15 ms·

Thunderbird in 2019

341 points by richardboegli 8y ago

halfastack 8y ago
Thunderbird is, hands down, my most used desktop app, if we're not counting IDEs and editors. Definitely would recommend; Thunderbird is awesome.
- neilsimp1 8y ago
  Honestly, I thought I liked Outlook on Windows until I gave Thunderbird a try. It's just so much faster.
- kgwxd 8y ago
  Not counting browsers?
  - timbit42 8y ago
    Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.
    - kgwxd 8y ago
      Reference; research; testing and debugging web sites in the 5 major desktop browsers; communication and data entry apps required for work that have a horrible desktop client, or no desktop client at all; etc. There's a lot of useful, work related things browsers provide access to.
wongarsu 8y ago
Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to anyone unless they need PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).
warpech 8y ago
Thanks for this great news for people hungry for good desktop alternatives for the abundant webmails. Please spend part of the effort on Lightning (the calendar add-on).
hyper_reality 8y ago
It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019, is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I hope this will get fixed soon.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Lol, Thunderbird seemingly has plenty of major loss-of-data bugs (I lost all my archives recently; synced up to the server -- that bug seems to be several years old (but rare)). I'd almost guarantee that your tab-scroll-position bug is fixed first. It seems to be the way of things. Thunderbird seems incredibly janky to me (unstable and easy to break, rough around the edges). Maybe my experience is rare ... would love to see it become solid and fast.
  - graeme 8y ago
    You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and restored?
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Well I had a backup of sorts, domestic environment, but did lose data (yes I shouldn't have trusted it). Still haven't managed to debug so can't use Thunderbird properly yet; changing app is a major upheaval after a decade or more [not quite continuous use, tried Kmail, Opera, and a few others like Sylpheed, Mutt(!), in the interim -- after Pine, proprietary apps TB was my first desktop MUA]. So, I need to audition new MUAs (family friendly), then recover what I can.
      - Fnoord 8y ago
        Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS. [1] https://getmailspring.com https://getmailspring.com
        shock 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
StevePerkins 8y ago
The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email client option out there. But geeze... what a muddled mess of messaging and pivots from this organization.
- RealDinosaur 8y ago
  The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd probably help out. Edit: Jeeze! You guys sure hate Electron. Just because a tool is misused so often, doesn't mean it's a bad tool.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I don't get it, why can't anything change? In fact, the platform in which Thunderbird runs - XULRunner - is the equivalent of Electron for the Gecko engine, and a bunch of different applications have been done with it.
  - bertman 8y ago
    > What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app Now this is something you don't read everyday on Hacker News...
    - RealDinosaur 8y ago
      With such downvotes, I start to think electron hate is a cult.
nzb 8y ago
Pfff, when I saw "Thunderbird in 2019 (blog.mozilla.org)" in the list of news I thought they were going to add ads to it like they did with Firefox. :)
- Jonnax 8y ago
  Why is this dumb comment on every Mozilla post? It's starting to sound like FUD. Especially when the alternative is a browser engine whose development is dictated by an advertising company.
  - ratsmack 8y ago
    User was created today, probably just to make the dumb comment.
shmerl 8y ago
I recently discovered this add-on: * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn... * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4-tbsync/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4... An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts. With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite useful.
- amaccuish 8y ago
  Oh thank you! I really wish Thunderbird would support EAS/MAPI over HTTP/EWS. They're so widely used and it's irritating to have to use the memory hog that is Evolution.
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    Update: works really well, shame it doesn't do email at the same time, but I guess it's a WIP. Cheers!
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Luckily in my case, I can use IMAP. But lack of calendar and contacts was very annoying, until I found this add-on.
    - anuragsoni 8y ago
      As an aside, if using IMAP for the exchange account (as @shmerl suggests) doesn't work for you, you might have better luck with DavMail [1]. I've used it in the past before my workplace enabled IMAP access for exchange mailboxes. [1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
  - gerdesj 8y ago
    Are you sure? I'll grant you neither are particularly small but on this laptop a TB with no accounts set up uses more memory than the various Evo processes with several Exchange mailboxes open. Nothing scientific but a quick look at memory % in "glances".
anuragsoni 8y ago
Really good to see Thunderbird getting some attention and a dedicated development team. I have to use Microsoft Exchange at work and Thunderbird (i'm on version 60) with a couple of plugins, has been the client that has worked best for me on linux.
seanalltogether 8y ago
Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.
- nunodonato 8y ago
  yes, daily
- jfk13 8y ago
  It's working OK for me (via the Provider for Google Calendar add-on), though I haven't tried starting hangouts.
fouronnes3 8y ago
Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156
- ArrayList 8y ago
  Holy damn that's bad! The bug's been open 10 years too!
- classichasclass 8y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141: "This bug has lasted this long because there is no reproducible test case, so thus no way for an engineer to diagnose the problem and test a patch." I sympathize, but I'm not sure what you expect the team to do. The bug seems highly intermittent even when it does occur and there doesn't seem to be anything in common between the systems that are affected.
  - ben509 8y ago
    Normal troubleshooting for intermittent issues is to add logging and diagnostics around possible areas it's happening and have users send in traces when it bites them again.
    - classichasclass 8y ago
      Sure, if you have some idea what the set of "possible areas" are. If you read the comments, it's possible there are several multiple overlapping bugs. And I don't see a whole lot of traces from those afflicted. I agree such bugs are at best obnoxious and at worst cataclysmic. But having been on the receiving end of such nebulous intermittent reports myself, I'm not going to simply conclude the team is incompetent or uninterested.
    - arkh 8y ago
pawodpzz 8y ago
I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to stdin). The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.
belorn 8y ago
As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome. The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose. The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of context.
- clinth 8y ago
  Agreed. I love Thunderbird, and gave it a shot last year as my work email client (exchange). Loved almost everything, but ultimately the search and lack of threading sent me back to outlook web access.
kuon 8y ago
