13 ms·

Thunderbird 2020 Financial Report

196 points by joeyespo 6y ago

Jonnax 6y ago
It's really nice to see they've got enough money to hire 15 people.
- thepete2 6y ago
  yes, and I was glad to see they get so much in donations.
  - ttul 6y ago
    Absolutely. I'm really glad that the Thunderbird project is healthy and alive. The ecosystem very much needs a solid open source email client to compete with commercial alternatives - particularly the cloud providers with their cloud vendor lock-in. Re-writing Thunderbird in a more accessible framework (JavaScript) will doubtless help more contributors to work on the codebase.
ktpsns 6y ago
> we have 15 people hired and working on the project Honest question: What are these people actually doing? I haven't seen new features since a long time, but Thunderbird seems to have reorganized one year ago (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), so they probably plan something big, like a rewrite of the software?
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  The roadmap is here https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    I'm happy to see that the Mork file format is finally on its way out ("Kill Mork" [TB78-TB91-TB2022]). 17 years ago, a Mozilla engineer called it "the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438
    - flobosg 6y ago
      That engineer was Jamie Zawinski, by the way.
  - throwaway3neu94 6y ago
    All I really want is a great conversations view like Gmail has. Sadly they only mention it in passing (it's blocked by global indexing).
    - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
      Depending on what you mean there are a couple of extensions which help: Conversations [1] and ThreadVis [2]. Thunderbird is slowly becoming less dated, but I'm not sure Gmail's UI is necessarily what email client designers should be aspiring to. The former lead designer of Gmail (and Inbox) hated it so much that he has put hundreds of hours into maintaining personal modifications. Now that's he's trying to turn it into a business, the marketing site is a bit more original and there's fewer strongly worded criticisms but I'm sure you can read between the lines [3]. [1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/?src=hp-dl-featured https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail... [2] https://addons.thunderbird.net/En-uS/thunderbird/addon/threadvis/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/En-uS/thunderbird/addon/threa... [3] https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/
- wott 6y ago
  I guess they are busy removing colours, removing reliefs, removing textures.
- newscracker 6y ago
  There are many things planned, especially moving to "web based technologies" for the client as a longer term initiative. The roadmap also has some work on JMAP support, which I hope picks up on mail servers too. One thing I'd love to see, which probably won't be on the roadmap, is native integration with Exchange and Exchange calendaring. I know there are some extensions for this, but none of those have actually worked well for me.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Oh no, this means we're in for another Electron app. I don't have anything against Electron, but... Man does it get tedious.
    - xfer 6y ago
      Thunderbird is already using gecko. You can't do an email client for general public without html rendering.
      - sebmellen 6y ago
        I’m more concerned about the Electron/Chrome browser monopoly (not that Firefox has done itself many favors lately). Maybe they will pull it off with just gecko, that would be neat.
        KwanEsq 6y ago
        They are just mirroring Firefox's (and thus Gecko's) own deprecation of XUL in favour of (X)HTML. Firefox's top level windows are now (X)HTML with XUL elements, and XUL specific elements and code paths are gradually being replaced with standard HTML elements or custom elements.
      - u801e 6y ago
        Given that the general public has largely moved on to web interfaces or mobile apps for email access, do we really need to render HTML emails in Thunderbird? I have mine set to display messages as plain text.
- ajosh 6y ago
  I've noticed that many of the linux repos are not up to date. If you're using those, you probably need to install it directly from the website to get the latest version and see the updates. The major features that have come out lately that I've noticed are first-party calendar integration and first-party GPG support. There was a calendar integration but I always found it to be a bit funny and hard to get working all of the way. I never had problems with Enigmail, however. Both features work much more solidly as an included part of Thunderbird. There are other, smaller features that have come in like having e-mail addresses in the To/CC/BCC lines be places into ovals to show them as a distinct, drag-able element. The Thunderbird codebase is old and is full of a ton of features, transforming it in a way that is true to its past and moves towards a better future is going to take time but it is coming along. Sure, some of the major features were available as plug-ins but they're much more solid now that they're built-in.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    I thought I had installed the flatpak for Thunderbird some time ago, but apparently I was wrong; I'm still pulling the RPMs down from Fedora repos. Those seem pretty close to upstream, however. I got an update for it just last week.
  - lrem 6y ago
    First-party GPG support would be so nice to have some decades ago. By now seems everyone admitted defeat. Companies standardized on email as notification system for "you got a message in the actually secure medium". Humans standardized on using some inherently safe (but usually not open) communicator. Who is there still wanting secure email?
    - ajosh 6y ago
      This question (and the one above right now) are good points. GPG isn't really a killer feature right now. I likewise haven't needed secure e-mail in a while. I just happened to notice it when it migrated stuff over. I stopped using my Yubikey with gpg a while back. All of that said - I'm replying to this message and not the other because there is one use for secure e-mail that may make a difference: DeltaChat. Deltachat uses autocrypt which includes your public key in headers. With autocrypt in place, Thunderbird can still read DeltaChat messages. I'm not sure if DeltaChat will ever take off in large numbers but it seems like a decent option for secure chat/IM.
