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What’s New in Thunderbird 78

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#181

Post by anuragsoni »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #145
kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

Out of interest are you hooked up to an Exchange account or IMAP? Exchange email accounts are the bane of my email set up at the moment.

I was full time on linux at a previous job where the company used Exchange. I tried davmail (for email, calendar, contacts), a combination of exchange imap + tbsync for contacts, calendar etc, but they all seemed a little flaky at best. The solution i settled on was Gnome's evolution. It was really seamless and everything worked just as well as using the Outlook app on windows/app. I went through the Gnome Online Accounts integration but you can add the account from within evolution as well.

I really like Thunderbird, but if you need to use exchange and are on linux I think there isn't a nicer option than Evolution at the moment. It plays nice with all MS services and integrates with the OS for contacts, calendar etc.

Ofcourse all of this only applies if you are using Linux and its possible evolution is annoying on non gnome systems (i haven't tried it outside of gnome). I think kmail also has exchange support but i haven't tried it.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#183

Post by inanutshellus »

scoutt wrote: post #152
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, TB search works a million times better for me than Outlook. What are your main issues?

It can't search for exact strings. Double quotes don't work.

I would love to be able to do a "slow search" that let me use exact strings.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#184

Post by jcranmer »

cxr wrote: post #176
kioleanu wrote: post #74

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables prop…

> But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again Thunderbird's problem is and always has been a lack of resources. Mozilla infamously bungled…

What hurts Thunderbird extremely hard is Mozilla's inability to keep any embedding story live for more than a year or so.

Originally, Thunderbird and Firefox lived in the same CVS codebase, and the only difference to build Thunderbird was changing one line in your config file. When Mozilla moved to Mercurial, the Thunderbird code was left out of the repository on purpose, and so gained the annoying split-repository. Then Mozilla removed the ability to build the C++ code in anything other than a link-everything-into-libxul configuration. (Well, you could choose to have binary components live elsewhere, but the string APIs turn out to be completely different for pretty much no good reason--and mail code is obviously very string-heavy)

There was a plan to build Thunderbird on top of a vanilla XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off. Webrunner was next (I think), and that was then killed off again. Now I believe there's yet another thing, but of course Firefox has also shut off access to binary (C/C++) extensions, so if Thunderbird wanted to use it, it would have to rewrite ~1M lines of code.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#185

Post by mugsie »

Boulth6 wrote: post #66
aneutron wrote: post #45

I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se. The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Great work Tea…

> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.

Is it supported? I tried to add a secret key on a smartcard, and it failed

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#186

Post by mxuribe »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #131
berkes wrote: post #84

I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere). The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily. I've been comparing…

Have you tried kmail, it's pretty mature. I use TB,YMMV.

I recently jumped from linux mint to Fedora...just to play because i haven't lived in anything related to redhat for many years (no offense to fedora or red hat, just formed a habit of ubuntu-derived distros like Mint)...anyway, i've always been a tunderbird user, but now that i am trying fedora i set it up with KDE...so figured I'd try kmail - which i had heard good things about. Well, my experience was ok/so-so as compared to thunderbird. Please don't interpret this as some start of a flamewar...i don't hate kmail by any means...it just felt like it was a similar to thunderbird but i don;t know less polished or with fewer features that were exposed. I'm sure that i have to give it more time to be fair, but so far kmail has disappointed be a little bit. I'm going to continue using it to see how things go. (Obviously my experience is not based on any evidence, nor is a formal review or anything like that...just early usage feelings.)

EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#187

Post by kevincox »

jcranmer wrote: post #177
ethelward wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ~4MB per thousand emails; while I agree it's conceptually wasteful, I doubt it would have any real consequences for anyone.

Waste isn't the issue with big folders; filesystem performance (especially NTFS, which is to say Windows users, which is to say ~90% of users) degrades pretty horribly when folders have tens of thousands of files. Even on Linux filesystems, having a folder with a 100,000 files in it was having issues.

FWIW on ext4 I benchmarked adding millions of files to a folder and compared with `xx/...` and `x/x/x/x/...` and found the performance to be basically identical between the options and didn't degrade with the file count.

The one thing that I did find is that deleting folders with many files was very slow. I guess that path wasn't well optimized. However even then you could deleted hundreds of files a second so for regular mail usage it likely isn't a major issue.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#188

Post by eythian »

Silhouette wrote: post #118
qqj wrote: post #114

Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.

Mail is the lingua franca of online communications. It isn't going anywhere any time soon, if only because it it's an independent standard that does not rely on some single commercial entity to continue operating it. That is also part of the reason why all those other services still fall back on email for their registration mechanisms.

And the Mediterranian Lingua Franca also faded away. I tend to agree with the person you're replying to, 95+% of my email is automated things sending it, it's rare that I have an email conversation with anybody these days. I don't like this trend, because I value open standards etc., hell I still use IRC regularly. But its use as a person-to-person communication mechanism is definitely falling, in my experience. Also, most mailing lists I'm on have been steadily drying up for a several years now.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#189

Post by kevincox »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #131
berkes wrote: post #84

I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere). The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily. I've been comparing…

Have you tried kmail, it's pretty mature. I use TB,YMMV.

One feature that I can't live without that is surprisingly rare is the ability to view full threads. In Thunderbird you can Right Click -> View Conversation (or something like that) and it will show you the entire tree of messages. This is invaluable for trying to understand messages in a long discussion.

But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#190

Post by kevincox »

galacticdessert wrote: post #63

Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again. The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

Maybe I don't understand the bug but I'm pretty sure Thunderbird has this. I can see the folders, messages and message all on the same screen.
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