13 ms·

Thunderbird’s Future Home

298 points by buovjaga 9y ago

finnjohnsen2 9y ago
I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  I also like that Thunderbird exists, I don't use it, but my wife does. That said, if you want a web-hosted client for standard email, why not give self-hosting RainLoop a try?
  - brightball 9y ago
    After reading about rainloop I could see wanting to run it locally, but as soon as you put it on a VM somewhere you're create a very public access point for all of your email accounts if that server gets compromised aren't you? Seems like creating a weak link on purpose.
    - E6300 9y ago
      It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.
      - singlow 9y ago
        I don't think that's true. A home computer can be firewalled with no incoming connections allowed. Your VM in the cloud has potential attack vectors through your own control interfaces (http/ssh/pop/imap) as well as the hosting control panel. In addition it may be listening for incoming smtp. I might trust myself to configure all of those securely but I'm not sure.
        E6300 9y ago
        You don't need to put it in the cloud. Just run it from inside your local network. If you want to access it from outside, you can setup a VPN.
    - yhager 9y ago
      I don't know specifically about RainLoop, but I usually put services like that behind a BasicAuth on the web server. It's a simple but effective way to protect myself from PHP/application vulnerabilities - at a minor annoyance to the users (authenticating twice, every once in a while).
- karussell 9y ago
  These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy? 'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not implying here that Thunderbird is worse than gmail ;) Furthermore 'spying' should not have the personal touch (only). Instead companies should take this issue really serious to reduce the possibilities of econmic spying. I know companies fighting hard against Google with their products, having strict NDAs but then yes, they use non-encrypted gmail accounts for everything. Thunderbird is important like all of these alternatives (be it open source or not like DuckDuckGo) to reduce influence of monopolies. As monopolies are bad for users&customers. Always. BTW: you can donate here: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
  - finnjohnsen2 9y ago
    Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN. But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I quit gmail due to the spying in 2013. Running my own e-mail server has been a bit troublesome. The big providers don't often like to accept e-mail from small personal servers, even if you have the correct SPF, reverse-dns, DKIM and DMARC records: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-... Then again, towards the end of my time with Gmail, I'd still have friends tell me mail sent from my gmail address ended up in spam. So maybe e-mail is just shit now.
stinkytaco 9y ago
I see this: >But there are still pain points – build/release, localization, and divergent plans with respect to add-ons, to name a few. These are pain points for both Thunderbird and Firefox, and we obviously want them resolved. However, the Council feels these pain points would not be addressed by moving to TDF or SFC. and then this > We have come to the conclusion that a move to a non-Mozilla organization will be a major distraction to addressing technical issues and building a strong Thunderbird team. Also, while we hope to be independent from Gecko in the long term, it is in Thunderbird’s interest to remain as close to Mozilla as possible to in the hope that it gives use better access to people who can help us plan for and sort through Gecko-driven incompatibilities. So I'm not sure I fully understand their direction. Are they simply less focused on solving those issues right now? I use Thunderbird but don't really have a horse in the race, I get what I need out of it and I support them, I'm just curious.
mariusmg 9y ago
So for the moment, at least, Thunderbird stays with Mozilla. That's good.
Vinnl 9y ago
tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC). Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox
  - iMerNibor 9y ago
    I assumed they already were since it does offer you to create one in-client (gandi.net for me currently)
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    The short answer: not really. About a decade ago, Mozilla decided that Thunderbird should be making a bigger effort to pay for its own funding. The two business opportunities that were implemented were paid email accounts (driven by a survey that found that a substantial portion of new users expected they were getting an email address when they downloaded Thunderbird), and paid support for the large-attachment uploads. Some of the companies involved have since withdrawn the contracts. In any case, the money being involved (I'm told) isn't stellar--on the order of $10s of K per annum in total.
frik 9y ago
A Bright Future The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies Mozilla dumps XUL tech from gecko left and right, removed proper "classic" mod support from Firefox... how is this a bright future. Thunderbird as a big XUL app is stuck with an soon to be not supported old gecko. And how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable? Replication of the dated UI with HTML5 will be an even bigger clusterfxxk. We need a proper open source offline client. And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail. Wasn't there a HTML5 based email client in FirefoxOS. Start with that code and set up a new Mozilla foundation funded offline email client, and keep security support for Thunderbird until the new email app is ready.
- tangue 9y ago
