18 ms·

What’s New in Thunderbird 78

444 points by anotherevan 6y ago

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Finally dark mode! Some Windows only add-ons could do it. But now Mac and Linux can too
- ypbyttfa 6y ago
  On windows 10, I have dark mode enabled system wide, but I struggle with most third party dark modes, the contrasts between components is not thought out enough - or in the case of email, styled html emails sometimes don't work on a dark background Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
  - sp332 6y ago
    Yes, in the background window in this screenshot https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png you can see manual Light and Dark options as well as Auto.
    - ypbyttfa 6y ago
      Have it installed, such an option isn't available to me, in Win10
      - sp332 6y ago
        According to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 it should be under Addons -> Themes, at least in previous versions? But it was kinda buggy as of last month.
    - jayelbe 6y ago
      Those are the operating system's settings in Mac OS. It's not a Thunderbird dialogue (unfortunately).
- userbinator 6y ago
  Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers. What a pitiful regression it has been since then. [1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5/tumblr_mwjaieyign1t2as4so6_1280.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5... [2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893/tumblr_mwjaieyign1t2as4so9_1280.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893... [3] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAEIg/ubOXpQPZ9RI/s1600/Win+3.1+Flourescent+Theme.JPG https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAE... [4] https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-schemes https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-sc...
  - llarsson 6y ago
    Yeah, and X resources let us Linux nerds choose freely as well. This is what we get now that every application ships its own implementation of everything, including GUI toolkit.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling. Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.
clircle 6y ago
Long live Thunderbird.
vdfs 6y ago
Wow, this remind me of the Firefox 4 release era with exciting new features
firoze 6y ago
Would it be wise to link one's Protonmail account with Thunderbird?
- loudtieblahblah 6y ago
  It remains end to end encrypted due the fact you have to use ProtonMail's desktop bridge.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    Which, at least for me, has never worked properly (I check after each update) and still leads to lags and timeouts in Thunderbird/Outlook. If they don't fix it till my protonmail's subscription expires, I guess I'm moving to another provider.
- effie 6y ago
  Why would it be "wise"? If you need secure mailbox free of direct surveillance by providers, you need to host it yourself using software you yourself checked and compiled.
orionblastar 6y ago
Did they fix the bug where you have a Yahoo or AT&T account and change the password at the server and when you change the password in Thunderbird it gives you server errors?
wilburhimself 6y ago
Casually I installed Thunderbird today ... but didn't realize the 78 version, it looks great, I love the dark mode!
Legogris 6y ago
This is a pretty significant release: * Integrated OpenGPG E2EE (fully realized in a future 78.2 release) * Significant UI improvements * Integration of calendars and tasks * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)
- Liquid_Fire 6y ago
  > * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already) Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.
rammy1234 6y ago
Significant release. Missing Dark Mode was making me to switch to other clients, now I am back to thunderbird
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  I've been using a dark theme with TB since, I can't even remember how long. Let's say 2000, though I started with Netscape Mail. :-D
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Many of these UI changes seem like backward steps. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-comparison.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso... Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons. New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.
- ronjouch 6y ago
  Agreed about the flat buttons sadly following the OS-cohesiveness-hindering flatness fad instead of adhering to standard OS styling which can be recognized across apps by users. Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to: 1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header). 2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay). There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
    At least in the Mail.app on macOS, clear buttons are still used in the toolbar and the window bar when you compose a new message. I definitely think theres new thunderbird buttons are both a downgrade in terms of usability, but also because, aesthetically, I think they look way worse. The icon design is really quite bad. The "A" char is poorly rendered, the stroke width and proportions seem to be all over the place, and the italics "A" looks particularly bad.
- 6y ago
poglet 6y ago
I switched to Outlook and found out my calendars and tasks from my Fastmail account were not supported (only Exchange accounts are now supported). If Thunderbird has now improved their calendar and task support, I will switch back. It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.
dugite-code 6y ago
Just FIY the winmail.dat (the horrible Microsoft email format) plugin LookOut (Fix Version) has not been updated for this release and unless someone jumps in to help Probably wont be updated. https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/ https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/ I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade. There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021
- pitdicker 6y ago
  Thank you for maintaining the extension until now! Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
  - dugite-code 6y ago
    Thanks, I am proud I was able to give back something useful for a time. Unfortunately it's not only the clients it's the servers as well. Also this is still occasionally an issue in Office 365 This guide doesn't look bad - https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/microsoft-tnef/ https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/micro... The official Microsoft article - Change the message format to HTML, Rich Text Format, or plain text - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-message-format-to-html-rich-text-format-or-plain-text-338a389d-11da-47fe-b693-cf41f792fefa https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-messag... And of course the Microsoft Exchange article - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-options-exchange-2013-help https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-op...
cs702 6y ago
Still no first-class calendar and contact sync with mobile and online services!?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Set up a radicale server and and the calendars sync just fine. Add the cardbook adding and contacts do too. I guess thats what you mean by not first class? https://radicale.org/3.0.html https://radicale.org/3.0.html
  - abawany 6y ago
    AFAICT, Cardbook doesn't work with TB78 (https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574 https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574) . The built-in Calendar integration is real nice though - was able to pick up various CalDAV options well. Edit1: fixed link.
jmpeax 6y ago
Dark mode still needs some work. It doesn't detect black text, and keeps it black on the dark background.
- davb 6y ago
