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Thunderbird’s New Home (2020)
- bradknowles 5y agoFor a long time, I was a heavy Thunderbird user. But that was a long time ago. If Thunderbird is coming back and will have consistent ongoing development work being done on it, then I might be convinced to take another look and see if it solves some of my complaints about the more recent versions of mail.app. Thanks for posting this!
- jraph 5y agoI have not stopped using Thunderbird since 2005 and while I was a bit concerned for the short period of uncertainly about Thunderbird's development, it had no practical consequences for me. I find it works well. I find no reason to stop using it, other than since I use KDE, KMail would probably be better integrated to my desktop environment but I haven't managed to switch so far. So Thunderbird's UI from the 2000's it is… but it is really efficient and KDE Breeze's GTK theme does not fail to give it a good look.
- Moru 5y agoIt's just a mail client, been using it since Netscape times so can't really stop using it. It has all I need and works as it's supposed to do. And it's still being updated. I get frustraded with everything else, especially webmail clients...
- chessmango 5y agoTitle should probably be suffixed '(2020)' - not that anything has changed :P
- dehrmann 5y agoEmail clients are more or less feature-complete at this point.
- dotancohen 5y agoThunderbird 72 was. Since then my most important extensions are slowing drying up and away, but I treasure that v72 tarball and the extensions that I use with it.
- reustle 5y agoOff topic, but it's always surprising that these business blogs never link back to the project homepage (root domain). The Thunderbird blog has zero links back to the project homepage in both header and footer.
- aliswe 5y agosame with help forums :(
- hericium 5y agoSeems that it's mozilla.com backlinks that are important for them. Other than to Thunderbird's blog, there's only a donation link pointing at thunderbird.net. It's about money not promoting the product. I appreciate no malware on that site though. Mozilla is so scummy nowadays that they infected their "we value your privacy" sites with Google's Analytics/TagManager spyware and force Firefox to open this crap post-updating. Thunderbird would open such sites, too, and you can't use uBlock Origin to block malware sites in Thunderbird.
- aspenmayer 5y agoGreat points all around! Do I have some good news for you: uBO is available for Thunderbird! Here’s the current releases: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/ Look for uBlock0_[version#].thunderbird.xpi You can also verify this support from their Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin
- hericium 5y agoHey, that's awesome! I stand corrected.
- aspenmayer 5y agoMore to the point, I hope it helps you! Since it’s been around so long, a lot of folks forgot or never knew that Thunderbird supports add-ons/extensions just like Firefox, or just expect the ones they want to not be available. I can only thank the devs of uBO.
- throwaway81523 5y agoI've been wanting to ask what mail clients people around here like to use. I use Thunderboard sort of by default, but imho it sucks. There are some amazing rants in the support forum about their repeatedly finding new ways to screw up user control over the font size. It's almost like reading about cartoon villains.
- hericium 5y agoFont size and multiple other layout parts. I am using Thunderbird on 3 operating systems and adding new account is done in different places in all three up-to-date Thunderbirds. For several months now, Thunderbird tends to ignore manually inputted IMAP host address and tries to use x part of y@x e-mail address format to connect to, even if there's no A/AAAA records for it (MX exists). e-mail-related SRV records seem to be ignored. Regarding font size, it can be changed with mouse scroll even in windows like account configuration.
- silisili 5y agoI used Thunderbird, then due to lack of office/outlook integration used Evolution. It worked OK but felt unpolished and mostly unused. That said, they were generally responsive to bug reports. Now I just use webmail everywhere. It's good enough, and eliminates most the frustrations I've had over the years with third party clients.
- throwaway81523 5y agoInteresting, I sometimes feel the same way. I like fastmail's web client, but it is non-FOSS, and my mom doesn't use fastmail. I've been looking for a mail client primarily for her, that lets her set the fonts nice and large.
- silisili 5y agoSee I specifically pointed my mom away from mail clients. She had called telling me her computer died(in reality, hard drive died), and asked how to download all her email again(probably 8+ years of email). She was devastated when I told her the news. Back then at least, it was ISP ran POP, and clients by default of course delete on retrieve. Told her to just use gmail going forward.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoGist > Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation. The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services.
- tentacleuno 5y ago> The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, This doesn't sound good. I hope they aren't going to start including Google / general advertising in Thunderbird. I hope it doesn't turn into an about:config nightmare of disabling all this stuff.
- meesterdude 5y agoLong time thunderbird user, recently switched to Postbox. No regrets. If they hadn't screwed with it, I'd still be using thunderbird. I don't know why they became so anti-user.
- kertoip_1 5y agoSeems to be no Linux version of postbox unfortunately.
- wufocaculura 5y agoSeems like postbox is more Apple focused. Used it for a while but couldn't find any feature that would convince me to switch.
