5 ms·
I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I
by bhauer 9y ago
I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help resuscitate and modernize email.
Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols. And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla expand their email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made user friendly).
- tajen 9y agoEspecially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).
- wutbrodo 9y ago> Thunderbird is the last way to download emails Google Takeout supports one-click exporting of emails to an open format; you just need to make sure to actually do it if you're interested.
- graton 9y agoYou can archive your email by using something like this: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault
- imglorp 9y agoFetchmail? https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail
- talideon 9y agoIf you're looking for something like fetchmail, I find fdm to be superior in just about every way: https://github.com/nicm/fdm https://github.com/nicm/fdm
- pyre 9y agoBoth Google and fastmail support IMAP (and IIRC POPv3). There are a great _many_ clients (and backup scripts) that support these protocols. In light of this, how is Thunderbird the last way to download emails?
- confounded 9y agoDesktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this. I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients. I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them. Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.
- izacus 9y agoWell good thing your personal experience translates to all other 25 million people using Thunderbird.
- confounded 9y agoWe don't have data, but Mozilla probably do. In lieu we can only guess based on our experiences.
- bhauer 9y agoI don't want to discount your experience and preferences. I hear and understand that you are using desktop email less frequently. I use desktop email extensively, and I suspect others do as well. I do not know where Mozilla sourced the metric of "25 million users," but let's assume it is within the right order of magnitude. Even if that number is projected to fall, it's sufficient to warrant significant resource investment. I'd argue, as I did above, that the mission statement of Mozilla aligns well with email, so from my perspective a healthy full-time development team seems reasonable for this product category. I don't want Mozilla ceding desktop email as it did desktop browsing; and I especially don't want Mozilla by way of inaction helping cede email generally to centralized alternatives. Your concern about desktop clients is an echo of Mozilla's challenge with web browsers—namely, they can't achieve a solid foothold on mobile because mobile is (currently) a walled garden. Until that is sorted out, Mozilla should redouble effort in the desktop space, where it is strongest. But for whatever it's worth, having not yet seen something like PAO [1] from Microsoft, I would love to see Mozilla move in that direction. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
- epicide 9y agoMost people use personal email for newsletters and when they forgot their password. In the professional world, you either use some form of webmail or Outlook.