I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion). - A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find. - Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)). - Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders. - Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  I always thought the search was excellent when I used it. At one point I had a 100k of emails. But I could find what ever I needed. Meanwhile Outlook failed with a certain local file size limit and caused endless problems. They were apparently okay with that and resisted change to something that actually worked.
  - kuon 8y ago
    The search is not bad when you know what you are looking for. It's fuzzy search that is missing, and a few UI adjustments.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far better than Outlook. And I have never once had to purchase recovery utils for Thunderbird, but to fix the fragile pst Outlook uses. I cant even count the number of times I had to do recovery for someone because IT was busy. Thunderbird never failed. At one point I just outright installed Thunderbird, changed the icon to Outlook and no one complained. I think I told them it was just the new interface. Plus Outlook was a security nightmare anyways.
  - rstuart4133 8y ago
bad_user 8y ago
First of all I’m very happy to see a community-driven Thunderbird that’s still alive and kicking. I used Thunderbird before and I can see myself returning to it. Now I'm on MacOS and I use MailMate, see: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ I wish Thunderbird would be more like it. It's simple, fast, uses Markdown in its editor, has nice keyboard shortcuts, plays well with Gmail's labels, has smart filters and works well with multiple accounts and aliases. Seeing some of the comments, I’m surprised to see people putting emphasis on Thunderbird’s calendar or missing CardDav support. Well, MailMate provides no such support. I.e. for calendars I simply use Apple’s Calendar, for contacts I use Apple’s Contacts. I don’t need my email client to handle these. That Thunderbird can do it, that’s cool, but I think Thunderbird has problems in handling email that should be fixed first. And I’m glad to see them invest in better Gmail support. I don’t even use Gmail as my personal account, but in this day and age it’s a must and the features (like labels) will prove handy for other email providers too.
xte 8y ago
IMO the real revolution might be a decision to integrate notmuch so to move from a '90s-like UI/workflow to a modern era one so powerful that can easily outshine webmails. Also, with a proper maildir cloning support (mbsync like for instance) it may give to the casual users the opportunity to have locally their messages. Otherwise anything Mozilla can do can at maximum keep a zombie alive simply because of lack of less ugly widespread and generic alternatives.
polskibus 8y ago
I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to get faster product development for the same donations.
starik36 8y ago
Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all the features that are barely implemented or don't work well. The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea. Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product. For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no issues whatsoever. The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones. Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.
jcranmer 8y ago
It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it. One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about performance.
- andris9 8y ago
  Issues with large (as in message count) mailboxes is a common thing nowadays. Don't know about client side as I've been working on the server side for past few years (see https://wildduck.email/ https://wildduck.email/). Clients with large mailboxes cause a lot of issues both server implementation wise and operation wise. For example some widely used IMAP server software dies if an IMAP client tries to SELECT a maildir folder with >320k messages (every message in the folder yields in some file system calls while SELECTing, it takes some time and then the process that handles the client connection just crashes due to some overflow or whatever). Also there's older versions of Outlook (eg. 2010) that tend to sync state by FETCHing FLAGS of all messages in all folders every X minute and causing huge amounts of traffic and so on.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    I'm not terribly surprised. It's easy to forget that mailboxes are actually databases, and at the scale of GB databases, you're going to start stealing ideas from the database community on how to manage databases rather than relying on the filesystem to act as a database for you. Thunderbird itself does a nastily poor job of scaling to massive folders, since it assumes that it can do UI-thread-synchronous operations like "get a list of every message in the database." (And fixing it is hard... as I have way too much experience with).
com2kid 8y ago
I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some emails not being discoverable with search. Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker. Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up eventually.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  Not really a good reason for switching. Make sure you regularly rebuild your search indexes in Outlook because I have several helpdesk calls that were fixed that way (partial results, last seen in OL 2016) ...
phyzome 8y ago
I'm still on Thunderbird 52 because the upgrade to 60 ruined my calendar. I hope the next ESR version works better. :-/ I don't even use Thunderbird for email anymore, so I guess what I really want is a standalone calendaring application that I can migrate to.
schnable 8y ago
I have a couple family members that were heavy Thunderbird users. They recently switched off it because it was chewing up CPU when in the backgound, and the spam filtering doesn't really work. Glad to hear they are getting some more engineers.
shay_ker 8y ago
An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone. Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021? 2022?
- wpietri 8y ago
  Could you say more about why that is? For me it's like a Swiss Army knife versus my full kitchen. I use a basic email client on my phone for on-the-go stuff (seeing what has come in, making quick replies). But for doing anything serious, I want a full keyboard and reasonable screen real estate. I don't think it's possible to have a particularly consistent experience, so I'm fine with using a different client on my phone.
  - shay_ker 8y ago
    I like special features of AirMail, for instance, where you can snooze certain emails. If they only had a desktop client, then I can't snooze on the go on my phone. And now I have to context switch and remember to delay certain tasks to when I get to my laptop. Email clients also sometimes impose some level of formatting, and I'd like that to be consistent across mobile/web as well
sublupo 8y ago
one thing I'm really hoping for is more support for calendars. I see no way to view / change the color of events. while I can add them to categories, it is much easier for me to color code them.
baroffoos 8y ago
Amazing how they are working on speed when thunderbird is about 20x faster than gmail
sabas_ge 8y ago
I actually like Thunderbird since when I discovered MRC Compose extension[0] which provides a UI similar to Outlook in the To, CC and BCC fields. Having to input one by one the email addresses is troublesome in my use case (lots of addresses to manipulate when replying). It's a pity it isn't a default behaviour. [0] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-compose/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-c...

