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What’s New in Thunderbird 78

blog.thunderbird.net

201–210 of 230 posts

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#201
post #160

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…

I think Outlook itself is a big reason for why other email clients seem so behind. As a user, Outlook is great and I have absolutely no complaints about it. As a developer that occasionally has to work with the technical side of emails, Outlook is the biggest source of frustration due to its “proprietary” standard of content presentation, address book management, contacts etc. I have to write plenty of code specifica…

I don't know. My dad is an "average" user running Outlook as client, and he's currently complaining all the time because for some reason at least every second Windows 10 update wrecks the performance of Outlook so hard it sometimes takes minutes to start and upwards of 10 seconds to open an email. Not to mention the occasional crash.

I'm glad Claws mail exists; an ancient client but the only graphical one I could find that's actually fast and lightweight. Although Mailspring is pretty good as well and is not quite as slow as one might expect from an Electron app.

In the end I am really glad I have no need of more "enterprise" features in this area.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#202
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in the background window in this screenshot https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png you can see manual Light and Dark options as well as Auto.

Have it installed, such an option isn't available to me, in Win10

According to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 it should be under Addons -> Themes, at least in previous versions? But it was kinda buggy as of last month.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#203
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.

marketing/newsletter email devalue the format, and in my family most stopped to care about a "inbox". Hundreds of images tucked away on an IMAP server, uncatalogued - far from ideal.

A chat-view in email clients could counter the development, if messages from contacts have visual advantage over automated email. The Ivelope client was featured here before, but went quiet. DeltaChat tries to do it, Chat-over-IMAP is another campaign of vendors.

Problems like mailbox size, search and indexed view of attachments/content, expectations on privacy.. this friction will remain from a user perspective.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#204
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…

I think it'd take some serious investment, probably using something like Electron, to make a combined Webmail and desktop mail client that's good and modern. But if someone did that, it'd be really interesting.

I sort of think Google should do it with GMail, in fact.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#205
post #163
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…

Just curious, how does Archiving get in the way? I've always found it a million times better than basically any of the other email clients archiving processes. Hope your having a great day!

It works well, and I like it.

But it interferes with search.

I have two ways of archiving: * Manuall mail older than 2 years off my server into a local storage. The process is somwhat clumsy, but works. * Conssitently archive anything that is done, keeping inbox(0) using the "archive" feature in TB - hotkey 'a'.

I did find that often archiving in other mailclients, or in thunderbird itself (all using IMAP, no shared storage on my machine) makes thunderbird's search index break. about 20% of the mails in my archive are not searchable. Only after hunting down the "rebuild search index feature" can it be fixed.

The fact that such a feature exists, alone is worrying in several ways.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#206
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.

I'm young and I really dislike slack. Sure, I agree email is shit but it is by far the best tool I have seen for this type of messaging. (Collaborative documents like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper being the other major async communication tool I value). The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on…

> The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel).

If you push Command-LeftArrow (on Mac) it's like a back button for Slack channels.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#207
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.

KDE-1 was my first DE, (SuSE 6.x) and I used that for years, so I really know and used KMail. KDE-PIM was my favorite and long time the only piece of K- software on my otherwise gnome en (back during the kde3 drama, I threw it out and went full-gnome).

I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird.

It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#208
post #109
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…

There's a webmail out there called Rainloop. It's probably one of the best email interfaces I used. Sadly, it's not a desktop client. My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.

Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker.

My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#209
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail. I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.

If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)

You could use POP but I don't see why you would.

Re: What’s New in Thunderbird 78

#210
post #9

This is a pretty significant release: * Integrated OpenGPG E2EE (fully realized in a future 78.2 release) * Significant UI improvements * Integration of calendars and tasks * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)

> * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)

Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.

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