  I found the same. It would be useful if you could enable dark mode on all UI elements but the message pane.
waynesonfire 6y ago
thanks for the integrated openpgp support. finally.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Was enigmail being a plugin a showstopper before? Just curious of this perspective.
  - dtech 6y ago
    Don't underestimate the power of defaults and core functionality. If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it. Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
  - brnt 6y ago
    Yes. It adheres to the original six levels of trust, generating a confusing UI that in practice nobody but three people used. Easy mode was still confusing, with details like does the button show "the current state or an option to switch to that state"? An alternative plugin, autocrypt, was actually a much better beginner-proof way of having pgp. I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.
kbumsik 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what UI toolkit does Thunderbird use? GTK or the UI system derived from Firefox?
- AnonHP 6y ago
  It used to be XUL, but since that was deprecated and Firefox doesn’t support it, for a while Thunderbird was still using it with a plan to switch out. The larger plan for Thunderbird is to use “web technologies” (meaning HTML, CSS and JS). IIRC, this move is already in progress.
  - jabl 6y ago
    TB has much less manpower than Firefox, so they're mostly following whatever Firefox does. Firefox is indeed in the process of getting rid of XUL in favour of web technologies, but AFAIK it's not done yet. And yes, on UNIX platforms the "XUL backend" is gtk.
greggman3 6y ago
To each their own but I find it hard to fathom using a non-cloud based email system. I regularly access my email from 7 computers.
- wvenable 6y ago
  I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail. I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
  - Moru 6y ago
    If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)
    - wott 6y ago
      POP3 doesn't automatically delete the emails it fetched (with RETR). It has to emit another specific command (DELE) for this purpose. So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
    - wvenable 6y ago
      You could use POP but I don't see why you would.
- kitotik 6y ago
  By “non-cloud based email system” you mean anything that isn’t gmail via a web browser? I regularly access my “non-cloud based email systems” from 8 different devices.
- _eht 6y ago
  Seven, huh? That makes you the man of the house...
acidburnNSA 6y ago
I'm a major fan. I self host email, contacts, calendar, and Thunderbird is essential in my workflow. Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.
- tarasmatsyk 6y ago
  just curious, what do you use to host email and calendar?
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    Postfix and dovecot and spamassassin for email. Radicale for caldav and carddev.
venki80 6y ago
Does this work with AOL dial-up?
jsilence 6y ago
I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients. Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  Maildir only suggests the safe delivery mechanism that gets around lack of atomicity guarantees in filesystems by using the guarantee that a rename is atomic as a workaround. It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be. I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
- bzb3 6y ago
  Isn't Maildir too wasteful?
  - effie 6y ago
    In what way?
    - bzb3 6y ago
      Each email in its own file means a minimum of x KB on disk for each email, where x is usually 4. For people with thousands of emails that's very wasteful.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        I would take a safe Maildir implementation over subtle (or sometimes catastrophic) data loss bugs any day. The one really serious problem I have with Thunderbird is that after being stung more than once, I feel like not only do I have to keep normal backups, I also have to retain old backups indefinitely, just in case a folder was corrupted silently a long time ago and I only find out months or years later when I need to search older messages.
AnonHP 6y ago
The integration of GPG into the client was a great move. The addition of dark mode is also good to keep up with the times. After all this while, the best thing I love about this release is the simplification of the To (and also CC and BCC) list into one field instead of being multiple rows (it was always painful to scroll). I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size). Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).
- upofadown 6y ago
  It is OpenPGP capability that is being integrated into the client, not GnuPG. You will have to import your keys from any existing GnuPG installation. Any new keys you add in Thunderbird will not be accessible to other things that use GnuPG.
aneutron 6y ago
I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se. The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future. [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  Likewise. I know it is merely a cosmetic change, but it is just easier on my eyes. For me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
- Legogris 6y ago
  Thunderbird is GTK. Does it not work if you configure a dark GTK theme?
  - aneutron 6y ago
    I'm using i3wm, so I thought there's no way to do it. But a friendly user showed me the env variable to set in a comment after this one.
    - Legogris 6y ago
      You can configure GTK regardless of your WM. xmonad here.
- Boulth6 6y ago
  > The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.
WalterGR 6y ago
Did Thunderbird remove support for older XUL-based add-ons like Firefox did? It’s unclear to me what the article means by “legacy extensions” - based on context it seems simply to refer to extensions that work in 77.
- bonzini 6y ago
  It refers to XUL extensions, they still work but need updates for new releases unlike WebExtensions.
pjmlp 6y ago
Looking forward to update it.
tarasmatsyk 6y ago
It looks nice, however it feels like I am running one more browser, am I wrong here? I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Good luck running a mail client - you know, a program that takes html documents and renders them, because modern email is html - without running a browser. In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
  - ars 6y ago
    alpine for the win! It can render some html, enough that I rarely need to open an email with an actual browser. But some emails are mainly images with little text, and then I have to export the email.
- trissylegs 6y ago
  All of them use some sort of Webbrowser underneath. Thunderbird is using Firefox/Gecko, Geary is using GTKWebkit, macOS Mail is probably using Webkit. Note sure what Windows Mail is using. (Similar to outlook in my experice) Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server) Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined) You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Sadly the interested for writing good, native, desktop application, especially email clients, seems to have faded away.
galacticdessert 6y ago
Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again. The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945
- kevincox 6y ago
  Maybe I don't understand the bug but I'm pretty sure Thunderbird has this. I can see the folders, messages and message all on the same screen.
rcarmo 6y ago
Thank goodness, they’ve cleaned up the to: fields in the compose window at long last. I have been using Thunderbird on and off for a _long_ time, and the lack of UI polish in thins like that has been a constant eyesore. Too bad that the formatting toolbar seems to have become visually “heavier”, with bolder lines in some icons. I’ll just have to see what the final product looks like on both my Mac and Elementary...
scoutt 6y ago