- the8472 6y ago
  Since thunderbird tracks the firefox codebase and firefox moved to webextensions that broke a lot of thunderbird extensions too. They mitigated the fallout. E.g. the virtual identities extension now is a first party feature.
- arendtio 6y ago
  Well, at first I thought the same. But honestly I don't really care if features are being added as long as they don't break too much. A few years, ago I switched to Thunderbird from Kmail because the KDE people constantly managed to break Kmail. I still use KDE as a desktop environment and while I think Kmail looks better, Thunderbird just works so much better (e.g. faster, better RSS integration, better search results) that I am quite happy that I switched.
- Black101 6y ago
  > Honest question: What are these people actually doing? at least they are not doing what gmail engineers are doing and changing the interface every few months for no good reason...
- Jugurtha 6y ago
  This is not a SaaS; this is an application built and distributed to more than 20 million people on their own machines, with different hardware, operating systems, installed software, different filesystems, upgrades, behind firewalls or weird networking, interacting with email providers and their particularities...
- tlamponi 6y ago
  I'm using the beta version and the changes are actually useful and, relatively, plenty. The one thing I'm currently looking forward the most is multi-process support, planned for Thunderbird 91, IIRC; It should relieve the hangs I sometimes get (having >50 GiB mails locally has its tolls, but oh well LKML, QEMU, ... archives and such are just nice to have around for me).
johnchristopher 6y ago
> Implementing a better vertical layout by exploring the possibility of not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a highly scalable and equally performant HTML component. Hey, does that mean we can have two lines per mail in the mail column :) ? Otherwise, I am not convinced by matrix integration. Unless it's a deep one and creates new scenarios impossible with two standalone applications.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a highly scalable and equally performant HTML component. Another question is: there's no HTML tree component.
soco 6y ago
On an (un)related note, I only new realized they have been all this time rewriting Thunderbird in JavaScript.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  That's not unrelated I think. It is interesting. Does it mean it will be slow? Does it mean it is basically based on Node.js?
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    It already is written in KavaScript for large parts. However Firefox/Gecko deprecated the XUL UI system, which is used by Thunderbird, so they have to swap the UI toolkit to something else.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  Thunderbird already was written using JavaScript; all Gecko-based applications are.
justin66 6y ago
There are still multiple bugs involving loss or corruption of email. (the one I've got open in another tab is 13 years old) Why does anyone actually use this program?
- jfk13 6y ago
  Do you know of an email program without bugs? TB has been working well for me for many years, and apparently for a good number of other people as well. I'm sure it has issues - heck, I've even filed bugs against it personally - but your comment doesn't at all resonate with my experience as a user.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    I haven't used TB for a while, but it has corrupted my local inbox once, and on two other occasions deleted e-mail from the server before confirming it was on disk, causing recent e-mails to be lost. This was all over 10 years ago, so perhaps it's better now.
    - flas9sd 6y ago
      they moved from mbox to Maildir files, so corruption is less likely imho as mbox files could get large in size.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        Oh that probably fixed most of the problems then; mbox is a terrible, no good, very-bad format.
      - gwillen 6y ago
        Did they move? When I installed Thunderbird on my Windows 10 machine recently, I noted that Maildir was available as an option, and switched to it. But it seemed like mbox was still the default, and certain behavior seems to be glitchy on Maildir. (I get frequent notifications about compaction of mailboxes, despite the fact that Maildir cannot be, and does not need to be, compacted.)
aidenn0 6y ago
So the typical Thunderbird user speaks German and runs Windows 10.
- tlamponi 6y ago
  I figured you took this from the referenced stats link, i.e.: https://stats.thunderbird.net/#platlang https://stats.thunderbird.net/#platlang
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I'm sad. This project had so much potential in the early days. Right now it's relegated to just being used by some aficionados.
- tristan957 6y ago
  The project is actually the most healthy it has probably ever been, or at least in recent memory. Did you read the financial report at all?
  - pizza234 6y ago
    I think that financial and technical status are essentially divorced. Good that they're getting money, but on the technical side, it's a rambling disaster. TB has had the embarrassing Mork backend for ages (took around 14 years to fix; it's not in the released version yet). And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window! Even ignoring the above, the addons compatibility keeps breaking. AFAIK that's a necessity, but as an end-user, the result is an increased alienation from the product. Ultimately, Thunderbird without addons is an unremarkable product.
    - u801e 6y ago
      > And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window! Switching between windows is easy using alt-tab. Switching tabs requires one to do something like ctrl-pgup/pgdown or alt-number if you know the tab number. Personally, I think using alt-tab is a lot easier to switch between the compose and overview windows.
      - tjoff 6y ago
        Or... ctrl+tab?
        u801e 6y ago
        TIL, or maybe relearned. Thanks :)
needtheaccount 6y ago
I made an account to ask this. 1. Why is there no Thunderbird for Android? It's the only project that I trust with my emails on my phone. 2. What do Android users use as an email client on their phones? I current cannot access email on my phone. Maybe it is better this way, security wise. But if Thunderbird was available for Android I might consider using it.
