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Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

444 points by dest 11y ago

Cyph0n 11y ago
That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The best solution imo is to just let the community take over.
- seszett 11y ago
  > It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. I don't know about Windows, but on Linux... I try every so often to use other clients, but Thunderbird is still the only one I can bear. For some reason there's always something that doesn't work with Gnome or KDE clients, keystore stuff that doesn't let me save my passwords, or seems to but doesn't actually remember them, or some indexation service insisting on taking half my CPU, or... And the desktop-agnostic clients are ugly and lack features. So through all this time, I've both hated Thunderbird and considered it the only usable client. I really wonder which one I'll switch to in the future.
  - krisdol 11y ago
    I'd give evolution another shot. I find it to be the only enterprise-ready one
    - creshal 11y ago
      If by "enterprise-ready" you mean "slow, bloated, and byzantine", then yes, it fits that ecosystem perfectly. But despite being a single-threaded, half-XML-half-C cancerous pile of dirty hacks, Thunderbird is still faster and more stable – not to mention more extensible – than Evolution could ever hope to be.
      - tormeh 11y ago
        God, I hope the Unix people abandon C and start using Rust. It's going to raise the quality of open source desktop applications so much. Or, well, it'll at least be the first clear improvement in many decades.
        feld 11y ago
        Are you so daft to think that the rust compiler is written in something other than C/C++?
        creshal 11y ago
        The original Rust compiler was written in… OCaml. Nowadays it's self-hosting.
        feld 11y ago
        And OCaml is written in C. Also, there's an awful lot of llvm involved in compiler-rt on github. To think you can evade C on a Unix box is very wishful thinking. You can't escape C-generated bytecode in your stack. It's bound to be somewhere.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        krisdol 11y ago
        Seeing as much of the kernel is written in it, of course. Working efficiently with raw memory pointers requires an unsafe language. Even Windows is written in C/C++
        ionised 11y ago
        I don't know much about Rust but the Wikipedia page says the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and that the new compiler is self-hosted and written in the Rust language itself.
        11y ago
      - krisdol 11y ago
        No, by enterprise-ready I mean it works better than others at integration with various Exchange accounts, including calendar scheduling and contact lists.
- jvehent 11y ago
  > The best solution imo is to just let the community take over. ... which is exactly what is being proposed here, with financial help from the Mozilla Foundation to ease the transition.
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    As far as I read in the linked article, nothing has been finalized yet from Mozilla's side.
- haddr 11y ago
  Geary email client is a really quite nice and fresh alternative recently. Although not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use...
  - pmlnr 11y ago
    > not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use... No encryption, no CardDav, no Sieve support. Yes, I need plugins for this in Thunderbird, but I can have them if I want to. geary is also hectic on which distribution/release is supported. The user interface is nice though.
coderdude 11y ago
I hope someone picks up the reins. I install TB on every OS I have. I prefer it. I damn near require it for its cross platform consistency. Anything but Google or Microsoft (and I like both of those companies). @bad_user quells my fears.
- josephmx 11y ago
  Have you tried the browser based Outlook 365? It's actually very good, I prefer it to desktop Outlook (though never really liked Thunderbird)
  - coderdude 11y ago
    I haven't tried it but I haven't heard anything bad about it either. Thanks for the lead.
wslh 11y ago
For e-mail Sylpheed was always an alternative: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
- buserror 11y ago
  I used sylpheed for a long time! But, it is a LITTLE bit looking long in the tooth these days, with the Windows 95 throwback :-) However, it might provide a fallback just in case...
- wiz21c 11y ago
  I use claws. Very simple, very efficient, very robust (well I just use textual email mostly and in a very one-person way, that is, I've got a few mails a day, mostly from less than ten mailing lists)
bad_user 11y ago
Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version 42 beta and it's looking good. This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.
- astrodust 11y ago
  What are the compile times on that code-base like? I remember Firefox being so bad it was measured in eons.
- crististm 11y ago
  You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than 18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors. Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a corporation. Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    Not sure what you're implying. Mozilla stopped developing Thunderbird since 2012. I would also be curios in what corporation (singular) is developing Linux.
    - crististm 11y ago
      I'm implying that "open source-ness" is not necessarily _the_ ingredient that will save a massive abandoned project. You need also 'drive' - and good hackers are put of by massive corporate projects. They have better things to do than clean up corporate mess.
      - bad_user 11y ago
        Open source, mostly defined by the right to fork, is a prerequisite for the survival of abandoned projects. You can say that abandoned open-source projects don't necessarily survive, but for proprietary projects abandonment is a guaranteed death sentence. I've also started to resent the word "hacker", because it sounds as some kind of social class made up of special snowflakes. If the project has value and users, then interested programmers will find a way to keep the project going and there are hundreds of projects in the Linux ecosystem that survive because of volunteers or companies scratching an itch. If there isn't interest, then surely the project might as well die. But that's a tautology.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toisanji 11y ago
I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow. What do you guys think of the closed source product http://postbox-inc.com http://postbox-inc.com built on top of Thunderbird?
- pmontra 11y ago
  No Linux, nothing to see here for me.
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  I love Postbox. It's been my primary email client ever since I was forced to switch from Eudora. It even supports Thunderbird plugins with some small tweaks (mostly just recognising the Postbox User Agent). My biggest complaint about Postbox is that it's too cheap. It's only $15... I paid more than that for my Twitter client. Email is mission critical for me, so I'm happy to pay at least $50 (maybe $50/year?) for whatever is the most efficient, powerful & reliable email client. I want to pay that money to a company so they'll keep developing & advancing the program, not abandon it like Mozilla is doing now.
- apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
  I've been using Postbox since 2012. It's a great client and while I've tried a ton of others (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, AirMail, Sparrow, Dropbox Mailbox, etc), I always come back to PostBox. It's stable, simple, has access to some Thunderbird extensions, and just works like I need it to. My only gripes are that development is inconsistent at best (v4 took far too long to come out, in my opinion) and they seem to focus on features that don't add much value to the client. But overall, it's a great client that I was more than happy to pay for.
floor_ 11y ago
You can't put in emails chained together with a semicolon. So I posted a bug report about address field parsing being broken. I was told that it was working as intended and was completely sandbagged. I don't have too much respect for the dev team right now.
jacquesm 11y ago
Thunderbird has been my email client ever since I used unix as my day-to-day platform and it's a real pity that Mozilla stops maintenance but on the whole it doesn't need that much maintenance. It just works, I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing. Just keep it as it is and I'm perfectly ok with it. If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long term stability and bug fixing rather than grafting new parts onto it and re-writing old parts that are working just fine I'd be OK with that too. (The default seems to be that bugs are not fixed before the part of the code base that contains them is replaced by something new which in turn also contains bugs.)
- mhb 11y ago
  I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing The forwarding/replying in plain vs. formatted text is pretty annoying.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Can you point me to the associated bug in bugzilla?
  - perlwle 11y ago
    Press shift + reply / forward in thunderbird. Is that what you want?
    - mhb 11y ago