  The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".
  - zlynx 9y ago
    Well it won't seduce me. Who wants an email client that uses 600 MB RAM just to open and that eats 100% CPU to animate your email folders?
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      To be clear, Thunderbird is currently implemented in XUL and JS. Moving to HTML and JS is not going to significantly change its performance characteristics, mostly. There are some details that will need to be done right, like needing to create a good HTML replacement for <xul:tree>, of course.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    There comes a time where good sense means you have to kiss these old projects goodbye. It makes sense for Thunderbird to try to move to a platform that users actually want to use. Thunderbird is in the state it's in because very few people still value a "fat" mail client.
echodevnull 9y ago
Here's a proposal on how the move to a new Thunderbird based on web technologies could be handled: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5Wy0 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5...
Chirael 9y ago
Day to day I use my email provider's regular web interface but I use Thunderbird every few months when I need to do a massive email cleanup - there is no other tool I'd rather use and it's indispensable to me for that purpose. Also the article states, "In many ways, there is more need for independent and secure email than ever" and I agree 100%. Thank you to everyone who works on this project!
- Chirael 9y ago
  Also for travel purposes, being able to "do" email offline with Thunderbird is very nice as well.
clishem 9y ago
> A Bright Future > The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies
- jerf 9y ago
  While I understand what you're getting, bear in mind that in the context of a discussion about Thunderbird specifically and not just in general that Thunderbird is currently best described as being built on "A now-very-deprecated vaguely web-esque technology stack with no future". Moving to web technologies is a step forward even if you don't personally like them much. (And I'm at least sympathetic to that viewpoint.)
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services: accessible from nearly any device, access to your data with minimal complication wherever you happen to sign in from, and a lightweight, instant-response, zero-install interaction model. If we value "native clients", we need to address the things that make web clients more convenient.
  - moosingin3space 9y ago
    My biggest frustration whenever an anti-web/anti-Electron comment is posted on Hacker News summarized.
  - u801e 9y ago
    > What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services I think the closest thing we have is the remote desktop protocol. I have used Thunderbird on my desktop via the rdp client I have installed on my phone (though with some degree of difficulty due to the interface and input limitations). I think something like that could work if rdp clients provided a better interface for clients not using a desktop computer.
edpichler 9y ago
I like to read about these open source organizations apparently very well administrated. It's a very interesting business model to me.
- Erik816 9y ago
  I'm not sure this is a textbook example of open source leading to a well administrated organization. I realize these decisions are complex, but the people who work on Thunderbird have been talking about the inevitability of this move for years at this point. Those are years that a more nimble (and profit motivated) organization could have been spent actually moving to a new technology instead of endlessly debating what to do.
nickcw 9y ago
I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job. I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent. I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now. In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!
- vog 9y ago
  > I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent. Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway. Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file: text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.
  - Twirrim 9y ago
    It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support. I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.
    - lftl 9y ago
      It's been a long since I used mutt regularly, but I recall that I had my mailcap setup to pipe the HTML straight to FF when I couldn't read the text version. It worked pretty well as long as images weren't embedded in the email.
elipsey 9y ago
My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons: - it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place - it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain. Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
systematical 9y ago
I use thunderbird because my work uses gmail. I guess (maybe) I could add the secondary work gmail account to my regular gmail. Not sure, the other alternative is to keep a separate incognito window or keep work email open in a separate browser. I just use Thunderbird instead.
- Macha 9y ago
  You can log into multiple Google accounts at the same time. You then get a user switcher in the top left, which as far as I know does not invalidate existing sessions.
pkaler 9y ago
I've gone from using Sparrow to Mailbox and now to Spark on macOS and iOS. Every time a good email client comes around, someones seems to kill it.
phantom_oracle 9y ago
I hope Thunderbird lives on for a long time, but in the FOSS world, one should never depend on a single piece of software for their day-to-day functionality, thus here are some alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?license=opensource&platform=linux https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?lice... You must also keep in mind that desktop mail-clients make the (otherwise) complicated PGP-encryption of emails a bit more user-friendly.