Thunderbird in 2019

341 points by richardboegli 8y ago

Thunderbird is, hands down, my most used desktop app, if we're not counting IDEs and editors. Definitely would recommend; Thunderbird is awesome.

neilsimp1 8y ago
Honestly, I thought I liked Outlook on Windows until I gave Thunderbird a try. It's just so much faster.
kgwxd 8y ago
Not counting browsers?
- timbit42 8y ago
  Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.
  - kgwxd 8y ago
    Reference; research; testing and debugging web sites in the 5 major desktop browsers; communication and data entry apps required for work that have a horrible desktop client, or no desktop client at all; etc. There's a lot of useful, work related things browsers provide access to.

wongarsu 8y ago

Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to anyone unless they need PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).

warpech 8y ago

Thanks for this great news for people hungry for good desktop alternatives for the abundant webmails. Please spend part of the effort on Lightning (the calendar add-on).

hyper_reality 8y ago

It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019, is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I hope this will get fixed soon.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Lol, Thunderbird seemingly has plenty of major loss-of-data bugs (I lost all my archives recently; synced up to the server -- that bug seems to be several years old (but rare)). I'd almost guarantee that your tab-scroll-position bug is fixed first. It seems to be the way of things. Thunderbird seems incredibly janky to me (unstable and easy to break, rough around the edges). Maybe my experience is rare ... would love to see it become solid and fast.
- graeme 8y ago
  You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and restored?
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Well I had a backup of sorts, domestic environment, but did lose data (yes I shouldn't have trusted it). Still haven't managed to debug so can't use Thunderbird properly yet; changing app is a major upheaval after a decade or more [not quite continuous use, tried Kmail, Opera, and a few others like Sylpheed, Mutt(!), in the interim -- after Pine, proprietary apps TB was my first desktop MUA]. So, I need to audition new MUAs (family friendly), then recover what I can.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS. [1] https://getmailspring.com https://getmailspring.com
      - shock 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

StevePerkins 8y ago

The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard). This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019. I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email client option out there. But geeze... what a muddled mess of messaging and pivots from this organization.