      That is what I use, but now I can't remember/recreate what I didn't like about it.
- pmontra 11y ago
  Even making sure that a program keeps compiling can be a big effort. Target platforms keep moving, toolchain changes, libraries die and must be replaced, it's not trivial. I hope they find a way to manage all of that because I don't want to use web mail and I don't know of other equivalent clients on Linux.
bshimmin 11y ago
The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.
- parennoob 11y ago
  If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say, "Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird, we're probably going to abandon it". Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...) - they don't exactly show a company flush with cash that is pulling support for a product because they don't like it or something. I like Enigmail though, just as you do, and tried introducing my family to it. Sadly that didn't stick :/
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    It's long, it's rambling, it uses phrases like "laser-focussed" (twice). Fine, it's not corporatese at its absolute worst (there isn't a "synergistic" in there), but it's also not going to win any awards for clear communication; it could be every bit as diplomatic whilst also losing about 70% of the words. I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.
    - hyc_symas 11y ago
      This is the real message, to me. Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential. However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is increasingly unstable. So, their stated goal is market dominance for Firefox, period. Nothing else really matters. Clearly they are failing at this goal, so they are focusing their resources on it and discarding anything else.
betteringred 11y ago
They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (like six weeks later) they'll stop supporting those for old Firefox. Initially the HTML Firefox will suck. When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features (hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will not reintroduce. Why? Because when they were first introduced a decade ago it was a cool idea someone had, and no one knew how popular it would be, so heck, why not implement it. But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important! As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago. They can't just kill XUL for Firefox though, they have to burn down the XUL ecosystem first so they're just releasing a new Firefox, nothing to see here. 1. They try to kill xulrunner as a project separate from Firefox. They try to move everyone to firefox -app. 2. They stop releasing binaries for xulrunner. 3. They deprecate XUL extensions. 4. They distance themselves from Thunderbird. They say it's better for Thunderbird. Yeah right! Thunderbird is built on XUL, it's not going to be rewritten in HTML any time soon, definitely not by volunteers. It's not going to be able to maintain XUL either, and when Mozilla stops supporting XUL for Firefox a few years after deprecating XUL extensions then Thunderbird will be screwed, but hey, it's not our project! We abandoned it years ago! So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given up to have it. But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. Because we already make hundreds of millions of dollars and we do whatever is shiny and new, screw the "community" of existing stuff. We're fighting for an open web! (where you can use Gmail for email)
- toyg 11y ago
  It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is. (this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu or RedHat.)
mverwijs 11y ago
Anyone know how this impacts the e-mail functionality of Seamonkey? (I've actually started using Seamonkey again on a whim. The last couple of weeks. Somehow, browsing feels more snappy with Seamonkey than with Firefox.)
- gryph0n 11y ago
  What a circle that would be !!! Phoenix (later, again renamed to Firefox) was originally split off from Mozilla/Netscape Navigator since the 'suite' was presumably slow.
  - lmm 11y ago
    Seamonkey was faster in a matter of months. If you stop messing with a piece of software, Moore's law soon makes it blazing fast.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  I use SeaMonkey purely for its newsgroup support. It's a lightweight and practical piece of software.
  - newscracker 11y ago
    Thunderbird supports newsgroups too and is lighter than SeaMonkey, which is a full suite.
- Yetanfou 11y ago
  The demise of Thunderbird does not mean anything to Seamonkey, but the deprecation of XUL will make it hard to continue to develop it since the whole user interface is based on XUL. The only viable option would be to pick up maintenance for the XUL-supporting Gecko engine.
  - jcranmer 11y ago
    Actually, SeaMonkey largely lives on Thunderbird's maintenance of the mailnews code.
joonoro 11y ago
Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability). If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS guys picked it up?), Mailpile [1] might have a chance to fill that gap. Other than that, there's always Claws Mail [2]. [0] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html [1] https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ [2] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/
- jeffdubin 11y ago
  Mailpile looks interesting, but the Mac package is unavailable: "Packages are being reworked". That makes me think twice -- and I'm not even a Mac user. Though I'd rather see a pulled release than a dangerous one, it's been like that for at least a couple of months now.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Development by Mozilla has been stopped since 2012, which means that Thunderbird has been relying on community support for maintenance and new features, Mozilla still contributing security updates. For details see here: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... Development has been slow since then, but the project is far from dead. I'm on version 42 beta (latest Firefox is 43 I think) and for example they've just includes the Lighting add-on in the base install. Plus all add-ons that interest me are compatible, like Markdown-here.
- edwintorok 11y ago
  I've also seen 'notmuch' recommended as email interface for emacs. Did you try it and could you compare it to mu4e?
  - joonoro 11y ago
    Did not know notmuch had an emacs interface, so no. I thought notmuch was just a sort of backend like offlineimap.
rogeryu 11y ago
I'm using TB since two years, when Apple Mail failed to load after an OSX upgrade. I wanted to move, preparing for moving to Linux later on. I have several family members using TB on Windows. My mother used Eudora for years, I believe seven years after development stopped. It never had a problem. I could copy it to Windows 7, just copying the folder with the program files in it, and it all worked. How big is the risk if TB development stops altogether? What security risks are there when you keep using it? My mother cannot handle changing to something new anymore. So I guess I have to take the risk.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  I migrated from Thunderbird on Linux to OSX by simply moving the profile directory and modifying the new configuration file to point to that directory. Easiest migration I have ever done.
salex89 11y ago
It is a shame... But I am much more irritated, lacking a better term, with the chronicall lacking of a proper mail client for Linux. Thunderbird is the best as far as I used them, but I am not satisfied with the performance, UK and features, especially considering Windows only counterparts.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I still use Thunderbird on a Linux laptop, will continue to do so, but think that this is a good decision. I donate a bit of money to Mozilla occasionally and I would like to see their effort go to working on privacy and Firefox.
akerro 11y ago
>Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. Can we have another alternative for pocket built-in?
meshko 11y ago
That is so [potentially] sad. I hope Thunderbird finds a nice home. Stupid Google, why did it have to kill Mozilla?
vdaniuk 11y ago
I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1 built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising. Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on HN is becoming unbearable.
- grinich 11y ago
  Thanks for the kind works about N1! (I work at Nylas.) Feel free to send us any feedback if you have ideas for how to improve the app. :)
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    N1 is a game changer for desktop clients and I'd love to contribute. What is the best place to send ideas concerning general product strategy? Tech feedbacks goes to github, obviously.
    - grinich 11y ago
      You can just write me directly :) mg@nylas.com
- fl0wenol 11y ago
  Do the web clients you've tried or N1 speak LDAP and support S/MIME with a local smart card reader?
  - tjohns 11y ago
    N1 is still in the early stages of development. It's missing email aliases, for example. LDAP + S/MIME are definitely not implemented yet. That said, the platform seems to have potential. I don't see any reason why these couldn't be implemented as plugins.
    - grinich 11y ago
kriro 11y ago