I love Thunderbird and I use it since forever. I welcome this update and changes, but they really have to fix Search.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Interesting, TB search works a million times better for me than Outlook. What are your main issues?
  - scoutt 6y ago
    It can't search for exact strings. Double quotes don't work.
    - inanutshellus 6y ago
      I would love to be able to do a "slow search" that let me use exact strings.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  I second this. This is my number one usability issue with TB, that I use almost everyday. Example: I recently (2 months) received, say, 150 e-mails from one person. During that same period, that person has also received lots (~300) of e-mails that are in my client: ones I sent, ones they were CC-ed, etc. Now, I need to find that pdf they sent me some time ago. It would be no problem to scour the 10 or so message I received from this adress with a pdf attached (still doable without the mimetype). TB lets me search messages that "concern" that person, but also gives me the ones they didn't send. Would a "sent by" be too hard to provide? Quick search works a lot better than the regular search for this, it's something I do multiple times a day. I sometimes spend more than 5 minutes looking for an e-mail, then give up, load zimbra, and I'm able to find the e-mail in 10 seconds thanks to the more granular filtering available there.
  - VVertigo 6y ago
    Thunderbird has three search methods: quick search allows you to filter by Sendor (unselect Recipients), but you can also do a more granular search using EditFindSearch Messages (Ctrl+Shift+F). I don’t use the other Ctrl+K search much.
kioleanu 6y ago
I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly. But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market. Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.
- atoav 6y ago
  On the other Hand the way Thunderbird profiles work you might have to do this only once a decade and not once every new device. At least this was the case in for me
  - ASalazarMX 6y ago
    I've been carrying over my Thunderbird profile to new computers since the 00s. It's just restoring a folder from backup, no obscure settings in the registry or hidden folders.
- bzb3 6y ago
  It's incredible how shitty ALL email clients for Windows are, except for Thunderbird. Of course, Mozilla had to abandon it...
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Great to see a headline like this again. But even if you had frozen Thunderbird how it was, it would still beat other mail solutions. I can live with Outlook/Exchange in my corporate environment, but it still cannot compete.
pantulis 6y ago
Thunderbird is one of the few email clients on MacOS that doesn't choke with huge GMail inboxes. Thing that baffles me is that you need to install an extensions to have keyboard shortcuts for moving & copying messages with autocompletion, of course the one I was using broke with the latest release ("Quick folder move"). What's the favorite these days? Same for Lightning and G Suite calendars, but I guess this will be fixed upstream quickly.
berkes 6y ago
I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere). The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily. I've been comparing it with each and every option for the Ubuntu desktop and even webmail. Clients like Geary[1] or Roundcube [2]. Those are often unfinished; I guess mail clients are like many other software-challenges in that regard: it's easy to make the basics, the 90% that 90% of the people need. It's doable to make those basics really good (see all the webmail, electron mail and other mail clients). But it is really hard to do the last 10%, because each of the individual users has a different 10%. And so, I find I love the UX of Geary and use Roundcube often for its simplicity and "Getting Stuff Done". But I also find that I keep going back to Thunderbird, because <insert some feature I use once a week> is only there. But, boy, it annoys me how cludgy and convoluted thunderbird then feels. Edit: forgot to mention that a lot of the 10% things in Thunderbird are severely in my way, daily. I have an RSS reader - why is there one in Thunderbird taking up mental (and memory) space, I don't ever use the built-in IM (is it jabber?), the calendar and todo-tasks feature I don't use, but they attempt to manage my agenda/invites anyway, making me miss an occasional meeting even. I'm sure other people find the GPG being severely in the way (part of the 10% that I use often) or that archiving and offline features are clumsy, confusing and making people miss emails (another feature I often use). -- [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary [2] https://roundcube.net/ https://roundcube.net/
- pmlnr 6y ago
  There's a webmail out there called Rainloop. It's probably one of the best email interfaces I used. Sadly, it's not a desktop client. My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.
  - berkes 6y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker. My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
In some of the screenshots the old version looked better than the new version, especially with regard to how everything nowadays needs to be "flat". It lacks the visual feedback of buttons, which can be "pressed in" and that can be annoying. Also I dislike how every button now seems to be bigger and everything needs to be in "tiles" instead of simple links or buttons. I think in general I simply dislike "material design".
- thom 6y ago
  It's always seemed odd to me that on the one hand material design admits how important the physicality of an interface can be, as well as our spatial understanding of it, but on the other hand tries to eliminate the most established examples of those things. Why talk about shape and depth if you then eliminate shape and depth on the most important UI widgets? I do think there's great promise to the core idea of treating data in our UIs like we'd treat, for example, pieces of paper on our desk, or pages in a book, but just more efficiently. For example I've always felt that a music app built around a paradigm of piles or boxes of songs, interacted with very physically and naturally to build playlists, would be wonderful (especially versus the current state of the iOS music app). However most of the time it's just flatness for flatness's sake, and an excuse for designers to go wild with minimalism.
alibert 6y ago
Did they changed something on the interface because I used to change the order of the action buttons on the email pane (anwser, archive, spam, delete, etc.) and this can't be done now?
LockAndLol 6y ago
Have they updated the documentation for writing addons? Last time I checked it was a decade or so old.
- miedpo 6y ago
  Yes. The new docs are here. The new add on code is in beta though and not fully stable so you have to keep an eye on it. https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
pmlnr 6y ago
- google provider plugins are broken - carddav plugins are broken - mail client is nicer I'm tired of this. Either be a PIM suite and don't break functionality, or don't.
hibbelig 6y ago
I see that the Nostalgy author is working on an upgrade. Very nice!
account42 6y ago
Will this version let me compose text-only messages by default while still being able to switch to a HTML message when needed? You used to be able to shift-click reply to compose as text but that that stopped working in a previous update.
- ronjouch 6y ago
  Shift-Click on Reply/Compose to switch from text to HTML (or HTML to text if HTML is your default) still works for me. If it doesn't for you, it's a bug.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    Though since they inexplicably removed the reply-to-all button from the easily accessed tools in a recent UI update, this can be more fiddly now than it needs to be...