RealDinosaur 8y ago
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change. They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it. What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example). Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd probably help out. Edit: Jeeze! You guys sure hate Electron. Just because a tool is misused so often, doesn't mean it's a bad tool.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I don't get it, why can't anything change? In fact, the platform in which Thunderbird runs - XULRunner - is the equivalent of Electron for the Gecko engine, and a bunch of different applications have been done with it.
- bertman 8y ago
  > What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron app Now this is something you don't read everyday on Hacker News...
  - RealDinosaur 8y ago
    With such downvotes, I start to think electron hate is a cult.

nzb 8y ago

Pfff, when I saw "Thunderbird in 2019 (blog.mozilla.org)" in the list of news I thought they were going to add ads to it like they did with Firefox. :)

Jonnax 8y ago
Why is this dumb comment on every Mozilla post? It's starting to sound like FUD. Especially when the alternative is a browser engine whose development is dictated by an advertising company.
- ratsmack 8y ago
  User was created today, probably just to make the dumb comment.

shmerl 8y ago

I recently discovered this add-on: * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn... * https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4-tbsync/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4... An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts. With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite useful.

amaccuish 8y ago
Oh thank you! I really wish Thunderbird would support EAS/MAPI over HTTP/EWS. They're so widely used and it's irritating to have to use the memory hog that is Evolution.
- amaccuish 8y ago
  Update: works really well, shame it doesn't do email at the same time, but I guess it's a WIP. Cheers!
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Luckily in my case, I can use IMAP. But lack of calendar and contacts was very annoying, until I found this add-on.
  - anuragsoni 8y ago
    As an aside, if using IMAP for the exchange account (as @shmerl suggests) doesn't work for you, you might have better luck with DavMail [1]. I've used it in the past before my workplace enabled IMAP access for exchange mailboxes. [1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
- gerdesj 8y ago
  Are you sure? I'll grant you neither are particularly small but on this laptop a TB with no accounts set up uses more memory than the various Evo processes with several Exchange mailboxes open. Nothing scientific but a quick look at memory % in "glances".

anuragsoni 8y ago

Really good to see Thunderbird getting some attention and a dedicated development team. I have to use Microsoft Exchange at work and Thunderbird (i'm on version 60) with a couple of plugins, has been the client that has worked best for me on linux.

seanalltogether 8y ago

Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.

nunodonato 8y ago
yes, daily
jfk13 8y ago
It's working OK for me (via the Provider for Google Calendar add-on), though I haven't tried starting hangouts.

fouronnes3 8y ago

Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156

ArrayList 8y ago
Holy damn that's bad! The bug's been open 10 years too!
classichasclass 8y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141: "This bug has lasted this long because there is no reproducible test case, so thus no way for an engineer to diagnose the problem and test a patch." I sympathize, but I'm not sure what you expect the team to do. The bug seems highly intermittent even when it does occur and there doesn't seem to be anything in common between the systems that are affected.
- ben509 8y ago
  Normal troubleshooting for intermittent issues is to add logging and diagnostics around possible areas it's happening and have users send in traces when it bites them again.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    Sure, if you have some idea what the set of "possible areas" are. If you read the comments, it's possible there are several multiple overlapping bugs. And I don't see a whole lot of traces from those afflicted. I agree such bugs are at best obnoxious and at worst cataclysmic. But having been on the receiving end of such nebulous intermittent reports myself, I'm not going to simply conclude the team is incompetent or uninterested.
  - arkh 8y ago

pawodpzz 8y ago

I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to stdin). The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.

belorn 8y ago

As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome. The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose. The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of context.

clinth 8y ago
Agreed. I love Thunderbird, and gave it a shot last year as my work email client (exchange). Loved almost everything, but ultimately the search and lack of threading sent me back to outlook web access.

kuon 8y ago

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion). - A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find. - Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)). - Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders. - Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.

paulie_a 8y ago
I always thought the search was excellent when I used it. At one point I had a 100k of emails. But I could find what ever I needed. Meanwhile Outlook failed with a certain local file size limit and caused endless problems. They were apparently okay with that and resisted change to something that actually worked.
- kuon 8y ago
  The search is not bad when you know what you are looking for. It's fuzzy search that is missing, and a few UI adjustments.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far better than Outlook. And I have never once had to purchase recovery utils for Thunderbird, but to fix the fragile pst Outlook uses. I cant even count the number of times I had to do recovery for someone because IT was busy. Thunderbird never failed. At one point I just outright installed Thunderbird, changed the icon to Outlook and no one complained. I think I told them it was just the new interface. Plus Outlook was a security nightmare anyways.
- rstuart4133 8y ago