What are viable alternatives (FLOSS+Mail+Calender+GUI)? I've used Evolution before and it was pretty good, I guess I'm switching back to that (more importantly I will have to switch my parents' computers as well, they have happily migrated to Linux). Claws also seems good at first glance. Have heard KMail and Trojita mentioned before but I'm not sure how much overhead having Qt for them would be (so basically ceteris paribus I'd rather have something GTK as Xubuntu is my distro of choice). I guess Exchange integration would be needed eventually but I could work around that if need be. Linux and OS X support preferred, could live with Linux only.
- lottin 11y ago
  Why do you have switch? If it works for you, you can continue to use Thunderbird.
dspillett 11y ago
Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.
- danellis 11y ago
  What is the point of that?
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    jwz doesn't like HN.
    - cpach 11y ago
      Yup, I’m afraid I forgot about that. https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592 https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592
      - dspillett 11y ago
        I wonder what the history is there... Though to be honest I really don't have time to look into it, if he doesn't want us there then fine I'll add that domain to those in my "causes irritation" blacklist so I don't waste time on it in future.
        cpach 11y ago
        Let's say he's not the most patient person alive. I guess he sees HN as the new Slashdot.
  - drivers99 11y ago
    Yeah it's not even a hotlink. It's just a link.
- bad_user 11y ago
ausjke 11y ago
Sad to hear, Thunderbird has been my major and actually sole email client for a few years, not a Windows user so outlook is out, do I have to use mutt from now on? On Android I use K-9 which works well, it seems for Desktop the web email will be my only choice, not good at all.
- ausjke 11y ago
  anyone used this fork: http://www.fossamail.org/ http://www.fossamail.org/ ? I don't mind paying for Thunderbird, hope someone picks up the development. Firefox is great but there are alternatives, Thunderbird is great and _unique_ (across platform and an overall good product), I somehow feel Thuderbird is of more use to me than Firefox itself.
castell 11y ago
[...] Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client it first developed in 2004 [...] In 2004 Thunderbird spun off the Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, WYSIWYG HTML editor, IRC-chat client), like Firefox. And Mozilla Suite is based itself on Netscape Suite, that AOL donated as open source code and formed the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla was the internal codename of Netscape). The Netscape Suite was a complete rewrite of Netscape Navigator 4. That long rewrite phase and the choosen technology (XUL, XPCOM, etc) contributed to loosing the Browser war agaist IE 5/6. Thunderbird barely changed since 2004. Back then it was a direct competitor to Outlook Express.
- hyc_symas 11y ago
  Anyone got the source to Navigator 4 still? I'd rather use that.
vamur 11y ago
Both Thunderbird and XUL are slow, so good riddance. Hopefully, dropping these and 32bit support will allow Mozilla to concentrate on improving Firefox performance. And add Wayland support in Linux as well.
a3n 11y ago
I dislike every email client I've used. I dislike Tbird the least. If Tbird doesn't survive this transition, I've thought in the past of using something like Mutt, with <something> to display rendered html, and <something else> to compose html mail. And <yet another thing> for calendar access to my fastmail calendar. Any suggestions for any of those things?
oneJob 11y ago
If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that. This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented. If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of whose interest this is in (Mozilla or its users) it is still being horribly communicated (otherwise one might better understand why it's in one's interest) and horribly implemented, to the point which I'm beginning to question whether Mozilla, as an organization, is up to the task of building a better web for its users. Why not more discussion around Pocket, the new tab page, Thunderbird support, etc. Why pop these decisions, fully made, on their user base? And why not, in the case of XUL, incrementally replace features or develop in parallel until a drop-in, validated solution exists. To me, one of two things is going on. Either Mozilla is not acting in the best interest of its users or this is amateur hour. Both scenarios suck.
- mhurron 11y ago
  How is focusing on Firefox not inline with a mission statement of 'building a better web for it's users?'
  - oneJob 11y ago
    It might be. But what about the discussion? Is focusing on a native mail application not inline with their mission statement, given all the privacy issues of late? And your point doesn't address the issue of implementation. Firefox is one initiative out of many initiatives in Mozilla's portfolio. And the web is not the browser. So I, personally, would say no, focusing on a browser to the exclusion of all other aspects of the Internet is not inline with that mission. But, I'm one of many users, and without open dialogue, it's impossible to say whether other Mozilla users agree with me.
    - mhurron 11y ago
      Why do they have a public discussion to justify their actions. If they choose to, fine but I do not see why they have too. > the web is not the browser Actually yes, the web is the browser, or more correctly the browser is your interface to the web. HTTP/HTTPS is the web, everything else is the Internet. Mozilla is focusing on providing a web experience, a SMTP client is not the web experience and they no longer wish to expend resources on it.
stonogo 11y ago
This was inevitable. They never did figure out how to sell ad space or corporate bundles in Thunderbird.
fdik 11y ago
In short: this is not true. We are in discussions with Mozilla how to safe Thunderbird and make it sustainable. There is a commitment from Mozilla to make that happen. Thunderbird will continue being maintained. Volker Birk p≡p foundation http://pep-project.org http://pep-project.org
geff82 11y ago
So a foundation with a 300 million Dollar budget can't support the most widespread free mailing software out there? A software that shares many parts with the Firefox browser? This makes no sense to me. It's ridiculous that they stop this project instead of going full stem forward to make it finally great. They are not that far away to malomg it a viable free alternative to Outlook (and they'd have happy followers)
bovermyer 11y ago
Thunderbird is still a thing people use? That's probably the biggest news to me.
- ionised 11y ago
  What else is there that isn't terrible?
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    I use Airmail. Well worth the price.
- wmt 11y ago
  Instead of what exactly? Eudora? Windows Live Mail?
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    Airmail. Or, if you're able to get into the closed beta, Nylas N1.
- g8oz 11y ago
  I suppose you use webmail supplied by a corporation. With all your old messages available for scanning when they or the government see fit. Some of us are not okay with that.
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    You suppose incorrectly. Leave your assumptions at the door. I use Fastmail as my email host, and Airmail as my client. I have one eye on Nylas N1 as a potential future cross-platform email client.
newscracker 11y ago
Just yesterday I had commented in a donation related thread here that it would be nice to donate to Thunderbird as one of the causes that's important. [1] As a long time Thunderbird user in an Exchange/Outlook environment, I'm disappointed each time I hear news about its priority being pushed further down. The TechCrunch article says, "Apart from the fact that Mozilla had cut off most development support in 2012, Thunderbird has become a somewhat anachronistic product." For any enterprise or business environment where email still rules, calling Thunderbird "anachronistic" sounds misinformed and insulting. Thunderbird may not have the market share of Outlook or the glamor of smartphone based mail apps, but I'm sure those who use Thunderbird are really passionate about what it provides and the extensibility that comes with it. One of the things I don't like about the Mozilla of the past few years is the high amount of effort and time spent on Firefox OS. I don't want to put that down, but Mozilla is trying very hard with very less traction on it and still pushing onward. Mitchell's message sounds like more planning is in the works to separate Thunderbird and probably make it stand on its own. This will take some time to plan and execute, with Thunderbird just languishing in the meantime. There could also be a complete re-write of Thunderbird, which is not really a great idea. I can see both optimistic and pessimistic views on what the future holds. When Mozilla Messaging was announced, I had high hopes for better integration with Exchange calendaring and also improved search. All that went to nothing in 2012. If Thunderbird ends up as a separate entity that I can donate directly to, I'll be one of the first to do so! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432
ultramancool 11y ago
I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a major issue on one occasion. I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.