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  I keep forgetting that I intend to give Geary a try.
  - jdboyd 9y ago
    Geary hasn't been very reliable for me and I have been keeping up to date with the latest versions. I mostly just use it for retrieving attachments and stick to mutt and k9mail the rest of the time. I think it is sad than an android mail program works more reliably and faster than most established desktop mail clients.
newscracker 9y ago
Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years. Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird already provides today. Plus the extensions system needs to be revamped as well (similar to what's happening on the Firefox side with XUL ones going out). Getting Exchange calendaring done is also not a priority because of the complexity and the effort needed. So it looks like we will get a better maintainable product after some years. I'm not sure if that's going to appeal to many people to donate. I'm happy with Thunderbird and some extensions that I use regularly, with the only exception being calendaring support for Exchange being very poor and unreliable (even with the Exchange EWS Provider extension or with external solutions like DavMail). Since I don't like taking risks with email client alpha or beta releases because of the fear of data loss (and with huge mailboxes, even detecting data loss would be a chore), I'll just stick with the current version and hope that the new revamped one comes in a stable form sooner (of course, I will donate periodically). I'm excited and afraid!
- noinsight 9y ago
  Are you referring to this addon? https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar It seems to be dead currently, seems it stopped working in the latest Thunderbird release and the author is unresponsive.
- dotancohen 9y ago
  That fully rewritten Thunderbird will apparently be based on Electron, the Javascript GUI. The CPU-thrashing, memory hungry, battery killer Electron. I do not want an email client, or any other software that is meant to run constantly in the background, to be written in Election.
  - buovjaga 9y ago
    Why are you spreading this information, when you know no such thing has been decided?
panamafrank 9y ago
Have mozilla considered Tracy Island?
JetSpiegel 9y ago
Frankly, I think it would be easier to write a GUI over mutt than to rewrite Thunderbird. I was a heavy user of Thunderbird, but after migrating to mutt, it's basically obsolete. The only pain point is really HTML, but converting it to text is Good Enough most of the time. Outlook-produced emails still look like crap, but I can click a button and open it on Firefox. Mutt is not only alive and kicking, there's the new NeoMutt project that is the NeoVim for Mutt. We have initial Lua scripting capabilities now. http://neomutt.org/ http://neomutt.org/
tracker1 9y ago
In my mind, there are a handful of things that are essential to getting Thunderbird back to a usable state... some of these could be plugins... First, the exchange/calendar integration options clearly suck... establishing a clear calendar interface as a built-in with extensible points for plugins for authentication/sync of calendars would be a good start. Second, likewise with calendar auth/sync would be an extensible interface for folder sync and authentication, so that a cleaner integration for common providers based on an underlying IMAP can be used... this way the conventional "junk, spam, inbox, sent" folders could be presented the correct way as well as the underlying storage for a given provider. Also, along with calendar/email would be more extension points for scheduling, contacts, etc... As it stands, even if there were different plugins for a google calendar and an exchange/o365 calendar, contacts, etc... if the underlying pieces can be shared, it would be a better user experience. Moreover would be some serious reconsideration regarding the UI/UX... I'm a big fan of material design, but some variation on that coming a lot closer to a Gmail app for desktop would be a really nice start... but getting a calendar/task/contacts integration points and primitives for extension would go a long way here. Having the core UI going the same direction as Servo, and having most of the UI/Extensions being HTML/JS based would be nice. Likewise, NPM compatibility for extensions' modules would be nice as well.
- Psilidae 9y ago
  Regarding NPM compatibility: I'd be worried about potential security issues with something like npm. I recognize that one must already put a lot of trust on developers when using extensions, but I'd worry NPM would make it a lot easier for a nefarious developer to add malicious code to a really deeply buried dependency.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    Maybe it's just a matter of using node/npm tooling to develop/package an extension... using a bundler. Of course, at this point, it might be worth re-doing the whole thing using electron as a base.. the more I use VS Code, the more inclined I am to feel that it may be good enough, and if it's a react app, maybe target react-native for phone/tablet platforms, and electron for desktop.
orionblastar 9y ago
I hope The Document Foundation gets it to add to Lubreoffice to be a foss alternative to Outlook. I get thousands of emails a day. I have several email accounts as I switch to a new one because the old one got a lot of spam. I email my friends and family my new email but they keep writing to my old emails. Message filter helps me sort stuff into different folders to find important emails and attachments.