    - ronjouch 6y ago
      Was it? It wasn't removed for me. You can add it again with Right click anywhere on the toolbar -> Customize
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        You should be able to do that, and it was the first thing I tried when it was removed by default. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me then, and having just checked again, it still doesn't work now (I'm on 68 for now, as the 78 update isn't being pushed to the regular release channel for me yet). Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the replacement "Smart Reply" button does show up, but only sometimes depending on context. Since Thunderbird only shows it selectively now, I did not see that when I was checking before. So I withdraw my criticism about removing functionality, and I replace it with criticism of changing user settings during updates, replacing a well-established feature with a subtly different one, and hiding controls that are currently not applicable rather than showing them as disabled. The fact that this comment thread exists is a pretty good demonstration of why these are bad ideas.
mod50ack 6y ago
It also now supports Microsoft's modern authentication (i.e., their flavor of OAuth), which is now becoming annoyingly mandatory at more and more organizations.
Krasnol 6y ago
Oh this is fantastic. Finaly Tray support. The only minor thing I need i "send later". It worked through an addon but that will require a subscription(?!) now... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jik/rewritten-add-ons-for-mozilla-thunderbirds-next-release https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jik/rewritten-add-ons-f...
qqj 6y ago
Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.
- shock 6y ago
  Makes me sad to read things like this. Slack and Discord are centralized, someone else owns your identity and you cannot do anything about it. With email (and Matrix) you have the chance to own your identity (by having your own domain).
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    I think we need to do one better. Relying on a domain/instance/provider doesn't cut it long term, and you either host your own, but it's hard to personally commit to maintain it non-stop for the foreseeable future, or you pick a reliable instance. Centralized silos are generally very reliable instances, (see: gmail). Not being able to move elsewhere is a lock-in issue (Matrix has an issue for decentralised identities [1]). I don't see why we couldn't just attach our identities to a private key. Encrypt that private key and back it up on various online providers (using PAKE so that they never see it). Use those to authenticate elsewhere. Designate one, or multiple, providers as a temporary mailbox (rather: ask them to fetch content that you are a recipient of from a DHT). People would identify you with pet names they assign to you. You could publish your key in multiple places (in my HN profile, for instance). I think of a DHT rather than a blockchain, because blockchains don't scale. Your user account could itself be a blockchain, though, stored encrypted in the DHT. Not sure why I haven't found such a system yet? Secure scuttlebut seems to come close, but I mostly want an authentication and message passing system, that e-mail could be re-built upon, and bridged with. [1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Mail is the lingua franca of online communications. It isn't going anywhere any time soon, if only because it it's an independent standard that does not rely on some single commercial entity to continue operating it. That is also part of the reason why all those other services still fall back on email for their registration mechanisms.
shock 6y ago
I'm a (mostly) happy user of TB, but I sorely miss a "conversations" feature.
- commoner 6y ago
  You might appreciate the Thunderbird Conversations add-on, which displays threaded conversations. With this add-on, the message view looks similar to Gmail's original interface. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail... https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-conversations https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...
ollo 6y ago
Still no Windows 10 notifications? Disappointing. Alternative clients that support native Win 10 notifications?
j1elo 6y ago
I had an IMAP account that, when deleted from the server (the company closed and closed their GSuite accounts), was rendered impossible to access from TB. But afaik the emails where there, given the space that the TB folder occupied on the hard disk. I saw some conversations about how if you want to have a local copy of emails and be sure that server errors (or server dissappearance, as it was the case) won't affect your access to old email copies, you should manually copy them to the Local Folders section within TB. Does anybody know what is the "best practices" for keeping access to downloaded emails and not lose them if the server closes? Should I be copying every email to the Local Folders storage?
- lesquivemeau 6y ago
  If it's an absolute priority, in the future you can consider using POP
- elbows 6y ago
  I use OfflineImap to backup all my email to a local maildir: http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/
majkinetor 6y ago
While minimize to tray is finally there, it would be good to have: 1. close to tray 2. start minimized (changing shortcut properties in Windows to start minimized doesn't do anything). 3. Always keep tray icon - now it is removed when you click on it which is anoying I am sure people will accidentally click close instead of minimize.
- aembleton 6y ago
  This sort of thing should be a feature provided by the Desktop Environment so that you can set how each application operates for closing and minimising.
  - majkinetor 6y ago
    Yeah, it should come as systemic feature. In the meantime, there is Minimize on Close plugin that works with v70.
Krasnol 6y ago
There is one thing not mentioned there: If you have a master password defined, the program won't open until you've entered it. This wasn't the case before.
davb 6y ago
I just switched Linux distro last night (Ubuntu to Fedora) and downloaded the latest Thunderbird (v78). I thought the oversized, cartoonish UI was something inherited from the Gtk or Gnome version shipping with the new distro (which oddly didn't affect other applications). Now I can see it was a change in Thunderbird, and I hate it. It's so clunky, that when enabling Large Text in Gnome (to make things more legible on the 1080p 14in laptop screen) Thunderbird looks disproportionately large compared to every other application.
eitland 6y ago
from a linked site: > Update: A few of you have asked how to make a contribution to Thunderbird under the new corporation, especially when using the monthly option. Please check out our updated site at give.thunderbird.net! I want something like this for Firefox too!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ilikehurdles 6y ago
bringing E2E into core Thunderbird is an awesome development. Wish it happened 10 years ago.
jjice 6y ago
Calendar integration off the bat is essential for an email client IMO. Glad that it's being incorporated. Dark mode is also a nice addition. I'm rooting for Thunderbird, I want them to help bring back non-web email clients.
inanutshellus 6y ago
I'm stuck on Thunderbird 60 because of Dorando keyconfig. I like to read an email /then/ move them to folders. Keyconfig lets me just tap a key and it manually runs the mail filters on that selected email. Otherwise I have to drag each email to its appropriate folder, which suuucks.
- matthewn 6y ago
  I was stuck on Thunderbird 60 for a long while for the exact same reason. I'm now using tbkeys on Thunderbird 68; it works great. https://github.com/willsALMANJ/tbkeys https://github.com/willsALMANJ/tbkeys