- rndmind 11y ago
  I second that. It's hard to find a functional and usable mail client. I may switch to claws for personal use, but I am still using thunderbird for work.
- shmerl 11y ago
  KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    How's the support for it on Windows and OS X?
    - lmm 11y ago
      I don't know about support, but my experience is it works fine on Windows.
      - ultramancool 11y ago
        Well, that's what I meant by support. Sorry for not being more clear.
slyrus 11y ago
This is the path to "rustigator"?
deleted 11y ago
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shmerl 11y ago
I switched to KMail around the time when Mozilla announced that they stopped active development of Thunderbird. Lack of any desktop integration in KDE (like new mail icon in notification area) contributed to that.
logn 11y ago
There aren't many serious alternatives to Thunderbird. I think that the project falls squarely within Mozilla's mission statement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ Most of their reasoning about this decision revolves around it being a distraction from Firefox. Maybe they should update the manifesto to put web browsing as goal #1. As it stands, it talks about the Internet, but the WWW is clearly their priority.
makecheck 11y ago
It's funny how Microsoft was once in court over essentially shoving browser components into UI, and now this. I wish that the features of web engines were more compartmentalized. The "convenience" of a Thing That Does Everything will also introduce fragility and bloat (and maybe even security exposures). For example, I would probably love to call functions to lay out some rectangles for me. I know a web engine can do that really well, and I don't even mind passing in CSS strings to describe what I want. The problem is, I don't want "Internet in a box" to come with it; I just want the layout in that case. It would also be a lot easier to identify problems and contribute solutions if there was a way to "only" do X and focus on that part of the engine to fix. It would be awesome to be able to take those kinds of low-level details, and start really going cross-platform with them. Make a library that can finally lay out whatever the hell you want consistently across machines, that can be patched into all existing UI libraries or other tools. Make a portable text rendering and text layout system. Make a portable GL viewer. But don't tell me that each of those things only works if I create an InternetInBoxView. Instead, refactor InternetInBoxView to use those separate parts.
pyabo 11y ago
I thought that it was unmaintained now!
usrusr 11y ago
So many words to say "an email client does not generate search engine traffic"... In this age of abundant js transpilers it's kind of surprising to see XUL not being one of the many valid X for "compile X to JS+CSS", but it kind of makes sense, giving the limited scope of XUL.
bariumbitmap 11y ago
Thunderbird appears to be the only email reader that gets close to supporting mid:// urls. https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-support-cid-and-mid-uris https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-su... It uses the "thunderlink:" protocol to support this. It does require some OS-specific setup. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderlink/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderli... Linking directly to email messages as transparently as linking to webpages is useful, and I wish it were more widespread.
zobzu 11y ago
So people here just give webmails as alternatives... Theres a reason people use thunderbird. Its the only non webmail, non mobile client that has a gui, works on most platforms and doesnt suck too horribly. People using it obviously don't care about webmail alternatives...
INTPenis 11y ago
I'm saddened because the only thing holding me back from using Linux full time at work is the lack of a good calendar and e-mail application. Of course thunderbird is insufficient for me who rely on Microsoft Exchange at work but it could still be a contender to Evolution given the right development focus. Evolution, the number one alternative I know of today, has had shaky EWS support from day one and in Fedora 23 on my personal laptop it's still not fully resolved. Also I find its calendar option quite hideous actually, it tries to mimic Outlook but that's not a good thing imho. The best calendar I've used is Calendar.app on Mac OS. Of course you can't blame anyone but us, the community. The one EWS plugin for Thunderbird is pay-2-play and the one for Evolution is the one having all the issues. So either Microsoft is hard to develop for or demand isn't high enough.
- newscracker 11y ago
  Have you checked out Exchange EWS Provider [1], currently maintained by Ericsson? This has been around for a few years [2], and when the developer could no longer spend time on it, Ericsson took it over. The extension is not perfect, but you can get some stuff done. Another alternative is the DavMail gateway [3], which runs as a separate (Java) program that sits between your Exchange server and Thunderbird. [I haven't used this one for years ever since the Exchange EWS provider became available] [1]: https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar [2]: http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-calendar-and-tasks-add-on-for-thunderbird-lightning/ http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-cale... [3]: http://davmail.sourceforge.net http://davmail.sourceforge.net
  - waz0wski 11y ago
    I'm using [1] against exch2013 without any major issues. Make sure your exchange environment autodiscover is properly configured, and ensure you have IMAP available (for thunderbird mail) and the setup will go smoothly.
tmalsburg2 11y ago
I use Thunderbird's calendar and think that this is good news. Thunderbird has been in a sad state for long time. It is slow, buggy, and behaves unpredictably. I hope this will create the necessary momentum for a new project or at least a new approach to developing Thunderbird further.
tdkl 11y ago
eM Client[1] is an excellent, rather less known client for Windows systems. It supports *Dav out of the box which is rather rare on Windows. [1] http://www.emclient.com/ http://www.emclient.com/
timbit42 11y ago
Would LibreOffice adopt it? Microsoft Office has Outlook.
- executesorder66 11y ago
  I really hope so. The Document Foundation seriously has their shit together. Having them take over would be a major win for open source email clients. Forgot to add: Is there any official way (besides sending an email) of getting them to consider it?
dboreham 11y ago
The suits have been trying to ditch the email client since I worked at Netscape (nearly 20 years). I remember sitting in a meeting with someone asking "What's the email client for our mail server supposed to be -- Outlook??". My hunch is the same thing will happen this time -- it will endure. Perhaps this is a play to get some of the big businesses that depend on having a viable non-Microsoft/works-on-Linux email client to pony up some cash?
SwellJoe 11y ago
When development "stopped" a while back, I tried to switch to alternatives. Evolution is high quality, but doesn't fit the way I want to work...no matter how many notifications I turn off, it always seems to find a way to be annoying and invasive. There are no OSS webmail clients as good as Thunderbird or GMail (even though I work on Usermin, and it is a competent webmail client compared to other OSS options, we just don't have the resources to push it forward enough to match native or something as amazing as GMail or Inbox, especially since it is not our core business). So, I will keep using Thunderbird, and hope that it keeps seeing occasional updates. I assume it will...it's got millions of users. Surely some of them are developers, with itches to scratch.
deleted 11y ago
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Ono-Sendai 11y ago
Bad news if true. Why would a not-for-profit foundation not support core productivity software used by 10M+ people?
OrdaGarb 11y ago
It's a little troubling to see only one mention of PGP in the comments. Thunderbird+Enigmail+GPG makes a highly functional way to send and receive PGP-encrypted mail.
z1mm32m4n 11y ago
I've been meaning to look into Nylas N1 for a while now, maybe now's the right time. I didn't see anything that stood out like a sore thumb when compared with Thinderbird (except for maybe PGP), but it'd be really awesome if it had a snoozing feature like Inbox or Mailbox. [1]: https://www.nylas.com/n1 https://www.nylas.com/n1
- grinich 11y ago
  We're working on that (and more)! You can see our roadmap and vote-up features here: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap
dorfsmay 11y ago
That's sad. I like Firefox and use it a lot, but I need Thunderbird a lot more than I need Firefox. There are other good browsers out there, I don't know any other good email client.
grahamjperrin 11y ago
I'm slowly switching from OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) to PC-BSD. When Thunderbird doesn't work as expected, I might occasionally use Mulberry. http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/ http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/ – neither a maintainer nor official support but still, it's fast and powerful.

