Give to Thunderbird • Hacker News Board

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#71

Post by FreakyT » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #69

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…

To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround.

It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#72

Post by pizza234 » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #8

I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm almost as far as possible away from there.

> Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on.

I have very strong suspicions about the engineering quality of their work (but can't confirm).

With the recent version, v78, they did broke extensions again, however, something very smell is the policy that they've adopted - the new replacement APIs are incomplete and experimental (see https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78):

> While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as so-called Experiments.

> As Experiments usually run in the main process and have unrestricted access to any aspect of Thunderbird, they are expected to require updates for each new version of Thunderbird. To reduce the maintenance burden in the future, it is in your own interest to use Experiment APIs only to the extent necessary for the add-on.

Essentially, they've broken compatibility by introducing a half-baked framework, and guaranteed that compatibility will be broken again and again.

I don't have the technical insight to know if this is really necessary (I know that in the past, breaking compatibility was a necessity in some cases), but on the outside, this looks like terrible, careless, engineering.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#73

Post by bjarneh » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #61

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…

https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#74

Post by hpcjoe » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

I set up a recurring monthly contribution of $10. I've used Thunderbird for years, its my go-to client. Unfortunately these days, day job forces windows 10 and lookout. But I use it everywhere else.

FWIW, lookout is itself dangerous software to install/use. There are many hacks of it, including new and exciting zero-days where you don't even need to interact with the mail in any way, to have a compromise occur. It is simply not worth the risk, on any platform.

I've used (and paid for) both Owl and ExQuilla for office365 integration when needed. Owl was iffy ... had lots of problems. ExQuilla just worked.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#75

Post by jabroni_salad » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #71

yunohn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround. It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.

The IMAP blocking is for different draconian reasons. Office365 does not support Modern Auth with IMAP, which is considered a security baseline now.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#76

Post by GekkePrutser » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

I wouldn't use it anyway. But I would sponsor Firefox like this.

However with Firefox you can only sponsor the Mozilla foundation and not the product itself.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#77

Post by archerx » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #41

Deukhoofd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They moved it over to MZLA Technologies Corporation last year, which is a for profit, so they could monetize it. https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thun...

What in the world? I thought maybe their original statement would make more sense, but no: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ We received a lot of donations from the community, so we're going to shift to a for-profit footing? That does not make a lot of sense to me. One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to trust them wi…

The Mozilla CEO clearly needs more money!

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#78

Post by GekkePrutser » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

Interesting, too bad it's not FOSS though. I would like to see how it works.

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#79

Post by josteink » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

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.…

> Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support

But Geary works nicely on mobile phones, like the PinePhone. For me it serves a different niche than Thunderbird (which is my default desktop email-client).

Re: Give to Thunderbird

#80

Post by jcranmer » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 2:08 PM UTC

opheliate wrote: post #10

I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and they're against releasing proprietary software? I really appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla direct…

> I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase?

That's the short answer to the question.

A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would require properly fixing several of the places rather than continuing the various levels of hacks in place.

Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical debt TB suffers from.