444 points by anotherevan 6y ago

paulryanrogers 6y ago

Finally dark mode! Some Windows only add-ons could do it. But now Mac and Linux can too

ypbyttfa 6y ago
On windows 10, I have dark mode enabled system wide, but I struggle with most third party dark modes, the contrasts between components is not thought out enough - or in the case of email, styled html emails sometimes don't work on a dark background Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
- sp332 6y ago
  Yes, in the background window in this screenshot https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/Dark-Mode-1.png you can see manual Light and Dark options as well as Auto.
  - ypbyttfa 6y ago
    Have it installed, such an option isn't available to me, in Win10
    - sp332 6y ago
      According to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1291071 it should be under Addons -> Themes, at least in previous versions? But it was kinda buggy as of last month.
  - jayelbe 6y ago
    Those are the operating system's settings in Mac OS. It's not a Thunderbird dialogue (unfortunately).
userbinator 6y ago
Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers. What a pitiful regression it has been since then. [1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5/tumblr_mwjaieyign1t2as4so6_1280.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5... [2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893/tumblr_mwjaieyign1t2as4so9_1280.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893... [3] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAEIg/ubOXpQPZ9RI/s1600/Win+3.1+Flourescent+Theme.JPG https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAE... [4] https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-schemes https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-sc...
- llarsson 6y ago
  Yeah, and X resources let us Linux nerds choose freely as well. This is what we get now that every application ships its own implementation of everything, including GUI toolkit.
- kevincox 6y ago
  To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling. Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.

clircle 6y ago

Long live Thunderbird.

vdfs 6y ago

Wow, this remind me of the Firefox 4 release era with exciting new features

firoze 6y ago

Would it be wise to link one's Protonmail account with Thunderbird?

loudtieblahblah 6y ago
It remains end to end encrypted due the fact you have to use ProtonMail's desktop bridge.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  Which, at least for me, has never worked properly (I check after each update) and still leads to lags and timeouts in Thunderbird/Outlook. If they don't fix it till my protonmail's subscription expires, I guess I'm moving to another provider.
effie 6y ago
Why would it be "wise"? If you need secure mailbox free of direct surveillance by providers, you need to host it yourself using software you yourself checked and compiled.

orionblastar 6y ago

Did they fix the bug where you have a Yahoo or AT&T account and change the password at the server and when you change the password in Thunderbird it gives you server errors?

wilburhimself 6y ago

Casually I installed Thunderbird today ... but didn't realize the 78 version, it looks great, I love the dark mode!

Legogris 6y ago

This is a pretty significant release: * Integrated OpenGPG E2EE (fully realized in a future 78.2 release) * Significant UI improvements * Integration of calendars and tasks * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)

Liquid_Fire 6y ago
> * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already) Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.

rammy1234 6y ago

Significant release. Missing Dark Mode was making me to switch to other clients, now I am back to thunderbird

mixmastamyk 6y ago
I've been using a dark theme with TB since, I can't even remember how long. Let's say 2000, though I started with Netscape Mail. :-D

LeoPanthera 6y ago

Many of these UI changes seem like backward steps. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-comparison.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso... Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons. New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons. https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.

ronjouch 6y ago
Agreed about the flat buttons sadly following the OS-cohesiveness-hindering flatness fad instead of adhering to standard OS styling which can be recognized across apps by users. Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to: 1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header). 2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay). There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
- 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
  At least in the Mail.app on macOS, clear buttons are still used in the toolbar and the window bar when you compose a new message. I definitely think theres new thunderbird buttons are both a downgrade in terms of usability, but also because, aesthetically, I think they look way worse. The icon design is really quite bad. The "A" char is poorly rendered, the stroke width and proportions seem to be all over the place, and the italics "A" looks particularly bad.
6y ago

poglet 6y ago

I switched to Outlook and found out my calendars and tasks from my Fastmail account were not supported (only Exchange accounts are now supported). If Thunderbird has now improved their calendar and task support, I will switch back. It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.

dugite-code 6y ago

Just FIY the winmail.dat (the horrible Microsoft email format) plugin LookOut (Fix Version) has not been updated for this release and unless someone jumps in to help Probably wont be updated. https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/ https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/ I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade. There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021

pitdicker 6y ago
Thank you for maintaining the extension until now! Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
- dugite-code 6y ago
  Thanks, I am proud I was able to give back something useful for a time. Unfortunately it's not only the clients it's the servers as well. Also this is still occasionally an issue in Office 365 This guide doesn't look bad - https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/microsoft-tnef/ https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/micro... The official Microsoft article - Change the message format to HTML, Rich Text Format, or plain text - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-message-format-to-html-rich-text-format-or-plain-text-338a389d-11da-47fe-b693-cf41f792fefa https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-messag... And of course the Microsoft Exchange article - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-options-exchange-2013-help https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-op...

cs702 6y ago

Still no first-class calendar and contact sync with mobile and online services!?

acidburnNSA 6y ago
Set up a radicale server and and the calendars sync just fine. Add the cardbook adding and contacts do too. I guess thats what you mean by not first class? https://radicale.org/3.0.html https://radicale.org/3.0.html
- abawany 6y ago
  AFAICT, Cardbook doesn't work with TB78 (https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574 https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574) . The built-in Calendar integration is real nice though - was able to pick up various CalDAV options well. Edit1: fixed link.

jmpeax 6y ago

Dark mode still needs some work. It doesn't detect black text, and keeps it black on the dark background.

davb 6y ago
I found the same. It would be useful if you could enable dark mode on all UI elements but the message pane.

waynesonfire 6y ago

thanks for the integrated openpgp support. finally.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
Was enigmail being a plugin a showstopper before? Just curious of this perspective.
- dtech 6y ago
  Don't underestimate the power of defaults and core functionality. If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it. Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
- brnt 6y ago
  Yes. It adheres to the original six levels of trust, generating a confusing UI that in practice nobody but three people used. Easy mode was still confusing, with details like does the button show "the current state or an option to switch to that state"? An alternative plugin, autocrypt, was actually a much better beginner-proof way of having pgp. I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.

kbumsik 6y ago

Out of curiosity, what UI toolkit does Thunderbird use? GTK or the UI system derived from Firefox?