444 points by dest 11y ago

That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The best solution imo is to just let the community take over.

seszett 11y ago
> It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. I don't know about Windows, but on Linux... I try every so often to use other clients, but Thunderbird is still the only one I can bear. For some reason there's always something that doesn't work with Gnome or KDE clients, keystore stuff that doesn't let me save my passwords, or seems to but doesn't actually remember them, or some indexation service insisting on taking half my CPU, or... And the desktop-agnostic clients are ugly and lack features. So through all this time, I've both hated Thunderbird and considered it the only usable client. I really wonder which one I'll switch to in the future.
- krisdol 11y ago
  I'd give evolution another shot. I find it to be the only enterprise-ready one
  - creshal 11y ago
    If by "enterprise-ready" you mean "slow, bloated, and byzantine", then yes, it fits that ecosystem perfectly. But despite being a single-threaded, half-XML-half-C cancerous pile of dirty hacks, Thunderbird is still faster and more stable – not to mention more extensible – than Evolution could ever hope to be.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      God, I hope the Unix people abandon C and start using Rust. It's going to raise the quality of open source desktop applications so much. Or, well, it'll at least be the first clear improvement in many decades.
      - feld 11y ago
        Are you so daft to think that the rust compiler is written in something other than C/C++?
        creshal 11y ago
        The original Rust compiler was written in… OCaml. Nowadays it's self-hosting.
        feld 11y ago
        And OCaml is written in C. Also, there's an awful lot of llvm involved in compiler-rt on github. To think you can evade C on a Unix box is very wishful thinking. You can't escape C-generated bytecode in your stack. It's bound to be somewhere.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        krisdol 11y ago
        Seeing as much of the kernel is written in it, of course. Working efficiently with raw memory pointers requires an unsafe language. Even Windows is written in C/C++
        ionised 11y ago
        I don't know much about Rust but the Wikipedia page says the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and that the new compiler is self-hosted and written in the Rust language itself.
        11y ago
    - krisdol 11y ago
      No, by enterprise-ready I mean it works better than others at integration with various Exchange accounts, including calendar scheduling and contact lists.
jvehent 11y ago
> The best solution imo is to just let the community take over. ... which is exactly what is being proposed here, with financial help from the Mozilla Foundation to ease the transition.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  As far as I read in the linked article, nothing has been finalized yet from Mozilla's side.
haddr 11y ago
Geary email client is a really quite nice and fresh alternative recently. Although not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use...
- pmlnr 11y ago
  > not that advanced and mature, but a pleasure to use... No encryption, no CardDav, no Sieve support. Yes, I need plugins for this in Thunderbird, but I can have them if I want to. geary is also hectic on which distribution/release is supported. The user interface is nice though.

coderdude 11y ago

I hope someone picks up the reins. I install TB on every OS I have. I prefer it. I damn near require it for its cross platform consistency. Anything but Google or Microsoft (and I like both of those companies). @bad_user quells my fears.

josephmx 11y ago
Have you tried the browser based Outlook 365? It's actually very good, I prefer it to desktop Outlook (though never really liked Thunderbird)
- coderdude 11y ago
  I haven't tried it but I haven't heard anything bad about it either. Thanks for the lead.

wslh 11y ago

For e-mail Sylpheed was always an alternative: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

buserror 11y ago
I used sylpheed for a long time! But, it is a LITTLE bit looking long in the tooth these days, with the Windows 95 throwback :-) However, it might provide a fallback just in case...
wiz21c 11y ago
I use claws. Very simple, very efficient, very robust (well I just use textual email mostly and in a very one-person way, that is, I've got a few mails a day, mostly from less than ten mailing lists)

bad_user 11y ago

Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version 42 beta and it's looking good. This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.

astrodust 11y ago
What are the compile times on that code-base like? I remember Firefox being so bad it was measured in eons.
crististm 11y ago
You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than 18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors. Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a corporation. Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Not sure what you're implying. Mozilla stopped developing Thunderbird since 2012. I would also be curios in what corporation (singular) is developing Linux.
  - crististm 11y ago
    I'm implying that "open source-ness" is not necessarily _the_ ingredient that will save a massive abandoned project. You need also 'drive' - and good hackers are put of by massive corporate projects. They have better things to do than clean up corporate mess.
    - bad_user 11y ago
      Open source, mostly defined by the right to fork, is a prerequisite for the survival of abandoned projects. You can say that abandoned open-source projects don't necessarily survive, but for proprietary projects abandonment is a guaranteed death sentence. I've also started to resent the word "hacker", because it sounds as some kind of social class made up of special snowflakes. If the project has value and users, then interested programmers will find a way to keep the project going and there are hundreds of projects in the Linux ecosystem that survive because of volunteers or companies scratching an itch. If there isn't interest, then surely the project might as well die. But that's a tautology.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

toisanji 11y ago

I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow. What do you guys think of the closed source product http://postbox-inc.com http://postbox-inc.com built on top of Thunderbird?

pmontra 11y ago
No Linux, nothing to see here for me.
SyneRyder 11y ago
I love Postbox. It's been my primary email client ever since I was forced to switch from Eudora. It even supports Thunderbird plugins with some small tweaks (mostly just recognising the Postbox User Agent). My biggest complaint about Postbox is that it's too cheap. It's only $15... I paid more than that for my Twitter client. Email is mission critical for me, so I'm happy to pay at least $50 (maybe $50/year?) for whatever is the most efficient, powerful & reliable email client. I want to pay that money to a company so they'll keep developing & advancing the program, not abandon it like Mozilla is doing now.
apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
I've been using Postbox since 2012. It's a great client and while I've tried a ton of others (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, AirMail, Sparrow, Dropbox Mailbox, etc), I always come back to PostBox. It's stable, simple, has access to some Thunderbird extensions, and just works like I need it to. My only gripes are that development is inconsistent at best (v4 took far too long to come out, in my opinion) and they seem to focus on features that don't add much value to the client. But overall, it's a great client that I was more than happy to pay for.

floor_ 11y ago

You can't put in emails chained together with a semicolon. So I posted a bug report about address field parsing being broken. I was told that it was working as intended and was completely sandbagged. I don't have too much respect for the dev team right now.

jacquesm 11y ago

Thunderbird has been my email client ever since I used unix as my day-to-day platform and it's a real pity that Mozilla stops maintenance but on the whole it doesn't need that much maintenance. It just works, I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing. Just keep it as it is and I'm perfectly ok with it. If mozilla did the same with FireFox a and would focus on long term stability and bug fixing rather than grafting new parts onto it and re-writing old parts that are working just fine I'd be OK with that too. (The default seems to be that bugs are not fixed before the part of the code base that contains them is replaced by something new which in turn also contains bugs.)

mhb 11y ago
I don't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing The forwarding/replying in plain vs. formatted text is pretty annoying.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Can you point me to the associated bug in bugzilla?
- perlwle 11y ago
  Press shift + reply / forward in thunderbird. Is that what you want?
  - mhb 11y ago
    That is what I use, but now I can't remember/recreate what I didn't like about it.
pmontra 11y ago
Even making sure that a program keeps compiling can be a big effort. Target platforms keep moving, toolchain changes, libraries die and must be replaced, it's not trivial. I hope they find a way to manage all of that because I don't want to use web mail and I don't know of other equivalent clients on Linux.

