters are weird and inconsistent. Some messages don't show as filtered, or some filters won't run, until I close and restart the program.

Overall, it's a certain bare minimum of acceptable. It's not a great application.

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

#187

Post by WalterBright »

dboreham wrote: post #177
WalterBright wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm. I can just about remember Jim Barksdale personally telling every employee that the new E2E encryption feature (PEM probably?) in Messenger had to be dog food tested. In 1997.

Unencrypted email is like mailing all your correspondence on postcards.

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

#188

Post by Lazare »

atonse wrote: post #100
bengotow wrote: post #12

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…

Honestly when I was reading this post, I was thinking "Why don't they just use Nylas? Nylas has already done this" – it just seems like a perfect case of not-invented-here. I really don't see the point of Thunderbird reinventing the wheel to essentially build another Nylas.

That was honestly my thoughts too.

I used Thunderbird years ago; now I'm a very happy Nylas user. I don't doubt that the Thunderbird team could spend the next 3 years building a very polished desktop mail app using web technologies, but uh...

...do we need another? And if so, wouldn't it be better to fork Nylas as a base? I mean, they could probably get most of the way their with a couple pull requests to make themes more powerful and a custom theme...

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

#189

Post by flukus »

Silhouette wrote: post #183
flukus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Uh, that's exactly what an email server does. Thunderbird is just the client used to access it from any device.

Assuming by "email server" you mean an SMTP server, that's not quite what I'm talking about. What I'm looking for is more akin to a mail store, an IMAP server, and functionality for sending and receiving via actual SMTP server(s). That's a separate set of responsibilities to reading or composing messages, which would just need something like an IMAP-compatible client. And all of those are separate responsibilities to…

IMAP is that single store. Setting up a server just for that would be just as impossible for most users as settings up a mail server would be.

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

#190

Post by Silhouette »

flukus wrote: post #189
Silhouette wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming by "email server" you mean an SMTP server, that's not quite what I'm talking about. What I'm looking for is more akin to a mail store, an IMAP server, and functionality for sending and receiving via actual SMTP server(s). That's a separate set of responsibilities to reading or composing messages, which would just need something like an IMAP-compatible client. And all of those are separate responsibilities to…

IMAP is that single store. Setting up a server just for that would be just as impossible for most users as settings up a mail server would be.

An IMAP server alone typically doesn't include the equivalents of fetchmail and the like. It just provides a protocol for remotely accessing the mail store.

However, I don't see why you think it would be impossible for most users to set up what I'm describing. If they can install Thunderbird and configure it to retrieve mail from their ISP or GMail or whatever, they could install a two-part system and configure the store part to do the same using exactly the same information.

In particular, just installing both parts on a single PC would work fine and provide equivalent functionality to current standalone mail clients like Thunderbird. You just have the flexibility to connect other devices to the same store and safely access your mail from those as well, or to install the store part on some other place on the network like an office server or maybe a NAS at home if you want to.

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