298 points by buovjaga 9y ago

I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).

NoGravitas 9y ago
I also like that Thunderbird exists, I don't use it, but my wife does. That said, if you want a web-hosted client for standard email, why not give self-hosting RainLoop a try?
- brightball 9y ago
  After reading about rainloop I could see wanting to run it locally, but as soon as you put it on a VM somewhere you're create a very public access point for all of your email accounts if that server gets compromised aren't you? Seems like creating a weak link on purpose.
  - E6300 9y ago
    It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.
    - singlow 9y ago
      I don't think that's true. A home computer can be firewalled with no incoming connections allowed. Your VM in the cloud has potential attack vectors through your own control interfaces (http/ssh/pop/imap) as well as the hosting control panel. In addition it may be listening for incoming smtp. I might trust myself to configure all of those securely but I'm not sure.
      - E6300 9y ago
        You don't need to put it in the cloud. Just run it from inside your local network. If you want to access it from outside, you can setup a VPN.
  - yhager 9y ago
    I don't know specifically about RainLoop, but I usually put services like that behind a BasicAuth on the web server. It's a simple but effective way to protect myself from PHP/application vulnerabilities - at a minor annoyance to the users (authenticating twice, every once in a while).
karussell 9y ago
These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy? 'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not implying here that Thunderbird is worse than gmail ;) Furthermore 'spying' should not have the personal touch (only). Instead companies should take this issue really serious to reduce the possibilities of econmic spying. I know companies fighting hard against Google with their products, having strict NDAs but then yes, they use non-encrypted gmail accounts for everything. Thunderbird is important like all of these alternatives (be it open source or not like DuckDuckGo) to reduce influence of monopolies. As monopolies are bad for users&customers. Always. BTW: you can donate here: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
- finnjohnsen2 9y ago
  Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN. But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.
djsumdog 9y ago
I quit gmail due to the spying in 2013. Running my own e-mail server has been a bit troublesome. The big providers don't often like to accept e-mail from small personal servers, even if you have the correct SPF, reverse-dns, DKIM and DMARC records: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-... Then again, towards the end of my time with Gmail, I'd still have friends tell me mail sent from my gmail address ended up in spam. So maybe e-mail is just shit now.

stinkytaco 9y ago

I see this: >But there are still pain points – build/release, localization, and divergent plans with respect to add-ons, to name a few. These are pain points for both Thunderbird and Firefox, and we obviously want them resolved. However, the Council feels these pain points would not be addressed by moving to TDF or SFC. and then this > We have come to the conclusion that a move to a non-Mozilla organization will be a major distraction to addressing technical issues and building a strong Thunderbird team. Also, while we hope to be independent from Gecko in the long term, it is in Thunderbird’s interest to remain as close to Mozilla as possible to in the hope that it gives use better access to people who can help us plan for and sort through Gecko-driven incompatibilities. So I'm not sure I fully understand their direction. Are they simply less focused on solving those issues right now? I use Thunderbird but don't really have a horse in the race, I get what I need out of it and I support them, I'm just curious.

mariusmg 9y ago

So for the moment, at least, Thunderbird stays with Mozilla. That's good.

Vinnl 9y ago

tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC). Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.

mrweasel 9y ago
I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox
- iMerNibor 9y ago
  I assumed they already were since it does offer you to create one in-client (gandi.net for me currently)
- jcranmer 9y ago
  The short answer: not really. About a decade ago, Mozilla decided that Thunderbird should be making a bigger effort to pay for its own funding. The two business opportunities that were implemented were paid email accounts (driven by a survey that found that a substantial portion of new users expected they were getting an email address when they downloaded Thunderbird), and paid support for the large-attachment uploads. Some of the companies involved have since withdrawn the contracts. In any case, the money being involved (I'm told) isn't stellar--on the order of $10s of K per annum in total.

frik 9y ago

A Bright Future The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies Mozilla dumps XUL tech from gecko left and right, removed proper "classic" mod support from Firefox... how is this a bright future. Thunderbird as a big XUL app is stuck with an soon to be not supported old gecko. And how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable? Replication of the dated UI with HTML5 will be an even bigger clusterfxxk. We need a proper open source offline client. And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail. Wasn't there a HTML5 based email client in FirefoxOS. Start with that code and set up a new Mozilla foundation funded offline email client, and keep security support for Thunderbird until the new email app is ready.