- syncbehind 5y agoIsn't postbox just a thunderbird fork?
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoI hate thunderbird, but I hate outlook more. I use the web outlook client and when typing it skips some key presses, I googled the issue and other users report the same. I have no idea how you screw up a textarea, but they did. At this point, as far as GUI clients go, Thunderbird is the least worst option.
- ghostly_s 5y agoThunderbird's kind of crappy out of the box, but the best part of it's Moz DNA is being highly customizable and extensible.I've looked at just about every option for mail clients on linux and haven't found one with what I would consider a 'modern' feature-set, largely because the open-source model mostly precludes the sort of middle-ware servers which commercial mail clients on other platforms use to provide "magic" features. The next best thing, then, is highly-configurable mail flow control, which, with the right extensions, Thunderbird can get mostly right.
- function_seven 5y agoI just noticed this yesterday! I usually use the desktop Outlook client, but yesterday I got an email on my other machine, and was replying using the web version. It just randomly dropped characters as I was typing. What on earth would cause that to happen? Best I can tell is that the autocomplete functionality was struggling to keep up with what I was typing? Or there is some onKeyPress function that doesn't reliably return a character because of it?
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoI use Firefox which I suspect is half the issue, but I think most of Microsoft’s engineering teams are falling short on quality. Live / Azure login is another pet hate.
- freeAgent 5y agoDisabling autocomplete suggestions improves, but does not eliminate the problem. I believe you can also work around the problem by using Edge/not-Firefox. It’s clear that MS have stopped testing or caring about Firefox compatibility (if they ever did in the first place). At this point, the bug is at least months old.
- FounderBurr 5y agoThunderbird is one of those products that is slowly being improved to death.
- donatj 5y agoI was looking for a very particular old email, and had some backed-up Thunderbird mailboxes from the mid aughts. I was surprised and dismayed to find the “modern redesigned” newest release completely incapable of opening them at all. I don’t recall the exact version I had to download to get them to work. I suspect 67, 68 is the non-XUL redesign. In my mind, being able to read old mailboxes should be one of the core competencies of a mail app, particularly one that speaks POP, where the download itself is a destructive act server-side. The current Thunderbird fails. You need to know your market, most people are happy with webmail these days, and the people using mail apps often have particular needs. There’s no amount of modernizing your going to do to Thunderbird to pull in average Joe’s. The day of the stand-alone mail client, particularly one without a weird edge, has long passed.
- cassepipe 5y agoThunderbird is the only FOSS mail client that I managed to set up yahoo mail and gmail addresses in less than a minute. If you mail provider requires an in browser athorizaton, you are just taken there. No fuss, which is why I use it. Actually I never managed to make those addresses work with either Geary, Evolution or Kmail. On the other hand the UX/UI is quite bad. Just try it out, you'll see what I mean.
- elric 5y agoI love thunderbird, been using it since day 1, and it's the only mail client I use. But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time. The god awful new(ish) To/CC/BCC thing still bugs me. The number of bugs in the calender in particular is mind boggling. I tried tackling some of them myself, but their code base is not the easiest to penetrate. It might be a good idea for the TB team to work on developer experience in order to attract some more contributors.
- mort96 5y agoI've been in the exact same place as you. Just this week I decided to move to Evolution. So far, so good; I don't love everything about it, but at least it works and the calendar feels like an integrated part of it rather than a bolted on afterthought. Google calendar support out of the box too, which I need for work. It doesn't work on Wayland for me, but that seems to be a general WebKitGTK bug and might be related to something Ubuntu- or NVidia-specific.
- kevincox 5y agoI tried moving off thunderbird to just about every graphical open source client I could find but they were all missing some key threading functionality that I use heavily. Particularly either 1. Show the discussion tree in my inbox and 2. Pull up the entire thread for a message in my inbox (or search or any other folder). I've stuck with Thunderbird because it doesn't have an major flaws. But it is definitely slow and clunky.
- ghosty141 5y agoEvolution looks neat but for me a huge problem is the lack of crossplatform-ness. I use windows as my main desktop OS simply because I like to play a lot of games in my free time, but at the same time I use Linux for development (at work and at home), thus it's quite important that I can use certain programms on both machines. Thunderbird seems like the only cross-platform open-source mailcient that that is at least somewhat alive.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
- rukshn 5y agoI remember Nylus N1 being a good mail client. Sadly they discontinued it. It was really good. I’m quite happy with the default email client on my Mac, but I’m looking for a good mail client for Windows
- vidyesh 5y agoI was a fan of Nylas N1 too until I knew they used to send email auth to their servers. One of the authors forked Nylas to create Mailspring which does most of the stuff client side.
- grandinj 5y agoI use thunderbird every day, and it just works. Admittedly, I just do basic stuff with it.