bshimmin 11y ago

The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc... This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of signing and encrypting emails.

parennoob 11y ago
If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say, "Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird, we're probably going to abandon it". Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...) - they don't exactly show a company flush with cash that is pulling support for a product because they don't like it or something. I like Enigmail though, just as you do, and tried introducing my family to it. Sadly that didn't stick :/
- bshimmin 11y ago
  It's long, it's rambling, it uses phrases like "laser-focussed" (twice). Fine, it's not corporatese at its absolute worst (there isn't a "synergistic" in there), but it's also not going to win any awards for clear communication; it could be every bit as diplomatic whilst also losing about 70% of the words. I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.
  - hyc_symas 11y ago
    This is the real message, to me. Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential. However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is increasingly unstable. So, their stated goal is market dominance for Firefox, period. Nothing else really matters. Clearly they are failing at this goal, so they are focusing their resources on it and discarding anything else.

betteringred 11y ago

They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app. In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey, it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually (like six weeks later) they'll stop supporting those for old Firefox. Initially the HTML Firefox will suck. When you take an app that's been worked on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features (hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will not reintroduce. Why? Because when they were first introduced a decade ago it was a cool idea someone had, and no one knew how popular it would be, so heck, why not implement it. But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important! As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago. They can't just kill XUL for Firefox though, they have to burn down the XUL ecosystem first so they're just releasing a new Firefox, nothing to see here. 1. They try to kill xulrunner as a project separate from Firefox. They try to move everyone to firefox -app. 2. They stop releasing binaries for xulrunner. 3. They deprecate XUL extensions. 4. They distance themselves from Thunderbird. They say it's better for Thunderbird. Yeah right! Thunderbird is built on XUL, it's not going to be rewritten in HTML any time soon, definitely not by volunteers. It's not going to be able to maintain XUL either, and when Mozilla stops supporting XUL for Firefox a few years after deprecating XUL extensions then Thunderbird will be screwed, but hey, it's not our project! We abandoned it years ago! So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given up to have it. But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. Because we already make hundreds of millions of dollars and we do whatever is shiny and new, screw the "community" of existing stuff. We're fighting for an open web! (where you can use Gmail for email)

toyg 11y ago
It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better pig, so here we go. Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is. (this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu or RedHat.)

mverwijs 11y ago

Anyone know how this impacts the e-mail functionality of Seamonkey? (I've actually started using Seamonkey again on a whim. The last couple of weeks. Somehow, browsing feels more snappy with Seamonkey than with Firefox.)

gryph0n 11y ago
What a circle that would be !!! Phoenix (later, again renamed to Firefox) was originally split off from Mozilla/Netscape Navigator since the 'suite' was presumably slow.
- lmm 11y ago
  Seamonkey was faster in a matter of months. If you stop messing with a piece of software, Moore's law soon makes it blazing fast.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
I use SeaMonkey purely for its newsgroup support. It's a lightweight and practical piece of software.
- newscracker 11y ago
  Thunderbird supports newsgroups too and is lighter than SeaMonkey, which is a full suite.
Yetanfou 11y ago
The demise of Thunderbird does not mean anything to Seamonkey, but the deprecation of XUL will make it hard to continue to develop it since the whole user interface is based on XUL. The only viable option would be to pick up maintenance for the XUL-supporting Gecko engine.
- jcranmer 11y ago
  Actually, SeaMonkey largely lives on Thunderbird's maintenance of the mailnews code.

joonoro 11y ago

Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability). If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS guys picked it up?), Mailpile [1] might have a chance to fill that gap. Other than that, there's always Claws Mail [2]. [0] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html [1] https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ [2] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/

jeffdubin 11y ago
Mailpile looks interesting, but the Mac package is unavailable: "Packages are being reworked". That makes me think twice -- and I'm not even a Mac user. Though I'd rather see a pulled release than a dangerous one, it's been like that for at least a couple of months now.
bad_user 11y ago
Development by Mozilla has been stopped since 2012, which means that Thunderbird has been relying on community support for maintenance and new features, Mozilla still contributing security updates. For details see here: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... Development has been slow since then, but the project is far from dead. I'm on version 42 beta (latest Firefox is 43 I think) and for example they've just includes the Lighting add-on in the base install. Plus all add-ons that interest me are compatible, like Markdown-here.
edwintorok 11y ago
I've also seen 'notmuch' recommended as email interface for emacs. Did you try it and could you compare it to mu4e?
- joonoro 11y ago
  Did not know notmuch had an emacs interface, so no. I thought notmuch was just a sort of backend like offlineimap.

rogeryu 11y ago

I'm using TB since two years, when Apple Mail failed to load after an OSX upgrade. I wanted to move, preparing for moving to Linux later on. I have several family members using TB on Windows. My mother used Eudora for years, I believe seven years after development stopped. It never had a problem. I could copy it to Windows 7, just copying the folder with the program files in it, and it all worked. How big is the risk if TB development stops altogether? What security risks are there when you keep using it? My mother cannot handle changing to something new anymore. So I guess I have to take the risk.

72deluxe 11y ago
I migrated from Thunderbird on Linux to OSX by simply moving the profile directory and modifying the new configuration file to point to that directory. Easiest migration I have ever done.

salex89 11y ago

It is a shame... But I am much more irritated, lacking a better term, with the chronicall lacking of a proper mail client for Linux. Thunderbird is the best as far as I used them, but I am not satisfied with the performance, UK and features, especially considering Windows only counterparts.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I still use Thunderbird on a Linux laptop, will continue to do so, but think that this is a good decision. I donate a bit of money to Mozilla occasionally and I would like to see their effort go to working on privacy and Firefox.

akerro 11y ago

>Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. Can we have another alternative for pocket built-in?

meshko 11y ago

That is so [potentially] sad. I hope Thunderbird finds a nice home. Stupid Google, why did it have to kill Mozilla?

vdaniuk 11y ago

I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1 built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising. Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on HN is becoming unbearable.

grinich 11y ago
Thanks for the kind works about N1! (I work at Nylas.) Feel free to send us any feedback if you have ideas for how to improve the app. :)
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  N1 is a game changer for desktop clients and I'd love to contribute. What is the best place to send ideas concerning general product strategy? Tech feedbacks goes to github, obviously.
  - grinich 11y ago
    You can just write me directly :) mg@nylas.com
fl0wenol 11y ago
Do the web clients you've tried or N1 speak LDAP and support S/MIME with a local smart card reader?
- tjohns 11y ago
  N1 is still in the early stages of development. It's missing email aliases, for example. LDAP + S/MIME are definitely not implemented yet. That said, the platform seems to have potential. I don't see any reason why these couldn't be implemented as plugins.
  - grinich 11y ago

kriro 11y ago

What are viable alternatives (FLOSS+Mail+Calender+GUI)? I've used Evolution before and it was pretty good, I guess I'm switching back to that (more importantly I will have to switch my parents' computers as well, they have happily migrated to Linux). Claws also seems good at first glance. Have heard KMail and Trojita mentioned before but I'm not sure how much overhead having Qt for them would be (so basically ceteris paribus I'd rather have something GTK as Xubuntu is my distro of choice). I guess Exchange integration would be needed eventually but I could work around that if need be. Linux and OS X support preferred, could live with Linux only.