AnonHP 6y ago
It used to be XUL, but since that was deprecated and Firefox doesn’t support it, for a while Thunderbird was still using it with a plan to switch out. The larger plan for Thunderbird is to use “web technologies” (meaning HTML, CSS and JS). IIRC, this move is already in progress.
- jabl 6y ago
  TB has much less manpower than Firefox, so they're mostly following whatever Firefox does. Firefox is indeed in the process of getting rid of XUL in favour of web technologies, but AFAIK it's not done yet. And yes, on UNIX platforms the "XUL backend" is gtk.

greggman3 6y ago

To each their own but I find it hard to fathom using a non-cloud based email system. I regularly access my email from 7 computers.

wvenable 6y ago
I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail. I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
- Moru 6y ago
  If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)
  - wott 6y ago
    POP3 doesn't automatically delete the emails it fetched (with RETR). It has to emit another specific command (DELE) for this purpose. So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
  - wvenable 6y ago
    You could use POP but I don't see why you would.
kitotik 6y ago
By “non-cloud based email system” you mean anything that isn’t gmail via a web browser? I regularly access my “non-cloud based email systems” from 8 different devices.
_eht 6y ago
Seven, huh? That makes you the man of the house...

acidburnNSA 6y ago

I'm a major fan. I self host email, contacts, calendar, and Thunderbird is essential in my workflow. Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.

tarasmatsyk 6y ago
just curious, what do you use to host email and calendar?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Postfix and dovecot and spamassassin for email. Radicale for caldav and carddev.

venki80 6y ago

Does this work with AOL dial-up?

jsilence 6y ago

I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients. Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.

tokamak-teapot 6y ago
Maildir only suggests the safe delivery mechanism that gets around lack of atomicity guarantees in filesystems by using the guarantee that a rename is atomic as a workaround. It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be. I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
bzb3 6y ago
Isn't Maildir too wasteful?
- effie 6y ago
  In what way?
  - bzb3 6y ago
    Each email in its own file means a minimum of x KB on disk for each email, where x is usually 4. For people with thousands of emails that's very wasteful.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      I would take a safe Maildir implementation over subtle (or sometimes catastrophic) data loss bugs any day. The one really serious problem I have with Thunderbird is that after being stung more than once, I feel like not only do I have to keep normal backups, I also have to retain old backups indefinitely, just in case a folder was corrupted silently a long time ago and I only find out months or years later when I need to search older messages.

AnonHP 6y ago

The integration of GPG into the client was a great move. The addition of dark mode is also good to keep up with the times. After all this while, the best thing I love about this release is the simplification of the To (and also CC and BCC) list into one field instead of being multiple rows (it was always painful to scroll). I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size). Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).

upofadown 6y ago
It is OpenPGP capability that is being integrated into the client, not GnuPG. You will have to import your keys from any existing GnuPG installation. Any new keys you add in Thunderbird will not be accessible to other things that use GnuPG.

aneutron 6y ago

I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se. The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future. [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
Likewise. I know it is merely a cosmetic change, but it is just easier on my eyes. For me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
Legogris 6y ago
Thunderbird is GTK. Does it not work if you configure a dark GTK theme?
- aneutron 6y ago
  I'm using i3wm, so I thought there's no way to do it. But a friendly user showed me the env variable to set in a comment after this one.
  - Legogris 6y ago
    You can configure GTK regardless of your WM. xmonad here.
Boulth6 6y ago
> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1] Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.

WalterGR 6y ago

Did Thunderbird remove support for older XUL-based add-ons like Firefox did? It’s unclear to me what the article means by “legacy extensions” - based on context it seems simply to refer to extensions that work in 77.

bonzini 6y ago
It refers to XUL extensions, they still work but need updates for new releases unlike WebExtensions.

pjmlp 6y ago

Looking forward to update it.

tarasmatsyk 6y ago

It looks nice, however it feels like I am running one more browser, am I wrong here? I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.

bawolff 6y ago
Good luck running a mail client - you know, a program that takes html documents and renders them, because modern email is html - without running a browser. In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
- ars 6y ago
  alpine for the win! It can render some html, enough that I rarely need to open an email with an actual browser. But some emails are mainly images with little text, and then I have to export the email.
trissylegs 6y ago
All of them use some sort of Webbrowser underneath. Thunderbird is using Firefox/Gecko, Geary is using GTKWebkit, macOS Mail is probably using Webkit. Note sure what Windows Mail is using. (Similar to outlook in my experice) Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server) Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined) You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
mrweasel 6y ago
Sadly the interested for writing good, native, desktop application, especially email clients, seems to have faded away.

galacticdessert 6y ago

Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again. The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

kevincox 6y ago
Maybe I don't understand the bug but I'm pretty sure Thunderbird has this. I can see the folders, messages and message all on the same screen.

rcarmo 6y ago

Thank goodness, they’ve cleaned up the to: fields in the compose window at long last. I have been using Thunderbird on and off for a _long_ time, and the lack of UI polish in thins like that has been a constant eyesore. Too bad that the formatting toolbar seems to have become visually “heavier”, with bolder lines in some icons. I’ll just have to see what the final product looks like on both my Mac and Elementary...

