Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

updates.thunderbird.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 403 posts

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#81

Post by antisol »

DO NOT donate to Thunderbird. Let it "die". As with all of Mozilla's software, that would be the best outcome - if it does, someone who isn't totally incompetent might fork it and actually improve it.

Literally every change that's been made to thunderbird in the last 10+ years has made it worse. Mozilla are doggedly using the same philosophy as they are with firefox: "in what new and exciting ways can we make it more shit?".

There are a bunch of things that I used to do in thunderbird with no problem on much less powerful machines that I can't do today.

For example, since they decided to rewrite their perfectly-functional calendar parsing in a trash language, it now eats 100% of my CPU for ~30mins at a time trying to parse my decades-long, many-many-thousands-of-entries calendar. Then when it finishes it notices that it's been 30 mins since it synchronised my calendar, so it syncs and starts parsing all over again! This effectively locks up the whole of thunderbird, making it totally unusable. This issue has persisted for years. The solution I came up with is "stop using thunderbird for my calendar".

There's a similar fun bug which means it won't sync my contacts anymore either. A feature that I had by about 2010 which my nokia phone could manage, modern thunderbird cannot do.

If you'd like another 20 examples of how it's worse today than it was 10 years ago, just ask, and I'll write up a hundred thousand words or so of vitriol.

It's extremely likely that next time I upgrade my distro I'll be shopping for a new email client. Currently I have thunderbird marked as held so that it doesn't upgrade. When I upgrade my distro there will be a new version of thunderbird, and I'd estimate about a 90% chance that that's when I'll make my exit, after ~20 years or so.

It's sad. Thunderbird used to be a great piece of software.

Don't give mozilla your money.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#82

Post by paulnpace »

swiftcoder wrote: post #9

> MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird. I guess I don't understand why the open-source email client with zero revenue potential is managed by a for-profit subsidiary, nor why that for-profit subsidiary is begging for donations. Shouldn't this whole thing be managed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?

This is just organizational structure. "For-profit" doesn't mean "profitable". Also, the organization is "wholly owned" by a non-profit, so if there are profits declared in the form of dividends, those dividends are sent to the non-profit.

Note that many non-profits have exceptionally high-paid executives and "contractors".

Regulatory requirements on non-profit organizations are very high, and those organizations are, in fact, very limited in what they can do and how they receive their money. There are very good reasons for a non-profit to own for-profit entities, and, similarly, for philanthropic organizations to organize as for-profit entities.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#83

Post by Vinnl »

Levitating wrote: post #67
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 I don't think that's the case. "Thunderbird is part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation." Thunderbirds sourcecode is literally part of the same mercury codebase as Firefox. Thunderbird does have a very small team, and I think everyone that uses it should considering donating.

Yeah it's all a bit complex (just like the US tax code, I suppose). MZLA (which makes Thunderbird) is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation (which makes Firefox) is also a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. In practice, this means that the people running Firefox day-to-day aren't the people running Thunderbird day-to-day, although of course they do talk, and technology choices made in Firefox can and do effect Thunderbird, just like they effect e.g. Zen Browser or Tor Browser.

(Also, someone help a non-native speaker: I think the "effect"s above should be "affect", but for some reason that looked wrong here. Why is that?)

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#84

Post by prmoustache »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #74
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was originally Minotaur (when the browser was Phoenix), then they were Firebird and Thunderbird, until the browser renamed to avoid a name clash.

I really don't remember (+quick check) Firebird for the email client, do you have source for this?

Firebird was the browser's name, after phoenix and before rebranding to firefox.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#85

Post by Barbing »

charcircuit wrote: post #80
mrks_hy wrote: post #38

I really like Thunderbird, it's the only truly cross-platform mail app, with K9 also now on Android. Works perfect, I even migrated my Windows install to Linux just by copying the data folder, absolutely seamless. Not sure why people are hating on it so much here. Point to an alternative with the same features?

Gmail can be used from any modern platform through the web and has dedicated Android and iOS apps too.

It's bad enough so many of us have to get our emails through them. Adding even more tracking on top of that… No, thank you. I don't want all my scroll positions on all my emails to be logged in their database forever.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#87

Post by smarnach »

Fervicus wrote: post #50
tristanj wrote: post #5

Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.

What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia, they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the amount of useful products they have.

How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers, workplace, HR, legal etc.).

Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#88

Post by antisol »

Levitating wrote: post #67
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 I don't think that's the case. "Thunderbird is part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation." Thunderbirds sourcecode is literally part of the same mercury codebase as Firefox. Thunderbird does have a very small team, and I think everyone that uses it should considering donating.

Thunderbird has always been mozilla. They split it out into the other company a few years back.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#89

Post by cge »

j-bos wrote: post #60
TekMol wrote: post #57

I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is implemented. Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it. I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad: I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expec…

You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just write the bug ID on the check.

MZLA Technologies, the organization that these donations go to, is not a non-profit.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#90

Post by wisidisi »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #74
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was originally Minotaur (when the browser was Phoenix), then they were Firebird and Thunderbird, until the browser renamed to avoid a name clash.

I really don't remember (+quick check) Firebird for the email client, do you have source for this?

Predecessor of Firefox was Firebird, and before that it was even called Phoenix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Name_changes

Post reply on HN