- tecleandor 6y ago
  I use "K-9 Mail"
  - brnt 6y ago
    If it was available on the desktop I might actually prefer it over Thunderbird.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Feature wise its a far cry from what Thunderbird can do.
- cassepipe 6y ago
  I have been using FairEmail for a month now. It's privacy centric and has loooooots of features. It is ad-free. It does not open stuff that may be used to track you by default. It can do GPG and so much more. It is developped by a single and very responsive developper for now. I liked it so much I bought the premium version to support his work but paid features are quite niche and you won't click on something only to find out that you need the paid version. https://email.faircode.eu/ https://email.faircode.eu/
- infinityplus1 6y ago
  I used to use Aqua Mail when I had a slow phone which could not run Gmail that well. Now a days Gmail app is good enough. If I use third party clients, the email search does not work as good as Gmail. So there really isn't any option.
walrus01 6y ago
What I want most out of Thunderbird is a self hostable web application that I can run on my own servers, and access as TLS1.3 in a browser, as a modern webmail app as competition for Rainloop and Roundcube. I realize this would probably require a complete re-write. The closest I can do to that now is a much more cumbersome solution involving something like a bare bones xfce4 desktop environment, the Linux thunderbird client, and VNC-over-SSH or apache guacamole.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  What’s wrong with roundcube?
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Really skimpy feature set for rules based filtering and other stuff found in the menus of desktop thunderbird.
    - thaumaturgy 6y ago
      Rule-based filtering is done through managesieve: https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/wiki/Plugin-managesieve https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/wiki/Plugin-manag...
      - herpderperator 6y ago
        I've been using RoundCube and managesieve for 10 years. Filters perfectly. Definitely recommended.
anotherevan 6y ago
I occasionally see their jobs page[1] and think I would love to work there, but I must admit being hired through Upwork gives me pause. [1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/
- asperous 6y ago
  Probably just through their HR service: https://www.upwork.com/i/payroll-client https://www.upwork.com/i/payroll-client I didn’t see a HR person listed on staff, so it’s probably just easier to use a third party service to handle all of that.
zucker42 6y ago
Huh, I didn't know Thunderbird was financially decoupled from Mozilla. What's the history of the relationship there?
- dugite-code 6y ago
  Thunderbird got mothballed for a few years as Mozilla no longer saw it as a priority so it was only receiving small fixes and patches in the ESR channel. After a long process of pushing from some motivated developers it recently was de-coupled from Mozilla in order to allow it to live or die by it's own communities initiative. Since it's spin-off it's been developed at breakneck speeds to desperately bring it up to par with modern Firefox (they share back-end technologies) in order to make it's development more sustainable and predictable. Unfortunately this has been a strain on add-on developers like myself. I was maintain the lookout TNEF parsing plugin however due to the pace of the changes and an increase in lack of time I'm now only putting out small fires
antisthenes 6y ago
I used Thunderbird as a work email client around 2012-2013 era. It was decent, but a little sluggish for my taste. I attributed it to my weak office PC at the time. Thinking they've done some interesting updates since then, I tried it again recently, in February 2021. I was disappointed to find a sluggish client with worse UI than it had 8 years ago, defeating the entire purpose of having a desktop email client on a powerful machine. Maybe it was some default settings or whatnot, but I didn't feel like digging around to fix it and there was no advantage in using it over the default Gmail web client. RAM usage was not light either. It all seemed like some weird poor UI wrapper around an Electron instance that just loads the Gmail client. I ended up going back to Opera Mail - a lightweight desktop email client from 2016, that unfortunately isn't getting updated anymore. Not sure what the use case is for that type of software anymore. It didn't feel like a real desktop client.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  People still use Thunderbird because of the extensions or the built-in GPG support.
visiblink 6y ago
I still use Claws Mail because I have never been able to figure out how to set Thunderbird to display emails with a consistent font size. I've changed the advanced settings and set a minimum font size, and it has no effect. You can zoom in when you're looking at an email, but the results are inconsistent from email to email. With Claws Mail I get the same font size every time. If anyone knows how to set this up properly, I'd give Thunderbird a try again.
- fdgdd 6y ago
  Maybe you can make use of its userContent.css support (http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css). I use it to force word wrap on pre blocks.
  - visiblink 6y ago
    Thank you. That looks like it may be exactly what I need to do.
GNU_James 6y ago
Any plans to add Microsoft "in-place-archive" support in Thunderbird?
greenspam 6y ago
Can someone recommend a thunderbird alternative on Linux that supports Microsoft Exchanges account? My company uses Exchange without imap. I can connect with apple mail on Mac, but yet need to find a mail client on linux. Thanks!
t00r 6y ago
Without question: Thunderbird (short: TB) may or may not be have its problems. But its very secure and last a long time. I use this Client since 2000 (on Windows) and due to problems with my computer in the beginning, i use it the PortableApp.com Version of TB more than 10 years. My Mail-Archive (only important mails) is beginning in the year 2000, the whole TB-folder has a size of 1.33 GB. TL;DR; I use TB and TB Portable over 20 years and have an actual folder size of 1.33 GB. No unsolvable problems in this time. I make heavy use of the RSS-Reader, too. Therefore i use uBlock Origin for TB.