scoutt 6y ago

I love Thunderbird and I use it since forever. I welcome this update and changes, but they really have to fix Search.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Interesting, TB search works a million times better for me than Outlook. What are your main issues?
- scoutt 6y ago
  It can't search for exact strings. Double quotes don't work.
  - inanutshellus 6y ago
    I would love to be able to do a "slow search" that let me use exact strings.
MayeulC 6y ago
I second this. This is my number one usability issue with TB, that I use almost everyday. Example: I recently (2 months) received, say, 150 e-mails from one person. During that same period, that person has also received lots (~300) of e-mails that are in my client: ones I sent, ones they were CC-ed, etc. Now, I need to find that pdf they sent me some time ago. It would be no problem to scour the 10 or so message I received from this adress with a pdf attached (still doable without the mimetype). TB lets me search messages that "concern" that person, but also gives me the ones they didn't send. Would a "sent by" be too hard to provide? Quick search works a lot better than the regular search for this, it's something I do multiple times a day. I sometimes spend more than 5 minutes looking for an e-mail, then give up, load zimbra, and I'm able to find the e-mail in 10 seconds thanks to the more granular filtering available there.
- VVertigo 6y ago
  Thunderbird has three search methods: quick search allows you to filter by Sendor (unselect Recipients), but you can also do a more granular search using EditFindSearch Messages (Ctrl+Shift+F). I don’t use the other Ctrl+K search much.

kioleanu 6y ago

I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor. It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly. But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market. Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.

atoav 6y ago
On the other Hand the way Thunderbird profiles work you might have to do this only once a decade and not once every new device. At least this was the case in for me
- ASalazarMX 6y ago
  I've been carrying over my Thunderbird profile to new computers since the 00s. It's just restoring a folder from backup, no obscure settings in the registry or hidden folders.
bzb3 6y ago
It's incredible how shitty ALL email clients for Windows are, except for Thunderbird. Of course, Mozilla had to abandon it...
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Great to see a headline like this again. But even if you had frozen Thunderbird how it was, it would still beat other mail solutions. I can live with Outlook/Exchange in my corporate environment, but it still cannot compete.

pantulis 6y ago

Thunderbird is one of the few email clients on MacOS that doesn't choke with huge GMail inboxes. Thing that baffles me is that you need to install an extensions to have keyboard shortcuts for moving & copying messages with autocompletion, of course the one I was using broke with the latest release ("Quick folder move"). What's the favorite these days? Same for Lightning and G Suite calendars, but I guess this will be fixed upstream quickly.

berkes 6y ago

I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird. It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere). The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily. I've been comparing it with each and every option for the Ubuntu desktop and even webmail. Clients like Geary[1] or Roundcube [2]. Those are often unfinished; I guess mail clients are like many other software-challenges in that regard: it's easy to make the basics, the 90% that 90% of the people need. It's doable to make those basics really good (see all the webmail, electron mail and other mail clients). But it is really hard to do the last 10%, because each of the individual users has a different 10%. And so, I find I love the UX of Geary and use Roundcube often for its simplicity and "Getting Stuff Done". But I also find that I keep going back to Thunderbird, because <insert some feature I use once a week> is only there. But, boy, it annoys me how cludgy and convoluted thunderbird then feels. Edit: forgot to mention that a lot of the 10% things in Thunderbird are severely in my way, daily. I have an RSS reader - why is there one in Thunderbird taking up mental (and memory) space, I don't ever use the built-in IM (is it jabber?), the calendar and todo-tasks feature I don't use, but they attempt to manage my agenda/invites anyway, making me miss an occasional meeting even. I'm sure other people find the GPG being severely in the way (part of the 10% that I use often) or that archiving and offline features are clumsy, confusing and making people miss emails (another feature I often use). -- [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary [2] https://roundcube.net/ https://roundcube.net/

pmlnr 6y ago
There's a webmail out there called Rainloop. It's probably one of the best email interfaces I used. Sadly, it's not a desktop client. My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.
- berkes 6y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker. My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

In some of the screenshots the old version looked better than the new version, especially with regard to how everything nowadays needs to be "flat". It lacks the visual feedback of buttons, which can be "pressed in" and that can be annoying. Also I dislike how every button now seems to be bigger and everything needs to be in "tiles" instead of simple links or buttons. I think in general I simply dislike "material design".

thom 6y ago
It's always seemed odd to me that on the one hand material design admits how important the physicality of an interface can be, as well as our spatial understanding of it, but on the other hand tries to eliminate the most established examples of those things. Why talk about shape and depth if you then eliminate shape and depth on the most important UI widgets? I do think there's great promise to the core idea of treating data in our UIs like we'd treat, for example, pieces of paper on our desk, or pages in a book, but just more efficiently. For example I've always felt that a music app built around a paradigm of piles or boxes of songs, interacted with very physically and naturally to build playlists, would be wonderful (especially versus the current state of the iOS music app). However most of the time it's just flatness for flatness's sake, and an excuse for designers to go wild with minimalism.

alibert 6y ago

Did they changed something on the interface because I used to change the order of the action buttons on the email pane (anwser, archive, spam, delete, etc.) and this can't be done now?

LockAndLol 6y ago

Have they updated the documentation for writing addons? Last time I checked it was a decade or so old.

miedpo 6y ago
Yes. The new docs are here. The new add on code is in beta though and not fully stable so you have to keep an eye on it. https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://thunderbird-webextensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

pmlnr 6y ago

- google provider plugins are broken - carddav plugins are broken - mail client is nicer I'm tired of this. Either be a PIM suite and don't break functionality, or don't.

hibbelig 6y ago

I see that the Nostalgy author is working on an upgrade. Very nice!

account42 6y ago

Will this version let me compose text-only messages by default while still being able to switch to a HTML message when needed? You used to be able to shift-click reply to compose as text but that that stopped working in a previous update.

ronjouch 6y ago
Shift-Click on Reply/Compose to switch from text to HTML (or HTML to text if HTML is your default) still works for me. If it doesn't for you, it's a bug.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Though since they inexplicably removed the reply-to-all button from the easily accessed tools in a recent UI update, this can be more fiddly now than it needs to be...
  - ronjouch 6y ago
    Was it? It wasn't removed for me. You can add it again with Right click anywhere on the toolbar -> Customize
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      You should be able to do that, and it was the first thing I tried when it was removed by default. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me then, and having just checked again, it still doesn't work now (I'm on 68 for now, as the 78 update isn't being pushed to the regular release channel for me yet). Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the replacement "Smart Reply" button does show up, but only sometimes depending on context. Since Thunderbird only shows it selectively now, I did not see that when I was checking before. So I withdraw my criticism about removing functionality, and I replace it with criticism of changing user settings during updates, replacing a well-established feature with a subtly different one, and hiding controls that are currently not applicable rather than showing them as disabled. The fact that this comment thread exists is a pretty good demonstration of why these are bad ideas.

mod50ack 6y ago

It also now supports Microsoft's modern authentication (i.e., their flavor of OAuth), which is now becoming annoyingly mandatory at more and more organizations.

