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Give to Thunderbird

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Re: Give to Thunderbird

#61

Post by jrm4 »

bjarneh wrote: post #32

Thunderbird is such a great program. Ever since I gave up Mutt as my default email program, I've been using all the time. One of the richest guys on the planet (Zuckerberg) was using Thinderbird in a photo some time ago I think. Perhaps if he reads HN; they can get an infinite lifeline.

HOLD the phone. Can we confirm this? If so, this 100% furthers my idea of "Stop thinking of tech billionaires of being helpfully creative to the world and having imaginations, they are the exact opposite."

If a normal person were also a billionaire, they'd stop for half a second and call someone and say "hey, make sure Thunderbird is good for forever."

These people can't think that way, they're hampered by the mental defect of "Hmm, what's the angle, how can I make money off this? I can't right now, okay so I'll do nothing."

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#62

Post by gnomewascool »

meesterdude wrote: post #27
gnomewascool wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. The reason is the underlying Gecko engine being constantly yanked from under them — they rely on parts of Firefox's codebase and when that changes, they have to keep up, risk having security vulnerabilities or manually backport relevant security patches, in effect maintaining their own forked browser engine.

understandable shifting sands; but that's NO excuse for the sort of shoddy work they've done to address it. At best interpretation, there was not enough rudimentary QA done, because some of their changes (at least, in previous releases i worked with) outright broke the ability to compose messages. This was the result of finally hitting the "upgrade" button: black text on a black background. So I rolled back. This, in…

I understand your frustration — I've similarly been bitten by some changes to Firefox; however please do remember that Thunderbird is developed by a small team with limited funds and adding or even maintaining configurability is expensive.

That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird, since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit of a vicious cycle.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#63

Post by spapas82 »

themulticaster wrote: post #48
spapas82 wrote: post #19

Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required feature that enables most users to have excellent security in their communications. For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to Thunderbird as my main mail client!

Just a nitpick, but FYI: Thunderbird now has an integrated PGP implementation, but it does not use GnuPG (GPG). Rather they integrated another PGP implementation called RNP. The standard is called OpenPGP, PGP is the original (proprietary) implementation and GnuPG was originally created as a compatible free software alternative to PGP. In previous Thunderbird versions (before 78), the quasi-standard Enigmail extensio…

Yes that's the case. Thunderbird does not use gnupg anymore and the enigmail extension is not needed.

However I think that Thunderbird having everything integrated in its UI, without the need to use or even install a third party program line gnupg makes the experience much better for inexperienced users.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#64

Post by dotancohen »

If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!) into Thunderbird: https://www.beonex.com/owl/

Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though I guess that makes sense because I expect that it needs to be updated whenever the Office 365 site is updated.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#65

Post by EMM_386 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #3
MzHN wrote: post #2

>[...] wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. [...] Why doesn't Firefox have this?

I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue. So the split is: you can donate to the non-profit organization, while the for-profit corporation only handles taxable income. The reason why it is split is due to taxes. Mozilla created the corporation after getting in trouble with the IRS. Edit: I haven’t kept up with Thunderbird for a very long time, but…

> I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue.

I think a lot of people are confused about this, myself included. A lot of people want to donate directly to Firefox for development.

But there are vast sums of money to the tune of $400M+ already involved here. I assume the $20 donations people give to Mozilla go towards the broader initiatives of the Foundation.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#66

Post by criddell »

gowld wrote: post #57
criddell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is (surprise!) best supported by Outlook. I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help them.

Is OME compatible with freedom? If so, Thunderbird could add support?

I don't think it would be easy. Along with OME comes a different protocol. I don't think it's fully compatible with SMTP or POP or IMAP.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#67

Post by spapas82 »

criddell wrote: post #46
spapas82 wrote: post #19

Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required feature that enables most users to have excellent security in their communications. For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to Thunderbird as my main mail client!

I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is (surprise!) best supported by Outlook. I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help them.

It ain't Thunderbird's big feature but it's an important one at least for me.

The fact that pgp is not growing in popularity is not related to its security but its difficulty of using it properly (and the fact that it is an open and non monetizable solution). Having been integrated in the Thunderbird as a first class feature makes it very easy to use so it may lead to increase in its popularity!

I have no experience with OME but I presume it's a proprietary solution.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#68

Post by brnt »

gnuarch wrote: post #24

On GNU/Linux Thunderbird ist my favourite GUI mail client, offering support for a variety of standards, including e.g. CalDAV (CardDAV in Beta), OpenPGP and S/MIME. Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone). Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan. On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative.…

I want to like Kmail, but it's a bit too opinionated (e.g. having a setting letting you set to reply-to-all by default was removed because it is 'wrong', as well as having the button show up on messages without a roll-down) and just too crashy (akonadi...) and impossible to backup configuration (I spend a full day tracking all the various files/dirs down, no luck).

I think there's an A-rate tool hiding in Kmail and Kontact, but development is glacial and not very responsive feature requests. (I even asked for some help setting up a dev env to develop something myself but no replies.)

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#69

Post by yunohn »

dotancohen wrote: post #64

If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!) into Thunderbird: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though…

Did you get this extension audited by your security team? It sounds insane to me that you’re bypassing IMAP restrictions, with a plug-in that monitors and parses the entire O365 website…

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#70

Post by aidenn0 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #50
aidenn0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find davmail to be the best way to access exchange. It connects to exchange and sets up local proxies using pop, IMAP, SMTP, and calDav. Then I can use whichever client I like. Otherwise it's just bouncing between which client has had the exchange plugins updated most recently. As a bonus, it's distributed as a jar, so you can download and run for the latest support, even on an LTS of a Linux distro

How heavy is davmail on the system? I am always a little paranoid about java apps. Can you accept/reject meeting invites with it? The Tbsync extension that I am using does not have this feature.

accept/reject meeting invites seems to depend on your CalDAV client. It doesn't work well with TB, but works great with Evolution. I haven't dug into what's actually happening because when it didn't work with TB, it was spamming peoples inboxes (e.g. one time it decided to reject every single instance of a recurring meeting that had been going on for years), so I just set the calendar to read-only in TB.
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