196 points by joeyespo 6y ago

Jonnax 6y ago

It's really nice to see they've got enough money to hire 15 people.

thepete2 6y ago
yes, and I was glad to see they get so much in donations.
- ttul 6y ago
  Absolutely. I'm really glad that the Thunderbird project is healthy and alive. The ecosystem very much needs a solid open source email client to compete with commercial alternatives - particularly the cloud providers with their cloud vendor lock-in. Re-writing Thunderbird in a more accessible framework (JavaScript) will doubtless help more contributors to work on the codebase.

ktpsns 6y ago

> we have 15 people hired and working on the project Honest question: What are these people actually doing? I haven't seen new features since a long time, but Thunderbird seems to have reorganized one year ago (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), so they probably plan something big, like a rewrite of the software?

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
The roadmap is here https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap
- EMM_386 6y ago
  I'm happy to see that the Mork file format is finally on its way out ("Kill Mork" [TB78-TB91-TB2022]). 17 years ago, a Mozilla engineer called it "the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career". https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438
  - flobosg 6y ago
    That engineer was Jamie Zawinski, by the way.
- throwaway3neu94 6y ago
  All I really want is a great conversations view like Gmail has. Sadly they only mention it in passing (it's blocked by global indexing).
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    Depending on what you mean there are a couple of extensions which help: Conversations [1] and ThreadVis [2]. Thunderbird is slowly becoming less dated, but I'm not sure Gmail's UI is necessarily what email client designers should be aspiring to. The former lead designer of Gmail (and Inbox) hated it so much that he has put hundreds of hours into maintaining personal modifications. Now that's he's trying to turn it into a business, the marketing site is a bit more original and there's fewer strongly worded criticisms but I'm sure you can read between the lines [3]. [1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/?src=hp-dl-featured https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail... [2] https://addons.thunderbird.net/En-uS/thunderbird/addon/threadvis/ https://addons.thunderbird.net/En-uS/thunderbird/addon/threa... [3] https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/
wott 6y ago
I guess they are busy removing colours, removing reliefs, removing textures.
newscracker 6y ago
There are many things planned, especially moving to "web based technologies" for the client as a longer term initiative. The roadmap also has some work on JMAP support, which I hope picks up on mail servers too. One thing I'd love to see, which probably won't be on the roadmap, is native integration with Exchange and Exchange calendaring. I know there are some extensions for this, but none of those have actually worked well for me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Oh no, this means we're in for another Electron app. I don't have anything against Electron, but... Man does it get tedious.
  - xfer 6y ago
    Thunderbird is already using gecko. You can't do an email client for general public without html rendering.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      I’m more concerned about the Electron/Chrome browser monopoly (not that Firefox has done itself many favors lately). Maybe they will pull it off with just gecko, that would be neat.
      - KwanEsq 6y ago
        They are just mirroring Firefox's (and thus Gecko's) own deprecation of XUL in favour of (X)HTML. Firefox's top level windows are now (X)HTML with XUL elements, and XUL specific elements and code paths are gradually being replaced with standard HTML elements or custom elements.
    - u801e 6y ago
      Given that the general public has largely moved on to web interfaces or mobile apps for email access, do we really need to render HTML emails in Thunderbird? I have mine set to display messages as plain text.
ajosh 6y ago