Krasnol 6y ago

Oh this is fantastic. Finaly Tray support. The only minor thing I need i "send later". It worked through an addon but that will require a subscription(?!) now... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jik/rewritten-add-ons-for-mozilla-thunderbirds-next-release https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jik/rewritten-add-ons-f...

qqj 6y ago

Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.

shock 6y ago
Makes me sad to read things like this. Slack and Discord are centralized, someone else owns your identity and you cannot do anything about it. With email (and Matrix) you have the chance to own your identity (by having your own domain).
- MayeulC 6y ago
  I think we need to do one better. Relying on a domain/instance/provider doesn't cut it long term, and you either host your own, but it's hard to personally commit to maintain it non-stop for the foreseeable future, or you pick a reliable instance. Centralized silos are generally very reliable instances, (see: gmail). Not being able to move elsewhere is a lock-in issue (Matrix has an issue for decentralised identities [1]). I don't see why we couldn't just attach our identities to a private key. Encrypt that private key and back it up on various online providers (using PAKE so that they never see it). Use those to authenticate elsewhere. Designate one, or multiple, providers as a temporary mailbox (rather: ask them to fetch content that you are a recipient of from a DHT). People would identify you with pet names they assign to you. You could publish your key in multiple places (in my HN profile, for instance). I think of a DHT rather than a blockchain, because blockchains don't scale. Your user account could itself be a blockchain, though, stored encrypted in the DHT. Not sure why I haven't found such a system yet? Secure scuttlebut seems to come close, but I mostly want an authentication and message passing system, that e-mail could be re-built upon, and bridged with. [1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915
Silhouette 6y ago
Mail is the lingua franca of online communications. It isn't going anywhere any time soon, if only because it it's an independent standard that does not rely on some single commercial entity to continue operating it. That is also part of the reason why all those other services still fall back on email for their registration mechanisms.

shock 6y ago

I'm a (mostly) happy user of TB, but I sorely miss a "conversations" feature.

commoner 6y ago
You might appreciate the Thunderbird Conversations add-on, which displays threaded conversations. With this add-on, the message view looks similar to Gmail's original interface. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail... https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-conversations https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...

ollo 6y ago

Still no Windows 10 notifications? Disappointing. Alternative clients that support native Win 10 notifications?

j1elo 6y ago

I had an IMAP account that, when deleted from the server (the company closed and closed their GSuite accounts), was rendered impossible to access from TB. But afaik the emails where there, given the space that the TB folder occupied on the hard disk. I saw some conversations about how if you want to have a local copy of emails and be sure that server errors (or server dissappearance, as it was the case) won't affect your access to old email copies, you should manually copy them to the Local Folders section within TB. Does anybody know what is the "best practices" for keeping access to downloaded emails and not lose them if the server closes? Should I be copying every email to the Local Folders storage?

lesquivemeau 6y ago
If it's an absolute priority, in the future you can consider using POP
elbows 6y ago
I use OfflineImap to backup all my email to a local maildir: http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/

majkinetor 6y ago

While minimize to tray is finally there, it would be good to have: 1. close to tray 2. start minimized (changing shortcut properties in Windows to start minimized doesn't do anything). 3. Always keep tray icon - now it is removed when you click on it which is anoying I am sure people will accidentally click close instead of minimize.

aembleton 6y ago
This sort of thing should be a feature provided by the Desktop Environment so that you can set how each application operates for closing and minimising.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  Yeah, it should come as systemic feature. In the meantime, there is Minimize on Close plugin that works with v70.

Krasnol 6y ago

There is one thing not mentioned there: If you have a master password defined, the program won't open until you've entered it. This wasn't the case before.

davb 6y ago

I just switched Linux distro last night (Ubuntu to Fedora) and downloaded the latest Thunderbird (v78). I thought the oversized, cartoonish UI was something inherited from the Gtk or Gnome version shipping with the new distro (which oddly didn't affect other applications). Now I can see it was a change in Thunderbird, and I hate it. It's so clunky, that when enabling Large Text in Gnome (to make things more legible on the 1080p 14in laptop screen) Thunderbird looks disproportionately large compared to every other application.

eitland 6y ago

from a linked site: > Update: A few of you have asked how to make a contribution to Thunderbird under the new corporation, especially when using the monthly option. Please check out our updated site at give.thunderbird.net! I want something like this for Firefox too!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ilikehurdles 6y ago

bringing E2E into core Thunderbird is an awesome development. Wish it happened 10 years ago.

jjice 6y ago

Calendar integration off the bat is essential for an email client IMO. Glad that it's being incorporated. Dark mode is also a nice addition. I'm rooting for Thunderbird, I want them to help bring back non-web email clients.

inanutshellus 6y ago

I'm stuck on Thunderbird 60 because of Dorando keyconfig. I like to read an email /then/ move them to folders. Keyconfig lets me just tap a key and it manually runs the mail filters on that selected email. Otherwise I have to drag each email to its appropriate folder, which suuucks.

matthewn 6y ago
I was stuck on Thunderbird 60 for a long while for the exact same reason. I'm now using tbkeys on Thunderbird 68; it works great. https://github.com/willsALMANJ/tbkeys https://github.com/willsALMANJ/tbkeys