lottin 11y ago
Why do you have switch? If it works for you, you can continue to use Thunderbird.

dspillett 11y ago

Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

danellis 11y ago
What is the point of that?
- tedunangst 11y ago
  jwz doesn't like HN.
  - cpach 11y ago
    Yup, I’m afraid I forgot about that. https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592 https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592
    - dspillett 11y ago
      I wonder what the history is there... Though to be honest I really don't have time to look into it, if he doesn't want us there then fine I'll add that domain to those in my "causes irritation" blacklist so I don't waste time on it in future.
      - cpach 11y ago
        Let's say he's not the most patient person alive. I guess he sees HN as the new Slashdot.
- drivers99 11y ago
  Yeah it's not even a hotlink. It's just a link.
bad_user 11y ago

ausjke 11y ago

Sad to hear, Thunderbird has been my major and actually sole email client for a few years, not a Windows user so outlook is out, do I have to use mutt from now on? On Android I use K-9 which works well, it seems for Desktop the web email will be my only choice, not good at all.

ausjke 11y ago
anyone used this fork: http://www.fossamail.org/ http://www.fossamail.org/ ? I don't mind paying for Thunderbird, hope someone picks up the development. Firefox is great but there are alternatives, Thunderbird is great and _unique_ (across platform and an overall good product), I somehow feel Thuderbird is of more use to me than Firefox itself.

castell 11y ago

[...] Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client it first developed in 2004 [...] In 2004 Thunderbird spun off the Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, WYSIWYG HTML editor, IRC-chat client), like Firefox. And Mozilla Suite is based itself on Netscape Suite, that AOL donated as open source code and formed the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla was the internal codename of Netscape). The Netscape Suite was a complete rewrite of Netscape Navigator 4. That long rewrite phase and the choosen technology (XUL, XPCOM, etc) contributed to loosing the Browser war agaist IE 5/6. Thunderbird barely changed since 2004. Back then it was a direct competitor to Outlook Express.

hyc_symas 11y ago
Anyone got the source to Navigator 4 still? I'd rather use that.

vamur 11y ago

Both Thunderbird and XUL are slow, so good riddance. Hopefully, dropping these and 32bit support will allow Mozilla to concentrate on improving Firefox performance. And add Wayland support in Linux as well.

a3n 11y ago

I dislike every email client I've used. I dislike Tbird the least. If Tbird doesn't survive this transition, I've thought in the past of using something like Mutt, with <something> to display rendered html, and <something else> to compose html mail. And <yet another thing> for calendar access to my fastmail calendar. Any suggestions for any of those things?

oneJob 11y ago

If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's the beauty of OSS. This is not that. This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented. If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of whose interest this is in (Mozilla or its users) it is still being horribly communicated (otherwise one might better understand why it's in one's interest) and horribly implemented, to the point which I'm beginning to question whether Mozilla, as an organization, is up to the task of building a better web for its users. Why not more discussion around Pocket, the new tab page, Thunderbird support, etc. Why pop these decisions, fully made, on their user base? And why not, in the case of XUL, incrementally replace features or develop in parallel until a drop-in, validated solution exists. To me, one of two things is going on. Either Mozilla is not acting in the best interest of its users or this is amateur hour. Both scenarios suck.

mhurron 11y ago
How is focusing on Firefox not inline with a mission statement of 'building a better web for it's users?'
- oneJob 11y ago
  It might be. But what about the discussion? Is focusing on a native mail application not inline with their mission statement, given all the privacy issues of late? And your point doesn't address the issue of implementation. Firefox is one initiative out of many initiatives in Mozilla's portfolio. And the web is not the browser. So I, personally, would say no, focusing on a browser to the exclusion of all other aspects of the Internet is not inline with that mission. But, I'm one of many users, and without open dialogue, it's impossible to say whether other Mozilla users agree with me.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    Why do they have a public discussion to justify their actions. If they choose to, fine but I do not see why they have too. > the web is not the browser Actually yes, the web is the browser, or more correctly the browser is your interface to the web. HTTP/HTTPS is the web, everything else is the Internet. Mozilla is focusing on providing a web experience, a SMTP client is not the web experience and they no longer wish to expend resources on it.

stonogo 11y ago

This was inevitable. They never did figure out how to sell ad space or corporate bundles in Thunderbird.

fdik 11y ago

In short: this is not true. We are in discussions with Mozilla how to safe Thunderbird and make it sustainable. There is a commitment from Mozilla to make that happen. Thunderbird will continue being maintained. Volker Birk p≡p foundation http://pep-project.org http://pep-project.org

geff82 11y ago

So a foundation with a 300 million Dollar budget can't support the most widespread free mailing software out there? A software that shares many parts with the Firefox browser? This makes no sense to me. It's ridiculous that they stop this project instead of going full stem forward to make it finally great. They are not that far away to malomg it a viable free alternative to Outlook (and they'd have happy followers)

bovermyer 11y ago

Thunderbird is still a thing people use? That's probably the biggest news to me.

ionised 11y ago
What else is there that isn't terrible?
- bovermyer 11y ago
  I use Airmail. Well worth the price.
wmt 11y ago
Instead of what exactly? Eudora? Windows Live Mail?
- bovermyer 11y ago
  Airmail. Or, if you're able to get into the closed beta, Nylas N1.
g8oz 11y ago
I suppose you use webmail supplied by a corporation. With all your old messages available for scanning when they or the government see fit. Some of us are not okay with that.
- bovermyer 11y ago
  You suppose incorrectly. Leave your assumptions at the door. I use Fastmail as my email host, and Airmail as my client. I have one eye on Nylas N1 as a potential future cross-platform email client.

newscracker 11y ago

Just yesterday I had commented in a donation related thread here that it would be nice to donate to Thunderbird as one of the causes that's important. [1] As a long time Thunderbird user in an Exchange/Outlook environment, I'm disappointed each time I hear news about its priority being pushed further down. The TechCrunch article says, "Apart from the fact that Mozilla had cut off most development support in 2012, Thunderbird has become a somewhat anachronistic product." For any enterprise or business environment where email still rules, calling Thunderbird "anachronistic" sounds misinformed and insulting. Thunderbird may not have the market share of Outlook or the glamor of smartphone based mail apps, but I'm sure those who use Thunderbird are really passionate about what it provides and the extensibility that comes with it. One of the things I don't like about the Mozilla of the past few years is the high amount of effort and time spent on Firefox OS. I don't want to put that down, but Mozilla is trying very hard with very less traction on it and still pushing onward. Mitchell's message sounds like more planning is in the works to separate Thunderbird and probably make it stand on its own. This will take some time to plan and execute, with Thunderbird just languishing in the meantime. There could also be a complete re-write of Thunderbird, which is not really a great idea. I can see both optimistic and pessimistic views on what the future holds. When Mozilla Messaging was announced, I had high hopes for better integration with Exchange calendaring and also improved search. All that went to nothing in 2012. If Thunderbird ends up as a separate entity that I can donate directly to, I'll be one of the first to do so! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432

ultramancool 11y ago

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a major issue on one occasion. I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.