I've noticed that many of the linux repos are not up to date. If you're using those, you probably need to install it directly from the website to get the latest version and see the updates. The major features that have come out lately that I've noticed are first-party calendar integration and first-party GPG support. There was a calendar integration but I always found it to be a bit funny and hard to get working all of the way. I never had problems with Enigmail, however. Both features work much more solidly as an included part of Thunderbird. There are other, smaller features that have come in like having e-mail addresses in the To/CC/BCC lines be places into ovals to show them as a distinct, drag-able element. The Thunderbird codebase is old and is full of a ton of features, transforming it in a way that is true to its past and moves towards a better future is going to take time but it is coming along. Sure, some of the major features were available as plug-ins but they're much more solid now that they're built-in.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  I thought I had installed the flatpak for Thunderbird some time ago, but apparently I was wrong; I'm still pulling the RPMs down from Fedora repos. Those seem pretty close to upstream, however. I got an update for it just last week.
- lrem 6y ago
  First-party GPG support would be so nice to have some decades ago. By now seems everyone admitted defeat. Companies standardized on email as notification system for "you got a message in the actually secure medium". Humans standardized on using some inherently safe (but usually not open) communicator. Who is there still wanting secure email?
  - ajosh 6y ago
    This question (and the one above right now) are good points. GPG isn't really a killer feature right now. I likewise haven't needed secure e-mail in a while. I just happened to notice it when it migrated stuff over. I stopped using my Yubikey with gpg a while back. All of that said - I'm replying to this message and not the other because there is one use for secure e-mail that may make a difference: DeltaChat. Deltachat uses autocrypt which includes your public key in headers. With autocrypt in place, Thunderbird can still read DeltaChat messages. I'm not sure if DeltaChat will ever take off in large numbers but it seems like a decent option for secure chat/IM.
the8472 6y ago
Since thunderbird tracks the firefox codebase and firefox moved to webextensions that broke a lot of thunderbird extensions too. They mitigated the fallout. E.g. the virtual identities extension now is a first party feature.
arendtio 6y ago
Well, at first I thought the same. But honestly I don't really care if features are being added as long as they don't break too much. A few years, ago I switched to Thunderbird from Kmail because the KDE people constantly managed to break Kmail. I still use KDE as a desktop environment and while I think Kmail looks better, Thunderbird just works so much better (e.g. faster, better RSS integration, better search results) that I am quite happy that I switched.
Black101 6y ago
> Honest question: What are these people actually doing? at least they are not doing what gmail engineers are doing and changing the interface every few months for no good reason...
Jugurtha 6y ago
This is not a SaaS; this is an application built and distributed to more than 20 million people on their own machines, with different hardware, operating systems, installed software, different filesystems, upgrades, behind firewalls or weird networking, interacting with email providers and their particularities...
tlamponi 6y ago
I'm using the beta version and the changes are actually useful and, relatively, plenty. The one thing I'm currently looking forward the most is multi-process support, planned for Thunderbird 91, IIRC; It should relieve the hangs I sometimes get (having >50 GiB mails locally has its tolls, but oh well LKML, QEMU, ... archives and such are just nice to have around for me).

johnchristopher 6y ago

> Implementing a better vertical layout by exploring the possibility of not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a highly scalable and equally performant HTML component. Hey, does that mean we can have two lines per mail in the mail column :) ? Otherwise, I am not convinced by matrix integration. Unless it's a deep one and creates new scenarios impossible with two standalone applications.