tangue 9y ago
The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".
- zlynx 9y ago
  Well it won't seduce me. Who wants an email client that uses 600 MB RAM just to open and that eats 100% CPU to animate your email folders?
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    To be clear, Thunderbird is currently implemented in XUL and JS. Moving to HTML and JS is not going to significantly change its performance characteristics, mostly. There are some details that will need to be done right, like needing to create a good HTML replacement for <xul:tree>, of course.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  There comes a time where good sense means you have to kiss these old projects goodbye. It makes sense for Thunderbird to try to move to a platform that users actually want to use. Thunderbird is in the state it's in because very few people still value a "fat" mail client.

echodevnull 9y ago

Here's a proposal on how the move to a new Thunderbird based on web technologies could be handled: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5Wy0 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5...

Chirael 9y ago

Day to day I use my email provider's regular web interface but I use Thunderbird every few months when I need to do a massive email cleanup - there is no other tool I'd rather use and it's indispensable to me for that purpose. Also the article states, "In many ways, there is more need for independent and secure email than ever" and I agree 100%. Thank you to everyone who works on this project!

Chirael 9y ago
Also for travel purposes, being able to "do" email offline with Thunderbird is very nice as well.

clishem 9y ago

> A Bright Future > The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies

jerf 9y ago
While I understand what you're getting, bear in mind that in the context of a discussion about Thunderbird specifically and not just in general that Thunderbird is currently best described as being built on "A now-very-deprecated vaguely web-esque technology stack with no future". Moving to web technologies is a step forward even if you don't personally like them much. (And I'm at least sympathetic to that viewpoint.)
cookiecaper 9y ago
What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services: accessible from nearly any device, access to your data with minimal complication wherever you happen to sign in from, and a lightweight, instant-response, zero-install interaction model. If we value "native clients", we need to address the things that make web clients more convenient.
- moosingin3space 9y ago
  My biggest frustration whenever an anti-web/anti-Electron comment is posted on Hacker News summarized.
- u801e 9y ago
  > What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services I think the closest thing we have is the remote desktop protocol. I have used Thunderbird on my desktop via the rdp client I have installed on my phone (though with some degree of difficulty due to the interface and input limitations). I think something like that could work if rdp clients provided a better interface for clients not using a desktop computer.

edpichler 9y ago

I like to read about these open source organizations apparently very well administrated. It's a very interesting business model to me.

Erik816 9y ago
I'm not sure this is a textbook example of open source leading to a well administrated organization. I realize these decisions are complex, but the people who work on Thunderbird have been talking about the inevitability of this move for years at this point. Those are years that a more nimble (and profit motivated) organization could have been spent actually moving to a new technology instead of endlessly debating what to do.

nickcw 9y ago

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job. I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent. I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now. In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!

vog 9y ago
> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent. Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway. Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file: text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support. I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.
  - lftl 9y ago
    It's been a long since I used mutt regularly, but I recall that I had my mailcap setup to pipe the HTML straight to FF when I couldn't read the text version. It worked pretty well as long as images weren't embedded in the email.

elipsey 9y ago

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?" I think that was almost 10 years ago.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons: - it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place - it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain. Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago

systematical 9y ago

I use thunderbird because my work uses gmail. I guess (maybe) I could add the secondary work gmail account to my regular gmail. Not sure, the other alternative is to keep a separate incognito window or keep work email open in a separate browser. I just use Thunderbird instead.

Macha 9y ago
You can log into multiple Google accounts at the same time. You then get a user switcher in the top left, which as far as I know does not invalidate existing sessions.

pkaler 9y ago

I've gone from using Sparrow to Mailbox and now to Spark on macOS and iOS. Every time a good email client comes around, someones seems to kill it.

phantom_oracle 9y ago

I hope Thunderbird lives on for a long time, but in the FOSS world, one should never depend on a single piece of software for their day-to-day functionality, thus here are some alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?license=opensource&platform=linux https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?lice... You must also keep in mind that desktop mail-clients make the (otherwise) complicated PGP-encryption of emails a bit more user-friendly.