bad_user 8y ago

First of all I’m very happy to see a community-driven Thunderbird that’s still alive and kicking. I used Thunderbird before and I can see myself returning to it. Now I'm on MacOS and I use MailMate, see: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ I wish Thunderbird would be more like it. It's simple, fast, uses Markdown in its editor, has nice keyboard shortcuts, plays well with Gmail's labels, has smart filters and works well with multiple accounts and aliases. Seeing some of the comments, I’m surprised to see people putting emphasis on Thunderbird’s calendar or missing CardDav support. Well, MailMate provides no such support. I.e. for calendars I simply use Apple’s Calendar, for contacts I use Apple’s Contacts. I don’t need my email client to handle these. That Thunderbird can do it, that’s cool, but I think Thunderbird has problems in handling email that should be fixed first. And I’m glad to see them invest in better Gmail support. I don’t even use Gmail as my personal account, but in this day and age it’s a must and the features (like labels) will prove handy for other email providers too.

xte 8y ago

IMO the real revolution might be a decision to integrate notmuch so to move from a '90s-like UI/workflow to a modern era one so powerful that can easily outshine webmails. Also, with a proper maildir cloning support (mbsync like for instance) it may give to the casual users the opportunity to have locally their messages. Otherwise anything Mozilla can do can at maximum keep a zombie alive simply because of lack of less ugly widespread and generic alternatives.

polskibus 8y ago

I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to get faster product development for the same donations.

starik36 8y ago

Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all the features that are barely implemented or don't work well. The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea. Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product. For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no issues whatsoever. The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones. Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.

jcranmer 8y ago

It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it. One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about performance.

andris9 8y ago
Issues with large (as in message count) mailboxes is a common thing nowadays. Don't know about client side as I've been working on the server side for past few years (see https://wildduck.email/ https://wildduck.email/). Clients with large mailboxes cause a lot of issues both server implementation wise and operation wise. For example some widely used IMAP server software dies if an IMAP client tries to SELECT a maildir folder with >320k messages (every message in the folder yields in some file system calls while SELECTing, it takes some time and then the process that handles the client connection just crashes due to some overflow or whatever). Also there's older versions of Outlook (eg. 2010) that tend to sync state by FETCHing FLAGS of all messages in all folders every X minute and causing huge amounts of traffic and so on.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  I'm not terribly surprised. It's easy to forget that mailboxes are actually databases, and at the scale of GB databases, you're going to start stealing ideas from the database community on how to manage databases rather than relying on the filesystem to act as a database for you. Thunderbird itself does a nastily poor job of scaling to massive folders, since it assumes that it can do UI-thread-synchronous operations like "get a list of every message in the database." (And fixing it is hard... as I have way too much experience with).

com2kid 8y ago

I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some emails not being discoverable with search. Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker. Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up eventually.

gerdesj 8y ago
Not really a good reason for switching. Make sure you regularly rebuild your search indexes in Outlook because I have several helpdesk calls that were fixed that way (partial results, last seen in OL 2016) ...

phyzome 8y ago

I'm still on Thunderbird 52 because the upgrade to 60 ruined my calendar. I hope the next ESR version works better. :-/ I don't even use Thunderbird for email anymore, so I guess what I really want is a standalone calendaring application that I can migrate to.

schnable 8y ago

I have a couple family members that were heavy Thunderbird users. They recently switched off it because it was chewing up CPU when in the backgound, and the spam filtering doesn't really work. Glad to hear they are getting some more engineers.

shay_ker 8y ago

An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone. Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021? 2022?

wpietri 8y ago
Could you say more about why that is? For me it's like a Swiss Army knife versus my full kitchen. I use a basic email client on my phone for on-the-go stuff (seeing what has come in, making quick replies). But for doing anything serious, I want a full keyboard and reasonable screen real estate. I don't think it's possible to have a particularly consistent experience, so I'm fine with using a different client on my phone.
- shay_ker 8y ago
  I like special features of AirMail, for instance, where you can snooze certain emails. If they only had a desktop client, then I can't snooze on the go on my phone. And now I have to context switch and remember to delay certain tasks to when I get to my laptop. Email clients also sometimes impose some level of formatting, and I'd like that to be consistent across mobile/web as well

sublupo 8y ago

one thing I'm really hoping for is more support for calendars. I see no way to view / change the color of events. while I can add them to categories, it is much easier for me to color code them.

baroffoos 8y ago

Amazing how they are working on speed when thunderbird is about 20x faster than gmail

sabas_ge 8y ago

I actually like Thunderbird since when I discovered MRC Compose extension[0] which provides a UI similar to Outlook in the To, CC and BCC fields. Having to input one by one the email addresses is troublesome in my use case (lots of addresses to manipulate when replying). It's a pity it isn't a default behaviour. [0] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-compose/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-c...