dmitriid 6y ago
> not using the <tree> XUL element and relying on a highly scalable and equally performant HTML component. Another question is: there's no HTML tree component.

soco 6y ago

On an (un)related note, I only new realized they have been all this time rewriting Thunderbird in JavaScript.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
galaxyLogic 6y ago
That's not unrelated I think. It is interesting. Does it mean it will be slow? Does it mean it is basically based on Node.js?
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  It already is written in KavaScript for large parts. However Firefox/Gecko deprecated the XUL UI system, which is used by Thunderbird, so they have to swap the UI toolkit to something else.
dblohm7 6y ago
Thunderbird already was written using JavaScript; all Gecko-based applications are.

justin66 6y ago

There are still multiple bugs involving loss or corruption of email. (the one I've got open in another tab is 13 years old) Why does anyone actually use this program?

jfk13 6y ago
Do you know of an email program without bugs? TB has been working well for me for many years, and apparently for a good number of other people as well. I'm sure it has issues - heck, I've even filed bugs against it personally - but your comment doesn't at all resonate with my experience as a user.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I haven't used TB for a while, but it has corrupted my local inbox once, and on two other occasions deleted e-mail from the server before confirming it was on disk, causing recent e-mails to be lost. This was all over 10 years ago, so perhaps it's better now.
  - flas9sd 6y ago
    they moved from mbox to Maildir files, so corruption is less likely imho as mbox files could get large in size.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Oh that probably fixed most of the problems then; mbox is a terrible, no good, very-bad format.
    - gwillen 6y ago
      Did they move? When I installed Thunderbird on my Windows 10 machine recently, I noted that Maildir was available as an option, and switched to it. But it seemed like mbox was still the default, and certain behavior seems to be glitchy on Maildir. (I get frequent notifications about compaction of mailboxes, despite the fact that Maildir cannot be, and does not need to be, compacted.)

aidenn0 6y ago

So the typical Thunderbird user speaks German and runs Windows 10.

tlamponi 6y ago
I figured you took this from the referenced stats link, i.e.: https://stats.thunderbird.net/#platlang https://stats.thunderbird.net/#platlang

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I'm sad. This project had so much potential in the early days. Right now it's relegated to just being used by some aficionados.

tristan957 6y ago
The project is actually the most healthy it has probably ever been, or at least in recent memory. Did you read the financial report at all?
- pizza234 6y ago
  I think that financial and technical status are essentially divorced. Good that they're getting money, but on the technical side, it's a rambling disaster. TB has had the embarrassing Mork backend for ages (took around 14 years to fix; it's not in the released version yet). And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window! Even ignoring the above, the addons compatibility keeps breaking. AFAIK that's a necessity, but as an end-user, the result is an increased alienation from the product. Ultimately, Thunderbird without addons is an unremarkable product.
  - u801e 6y ago
    > And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window! Switching between windows is easy using alt-tab. Switching tabs requires one to do something like ctrl-pgup/pgdown or alt-number if you know the tab number. Personally, I think using alt-tab is a lot easier to switch between the compose and overview windows.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      Or... ctrl+tab?
      - u801e 6y ago
        TIL, or maybe relearned. Thanks :)

needtheaccount 6y ago

I made an account to ask this. 1. Why is there no Thunderbird for Android? It's the only project that I trust with my emails on my phone. 2. What do Android users use as an email client on their phones? I current cannot access email on my phone. Maybe it is better this way, security wise. But if Thunderbird was available for Android I might consider using it.

tecleandor 6y ago
I use "K-9 Mail"
- brnt 6y ago
  If it was available on the desktop I might actually prefer it over Thunderbird.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Feature wise its a far cry from what Thunderbird can do.
cassepipe 6y ago
I have been using FairEmail for a month now. It's privacy centric and has loooooots of features. It is ad-free. It does not open stuff that may be used to track you by default. It can do GPG and so much more. It is developped by a single and very responsive developper for now. I liked it so much I bought the premium version to support his work but paid features are quite niche and you won't click on something only to find out that you need the paid version. https://email.faircode.eu/ https://email.faircode.eu/
infinityplus1 6y ago
I used to use Aqua Mail when I had a slow phone which could not run Gmail that well. Now a days Gmail app is good enough. If I use third party clients, the email search does not work as good as Gmail. So there really isn't any option.