NoGravitas 9y ago
I keep forgetting that I intend to give Geary a try.
- jdboyd 9y ago
  Geary hasn't been very reliable for me and I have been keeping up to date with the latest versions. I mostly just use it for retrieving attachments and stick to mutt and k9mail the rest of the time. I think it is sad than an android mail program works more reliably and faster than most established desktop mail clients.

newscracker 9y ago

Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years. Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird already provides today. Plus the extensions system needs to be revamped as well (similar to what's happening on the Firefox side with XUL ones going out). Getting Exchange calendaring done is also not a priority because of the complexity and the effort needed. So it looks like we will get a better maintainable product after some years. I'm not sure if that's going to appeal to many people to donate. I'm happy with Thunderbird and some extensions that I use regularly, with the only exception being calendaring support for Exchange being very poor and unreliable (even with the Exchange EWS Provider extension or with external solutions like DavMail). Since I don't like taking risks with email client alpha or beta releases because of the fear of data loss (and with huge mailboxes, even detecting data loss would be a chore), I'll just stick with the current version and hope that the new revamped one comes in a stable form sooner (of course, I will donate periodically). I'm excited and afraid!

noinsight 9y ago
Are you referring to this addon? https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar It seems to be dead currently, seems it stopped working in the latest Thunderbird release and the author is unresponsive.
dotancohen 9y ago
That fully rewritten Thunderbird will apparently be based on Electron, the Javascript GUI. The CPU-thrashing, memory hungry, battery killer Electron. I do not want an email client, or any other software that is meant to run constantly in the background, to be written in Election.
- buovjaga 9y ago
  Why are you spreading this information, when you know no such thing has been decided?

panamafrank 9y ago

Have mozilla considered Tracy Island?

JetSpiegel 9y ago

Frankly, I think it would be easier to write a GUI over mutt than to rewrite Thunderbird. I was a heavy user of Thunderbird, but after migrating to mutt, it's basically obsolete. The only pain point is really HTML, but converting it to text is Good Enough most of the time. Outlook-produced emails still look like crap, but I can click a button and open it on Firefox. Mutt is not only alive and kicking, there's the new NeoMutt project that is the NeoVim for Mutt. We have initial Lua scripting capabilities now. http://neomutt.org/ http://neomutt.org/

tracker1 9y ago

In my mind, there are a handful of things that are essential to getting Thunderbird back to a usable state... some of these could be plugins... First, the exchange/calendar integration options clearly suck... establishing a clear calendar interface as a built-in with extensible points for plugins for authentication/sync of calendars would be a good start. Second, likewise with calendar auth/sync would be an extensible interface for folder sync and authentication, so that a cleaner integration for common providers based on an underlying IMAP can be used... this way the conventional "junk, spam, inbox, sent" folders could be presented the correct way as well as the underlying storage for a given provider. Also, along with calendar/email would be more extension points for scheduling, contacts, etc... As it stands, even if there were different plugins for a google calendar and an exchange/o365 calendar, contacts, etc... if the underlying pieces can be shared, it would be a better user experience. Moreover would be some serious reconsideration regarding the UI/UX... I'm a big fan of material design, but some variation on that coming a lot closer to a Gmail app for desktop would be a really nice start... but getting a calendar/task/contacts integration points and primitives for extension would go a long way here. Having the core UI going the same direction as Servo, and having most of the UI/Extensions being HTML/JS based would be nice. Likewise, NPM compatibility for extensions' modules would be nice as well.

Psilidae 9y ago
Regarding NPM compatibility: I'd be worried about potential security issues with something like npm. I recognize that one must already put a lot of trust on developers when using extensions, but I'd worry NPM would make it a lot easier for a nefarious developer to add malicious code to a really deeply buried dependency.
- tracker1 9y ago
  Maybe it's just a matter of using node/npm tooling to develop/package an extension... using a bundler. Of course, at this point, it might be worth re-doing the whole thing using electron as a base.. the more I use VS Code, the more inclined I am to feel that it may be good enough, and if it's a react app, maybe target react-native for phone/tablet platforms, and electron for desktop.

orionblastar 9y ago

I hope The Document Foundation gets it to add to Lubreoffice to be a foss alternative to Outlook. I get thousands of emails a day. I have several email accounts as I switch to a new one because the old one got a lot of spam. I email my friends and family my new email but they keep writing to my old emails. Message filter helps me sort stuff into different folders to find important emails and attachments.