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Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

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Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#291

Post by moralestapia »

narag wrote: post #47

After reading a bunch of negative comments here, let me add a little on the bright side. I've been using Thunderbird for many years, currently both at home and at work to manage gmail accounts, pop at home, imap in the office. It works great for me, with a few annoyances but nothing serious. As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structur…

>Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now

Source?

Thunderbird is owned by Mozilla ... if I donate, my money goes to Mozilla.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#292

Post by bloppe »

cycomanic wrote: post #121
bachmeier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Thunderbird for decades, I've donated in the past, and am likely to donate again. With that out of the way, the lack of transparency as to what happens to my money kills the incentive to donate. "How will my gift be used?" "Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing develop…

I find that a weird sentiment. Why do people demand to know and control how every one of their donations goes, while nobody questions how corporations use their money. Ironically, the demand for this increased transparency significantly increases compliance cost, which means more and more money is driven away from the actual cause toward the administrative costs. Exactly what people don't want to support.

When you're shopping for a paid product, you're generally trying to minimize your costs (while balancing quality). When you're donating to a free product, you're actually trying to maximize the effectiveness of your donation. If you were simply trying to minimize your cost/benefit ratio, you would donate nothing. Clearly there is a totally different mentality at play.

Consider it also from the recipient's perspective. Their benefactors are more likely to donate more money when they believe it will be put to good use. It's a complicated messaging problem, but being vague is probably not in your best interest.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#294

Post by Panino »

I recently started using Thunderbird for work which uses O365 (horrific service) for mail. I've found that 2FA with O365 to be totally unreliable no matter the client, even using the iOS app.

Does anyone use Thunderbird with Gmail and 2FA, and does it work correctly 100% of the time there?

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#295

Post by BizarroLand »

RobotToaster wrote: post #152
cycomanic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that a weird sentiment. Why do people demand to know and control how every one of their donations goes, while nobody questions how corporations use their money. Ironically, the demand for this increased transparency significantly increases compliance cost, which means more and more money is driven away from the actual cause toward the administrative costs. Exactly what people don't want to support.

People are generally happier to donate money to a charity if they know it will go to a good cause, and not the CEO's seven million dollar salary. It also isn't that unusual for donations to be ring fenced for certain things.

Exactly. I decided to never donate to Wikipedia again after learning that wikipedia took some of that donated money and redonated it to other companies.

It felt like a betrayal to me.

Not that I think the other companies were bad, but if they have so much money they're giving it away to other people then they obviously don't need my money anymore.

If they wanted people to give other companies money then why didn't they have a separate different begging drive for those companies instead of just deciding, "Well, this is my money now, given to me to keep the site running and our employees paid, I'm going to give it away instead of using for the purpose that I literally begged it for".

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#296

Post by teddyh »

antisol wrote: post #212
registeredcorn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all seriousness, it might be good to write up more of the issues that you have for at least a few reasons: 1. TB probably(?) doesn't consider use cases like the one that you described. If there is any hope of them fixing it, it would be best to be underscored in detail. Perhaps then someone can try to propagate some fake test data to try and test against. 2. There's always the chance someone might be willing to fo…

Maybe. I did try (politely, btw!) reporting a couple of issues on their bugtracker a long time ago, but the usual thing happened: nothing at all. IIRC there was no response of any kind. Which makes me reticent to put more time into writing more bug reports for them to ignore. I just found out about betterbird today. It looks interesting. I might give it a try. And if I see the same issues there, maybe I'll report it…

If you want any negatively inclined people to be unable to resort to think that you are lying, a good thing for you to do would be to link to the bugtracker issues that you created long ago.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#297

Post by etiam »

anigbrowl wrote: post #280

I installed Thunderbird for the first time in a couple of decades recently. My impression was that it's very feature rich but also quite ugly and not friendly to new users. It comes with a lot of assumptions about what the user wants to do and how, and I found myself having to use cheats and workarounds from the outset. I wanted to import a batch of disparate .eml files that had been seperately exported, and after 15…

Most of the smashing up and disfiguration of a perfectly good interface, uglification, waste and breakage of both data and compatibility were introduced in a rewrite 2023 ostensibly aiming for "fresh" design and user interface work.

I'd heed the call for donation simply for returning to pre-2023 design with up-to-date security patches. As it is, maybe it's merciful if development just comes to a standstill. Almost every visible step lately seems to move in the wrong direction.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#298

Post by [deleted] »

cycomanic wrote: post #121
bachmeier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Thunderbird for decades, I've donated in the past, and am likely to donate again. With that out of the way, the lack of transparency as to what happens to my money kills the incentive to donate. "How will my gift be used?" "Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing develop…

I find that a weird sentiment. Why do people demand to know and control how every one of their donations goes, while nobody questions how corporations use their money. Ironically, the demand for this increased transparency significantly increases compliance cost, which means more and more money is driven away from the actual cause toward the administrative costs. Exactly what people don't want to support.

[deleted]

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#299

Post by MoonWalk »

Is there still no way to export and import your filters in Thunderbird? This is why I shunned it 20 years ago. The absurd idea that you're going to manually run around to all your computers all the time and manually set up (and maintain) mail filters should have been rejected in version 1.0.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#300

Post by BoredPositron »

ciupicri wrote: post #289
BoredPositron wrote: post #54

I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so there is room for something new.

As if writing a browser and an email client is a piece of cake and there are tons of alternatives ready to take over. Blink and WebKit don't count.

That's the whole point of the argument as long as there is Mozilla nothing new will come because there is Mozilla. That's why Google is still funding them.
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