rndmind 11y ago
I second that. It's hard to find a functional and usable mail client. I may switch to claws for personal use, but I am still using thunderbird for work.
shmerl 11y ago
KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  How's the support for it on Windows and OS X?
  - lmm 11y ago
    I don't know about support, but my experience is it works fine on Windows.
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      Well, that's what I meant by support. Sorry for not being more clear.

slyrus 11y ago

This is the path to "rustigator"?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 11y ago

I switched to KMail around the time when Mozilla announced that they stopped active development of Thunderbird. Lack of any desktop integration in KDE (like new mail icon in notification area) contributed to that.

logn 11y ago

There aren't many serious alternatives to Thunderbird. I think that the project falls squarely within Mozilla's mission statement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ Most of their reasoning about this decision revolves around it being a distraction from Firefox. Maybe they should update the manifesto to put web browsing as goal #1. As it stands, it talks about the Internet, but the WWW is clearly their priority.

makecheck 11y ago

It's funny how Microsoft was once in court over essentially shoving browser components into UI, and now this. I wish that the features of web engines were more compartmentalized. The "convenience" of a Thing That Does Everything will also introduce fragility and bloat (and maybe even security exposures). For example, I would probably love to call functions to lay out some rectangles for me. I know a web engine can do that really well, and I don't even mind passing in CSS strings to describe what I want. The problem is, I don't want "Internet in a box" to come with it; I just want the layout in that case. It would also be a lot easier to identify problems and contribute solutions if there was a way to "only" do X and focus on that part of the engine to fix. It would be awesome to be able to take those kinds of low-level details, and start really going cross-platform with them. Make a library that can finally lay out whatever the hell you want consistently across machines, that can be patched into all existing UI libraries or other tools. Make a portable text rendering and text layout system. Make a portable GL viewer. But don't tell me that each of those things only works if I create an InternetInBoxView. Instead, refactor InternetInBoxView to use those separate parts.

pyabo 11y ago

I thought that it was unmaintained now!

usrusr 11y ago

So many words to say "an email client does not generate search engine traffic"... In this age of abundant js transpilers it's kind of surprising to see XUL not being one of the many valid X for "compile X to JS+CSS", but it kind of makes sense, giving the limited scope of XUL.

bariumbitmap 11y ago

Thunderbird appears to be the only email reader that gets close to supporting mid:// urls. https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-support-cid-and-mid-uris https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-su... It uses the "thunderlink:" protocol to support this. It does require some OS-specific setup. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderlink/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderli... Linking directly to email messages as transparently as linking to webpages is useful, and I wish it were more widespread.

zobzu 11y ago

So people here just give webmails as alternatives... Theres a reason people use thunderbird. Its the only non webmail, non mobile client that has a gui, works on most platforms and doesnt suck too horribly. People using it obviously don't care about webmail alternatives...

INTPenis 11y ago

I'm saddened because the only thing holding me back from using Linux full time at work is the lack of a good calendar and e-mail application. Of course thunderbird is insufficient for me who rely on Microsoft Exchange at work but it could still be a contender to Evolution given the right development focus. Evolution, the number one alternative I know of today, has had shaky EWS support from day one and in Fedora 23 on my personal laptop it's still not fully resolved. Also I find its calendar option quite hideous actually, it tries to mimic Outlook but that's not a good thing imho. The best calendar I've used is Calendar.app on Mac OS. Of course you can't blame anyone but us, the community. The one EWS plugin for Thunderbird is pay-2-play and the one for Evolution is the one having all the issues. So either Microsoft is hard to develop for or demand isn't high enough.

newscracker 11y ago
Have you checked out Exchange EWS Provider [1], currently maintained by Ericsson? This has been around for a few years [2], and when the developer could no longer spend time on it, Ericsson took it over. The extension is not perfect, but you can get some stuff done. Another alternative is the DavMail gateway [3], which runs as a separate (Java) program that sits between your Exchange server and Thunderbird. [I haven't used this one for years ever since the Exchange EWS provider became available] [1]: https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar [2]: http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-calendar-and-tasks-add-on-for-thunderbird-lightning/ http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-cale... [3]: http://davmail.sourceforge.net http://davmail.sourceforge.net
- waz0wski 11y ago
  I'm using [1] against exch2013 without any major issues. Make sure your exchange environment autodiscover is properly configured, and ensure you have IMAP available (for thunderbird mail) and the setup will go smoothly.

tmalsburg2 11y ago

I use Thunderbird's calendar and think that this is good news. Thunderbird has been in a sad state for long time. It is slow, buggy, and behaves unpredictably. I hope this will create the necessary momentum for a new project or at least a new approach to developing Thunderbird further.

tdkl 11y ago

eM Client[1] is an excellent, rather less known client for Windows systems. It supports *Dav out of the box which is rather rare on Windows. [1] http://www.emclient.com/ http://www.emclient.com/

timbit42 11y ago

Would LibreOffice adopt it? Microsoft Office has Outlook.

executesorder66 11y ago
I really hope so. The Document Foundation seriously has their shit together. Having them take over would be a major win for open source email clients. Forgot to add: Is there any official way (besides sending an email) of getting them to consider it?

dboreham 11y ago

The suits have been trying to ditch the email client since I worked at Netscape (nearly 20 years). I remember sitting in a meeting with someone asking "What's the email client for our mail server supposed to be -- Outlook??". My hunch is the same thing will happen this time -- it will endure. Perhaps this is a play to get some of the big businesses that depend on having a viable non-Microsoft/works-on-Linux email client to pony up some cash?

SwellJoe 11y ago

When development "stopped" a while back, I tried to switch to alternatives. Evolution is high quality, but doesn't fit the way I want to work...no matter how many notifications I turn off, it always seems to find a way to be annoying and invasive. There are no OSS webmail clients as good as Thunderbird or GMail (even though I work on Usermin, and it is a competent webmail client compared to other OSS options, we just don't have the resources to push it forward enough to match native or something as amazing as GMail or Inbox, especially since it is not our core business). So, I will keep using Thunderbird, and hope that it keeps seeing occasional updates. I assume it will...it's got millions of users. Surely some of them are developers, with itches to scratch.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Ono-Sendai 11y ago

Bad news if true. Why would a not-for-profit foundation not support core productivity software used by 10M+ people?

OrdaGarb 11y ago

It's a little troubling to see only one mention of PGP in the comments. Thunderbird+Enigmail+GPG makes a highly functional way to send and receive PGP-encrypted mail.

z1mm32m4n 11y ago

I've been meaning to look into Nylas N1 for a while now, maybe now's the right time. I didn't see anything that stood out like a sore thumb when compared with Thinderbird (except for maybe PGP), but it'd be really awesome if it had a snoozing feature like Inbox or Mailbox. [1]: https://www.nylas.com/n1 https://www.nylas.com/n1

grinich 11y ago
We're working on that (and more)! You can see our roadmap and vote-up features here: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap

dorfsmay 11y ago

That's sad. I like Firefox and use it a lot, but I need Thunderbird a lot more than I need Firefox. There are other good browsers out there, I don't know any other good email client.

grahamjperrin 11y ago

I'm slowly switching from OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) to PC-BSD. When Thunderbird doesn't work as expected, I might occasionally use Mulberry. http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/ http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/ – neither a maintainer nor official support but still, it's fast and powerful.