walrus01 6y ago

What I want most out of Thunderbird is a self hostable web application that I can run on my own servers, and access as TLS1.3 in a browser, as a modern webmail app as competition for Rainloop and Roundcube. I realize this would probably require a complete re-write. The closest I can do to that now is a much more cumbersome solution involving something like a bare bones xfce4 desktop environment, the Linux thunderbird client, and VNC-over-SSH or apache guacamole.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
What’s wrong with roundcube?
- walrus01 6y ago
  Really skimpy feature set for rules based filtering and other stuff found in the menus of desktop thunderbird.
  - thaumaturgy 6y ago
    Rule-based filtering is done through managesieve: https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/wiki/Plugin-managesieve https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/wiki/Plugin-manag...
    - herpderperator 6y ago
      I've been using RoundCube and managesieve for 10 years. Filters perfectly. Definitely recommended.

anotherevan 6y ago

I occasionally see their jobs page[1] and think I would love to work there, but I must admit being hired through Upwork gives me pause. [1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/careers/

asperous 6y ago
Probably just through their HR service: https://www.upwork.com/i/payroll-client https://www.upwork.com/i/payroll-client I didn’t see a HR person listed on staff, so it’s probably just easier to use a third party service to handle all of that.

zucker42 6y ago

Huh, I didn't know Thunderbird was financially decoupled from Mozilla. What's the history of the relationship there?

dugite-code 6y ago
Thunderbird got mothballed for a few years as Mozilla no longer saw it as a priority so it was only receiving small fixes and patches in the ESR channel. After a long process of pushing from some motivated developers it recently was de-coupled from Mozilla in order to allow it to live or die by it's own communities initiative. Since it's spin-off it's been developed at breakneck speeds to desperately bring it up to par with modern Firefox (they share back-end technologies) in order to make it's development more sustainable and predictable. Unfortunately this has been a strain on add-on developers like myself. I was maintain the lookout TNEF parsing plugin however due to the pace of the changes and an increase in lack of time I'm now only putting out small fires

antisthenes 6y ago

I used Thunderbird as a work email client around 2012-2013 era. It was decent, but a little sluggish for my taste. I attributed it to my weak office PC at the time. Thinking they've done some interesting updates since then, I tried it again recently, in February 2021. I was disappointed to find a sluggish client with worse UI than it had 8 years ago, defeating the entire purpose of having a desktop email client on a powerful machine. Maybe it was some default settings or whatnot, but I didn't feel like digging around to fix it and there was no advantage in using it over the default Gmail web client. RAM usage was not light either. It all seemed like some weird poor UI wrapper around an Electron instance that just loads the Gmail client. I ended up going back to Opera Mail - a lightweight desktop email client from 2016, that unfortunately isn't getting updated anymore. Not sure what the use case is for that type of software anymore. It didn't feel like a real desktop client.

neurostimulant 6y ago
People still use Thunderbird because of the extensions or the built-in GPG support.

visiblink 6y ago

I still use Claws Mail because I have never been able to figure out how to set Thunderbird to display emails with a consistent font size. I've changed the advanced settings and set a minimum font size, and it has no effect. You can zoom in when you're looking at an email, but the results are inconsistent from email to email. With Claws Mail I get the same font size every time. If anyone knows how to set this up properly, I'd give Thunderbird a try again.

fdgdd 6y ago
Maybe you can make use of its userContent.css support (http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css). I use it to force word wrap on pre blocks.
- visiblink 6y ago
  Thank you. That looks like it may be exactly what I need to do.

GNU_James 6y ago

Any plans to add Microsoft "in-place-archive" support in Thunderbird?

greenspam 6y ago

Can someone recommend a thunderbird alternative on Linux that supports Microsoft Exchanges account? My company uses Exchange without imap. I can connect with apple mail on Mac, but yet need to find a mail client on linux. Thanks!

t00r 6y ago

Without question: Thunderbird (short: TB) may or may not be have its problems. But its very secure and last a long time. I use this Client since 2000 (on Windows) and due to problems with my computer in the beginning, i use it the PortableApp.com Version of TB more than 10 years. My Mail-Archive (only important mails) is beginning in the year 2000, the whole TB-folder has a size of 1.33 GB. TL;DR; I use TB and TB Portable over 20 years and have an actual folder size of 1.33 GB. No unsolvable problems in this time. I make heavy use of the RSS-Reader, too. Therefore i use uBlock Origin for TB.